He said that Africa’s future is up to Africans. He said that aid is not an end in itself, and that “the purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it is no longer needed.” He said that the time for blaming the West and colonialism is long past, and that “the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy” or for “wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.” America would continue to help, but what it expected was democracy, not tyranny, and certainly not countries where government corruption ensured that 20 percent is skimmed off the top when anyone tries to invest.

In the 21st century, capable, reliable and transparent institutions are the key to success — strong parliaments and honest police forces; independent judges and journalists; a vibrant private sector and civil society…
People everywhere should have the right to start a business or get an education without paying a bribe.

Some say the president is just a speech-maker. They say that making speeches is what he likes to do and what he does best. They say this was just one speech among others. But what he said in Ghana carried unusual conviction, spelling out a number of things that should have been spelled out long ago. For trying to introduce some realism into our understanding of Africa we wish him well.

Can Sudan be Saved? asks whether the food problem in many places is economic, or is it because marauding bands of lawless militias have created such fear and instability that farmers give up trying to grow and harvest crops. Well-meaning intervention in Africa goes back a very long way. Starting with an effort to suppress the slave trade in the 1860s, Humanitarian Disasters tells how there has been a series of Western campaigns to improve the prospects of the peoples of Sudan. Although vast sums have been spent there is very little to show for it today.

Arnaud Bey was a French geographer in the employ of the Egyptian government. He said to us: “Why do you content yourself like other tourists to go no farther than Wady Halfa? Why not travel overland by camel from this very place, Korosko, to Khartoum? The Sheikh of the intervening Bishari Desert is in the village at this very moment. I know him well, and can easily arrange that he shall take you to Berber at moderate cost. You will then find your way by boat to Khartoum.”

We were amazed at the proposition, for the very names of those places were unknown to us. He drew a map on a small piece of paper for us to keep, on which he marked bits of useful information. At length, after hours of eating and drinking and talking, we fell wholly into his plan. The Sheikh was sent for, and I shall never forget his entrance.

The cabin reeked with the smells of a recent carouse, when the door opened and there stood the tall Sheikh, marked with sand on his forehead that indicated recent prostration in prayer. The pure moonlight flooded the Bacchanalian cabin, and the clear cool desert air poured in. I felt swinish in the presence of his Moslem purity and imposing mien. For all that, we soon came to terms, and were to start the day after the morrow.

A more complete change can hardly be imagined than that from a luxurious cabin to nightly open-air bivouacs on the cold sand. The track we followed was presumably the same that has been followed since the most ancient days; it bore marks of its continued use during recent times in the whitened bones with which it was strewed. Sometimes we came across a camel whose skin had not yet disappeared, but formed a hollow shell including marrowless and porous bones. These desiccated remains were of most unexpected lightness. My arm is far from strong, but I easily lifted with one hand and held aloft the quarter of a camel in this dried-up state.

Many strangers joined our slowly moving caravan. One group consisted of a husband on foot, with his wife and child mounted on a donkey, like the often-painted subject of the Flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. Another personage was a middle-aged and rather mild-looking individual, who possessed little more than a sword, and was on his way to Abyssinia, where some fighting was expected with neighbouring savage tribes.

He proposed to take part in it and to make his profit from the slaves he captured. He was an old hand at this, and his businesslike account of the process was explicit. It was a moot question with him on each occasion when a man had been captured, whether to castrate him at once or not. If so, the man was apt to die, and would certainly require costly attention for a long time; on the other hand, if he recovered, his market value was greatly increased.

After four days’ travel from morning to evening, we came to a half-way place where a brackish but drinkable water was to be had, which replaced the redolent stuff that our water-skins afforded, and so on for four more days, when we reached the Nile at Abu Hamed, having cut across its huge bend.

Oh! The delights to such tourists as we were, of a temporary exemption from the discomforts of the desert, and of unlimited rations of water. We travelled farther by the side of the Nile for another three days or so, till Berber was reached, when we paid our dues and said good-bye to the camels. The governor of Berber was very civil; the sherbet he gave us, though made from limes and not from lemons, tasted heavenly. He gave me a monkey, and I bought another, and these two were my constant companions on camel-back and everywhere else for many months, until I returned to England.

Another boat had here to be hired to take us up to Khartoum. We got one in which the part below decks was much too low to stand in, and it swarmed with cockroaches, but it sufficed. We set sail, and in due time passed Shendy, the scene of the recent massacre of Abbas Pasha, a younger son of Mehemet Ali. At Shendy Abbas Pasha and his soldiers had committed all sorts of outrages, and finally he demanded the daughter of the local tax-gatherer in a form of marriage that was equivalent to temporary concubinage, which was a grave insult to her father, the most important man in the place.

The tax-gatherer was unable to resist; so he resigned himself, but gave orders secretly. While Abbas Pasha with his suite were at dinner and stupid with what they had drunk, the Pasha noticed that great bundles of stalks of the native corn were being brought in and stacked about the tent. He asked and was told that it was forage and litter for his Highness’s horses. When enough of this straw had been brought in, a signal was given to fire it, and every man who attempted to break through was massacred, including of course Abbas himself.

Finally we reached Khartoum, then a group of huts with a wagon-roofed hall for the audiences of the Pasha. We heard of an extraordinary figure, believed to be English, who had arrived some weeks previously. We went to call on him, knocked at the door, were told to enter, and came into the presence of a white man nearly naked, as agile as a panther, with head shorn except for the Moslem tuft, reeking with butter, and with a leopard skin thrown over his shoulder.

He was recognised at once by my companions as an undergraduate friend, Mansfield Parkyns. He had got into a College scrape, and, leaving Cambridge prematurely, found his way to Abyssinia, where during years of adventure he met and made friends with the aforementioned tax-gatherer of Shendy. Of the many travellers whom I have known I should place Mansfield Parkyns (1823-1894) as perhaps the most gifted with natural advantages for that career. He easily held his own under difficulties, won hearts by his sympathy, and could touch any amount of pitch without being himself defiled. He was consequently an admirable guide in that sink of iniquity, Khartoum.

The saying was that when a man was such a reprobate that he could not live in Europe, he went to Constantinople; if too bad to be tolerated in Constantinople, he went to Cairo, and thenceforward under similar compulsion to Khartoum. Half a dozen or so of these trebly refined villains resided there as slave-dealers; they were pallid, haggard, fever-stricken, profane, and obscene. Mansfield Parkyns complacently tolerated and mastered them all.

The abominations of their habitual conversation exceeded in a far-away degree any other I have ever listened to, but it was clever. When one of them was out of the room, the others freely related his adventures to us, in which some anecdote like this was frequent:

So he said, ‘Let us be friends; come drink a cup of coffee and smoke a pipe’—then he put poison into the coffee.

There is a gourd whose dried seeds are said to be poisonous and not very unlike coffee in taste, which is particularly convenient in such cases. With all their villainy there was something of interest in their talk, but I had soon quite enough of it. Still, the experience was acceptable, for one wants to know the very worst of everything as well as the best.

The yard is a mess. The thatched roof leaks. The mud hut looks about to fall down. Is it for lack of money? But the typical sub-Saharan country is overrun with western charities, crawling with white do-gooders, and awash with philanthropic funds. According to Martin Meredith’s recent The State of Africa, over US$300 billion has been sunk in the region.

Or is it that nobody cares? Are there simply not enough people willing to uphold standards of maintenance, amenity, and appearance? Not enough people who care when things break down, or have the gumption to fix them up when only a nail or a lick of paint is needed?

Some of us would point to a wretched colonial history that shattered traditions and threw maintenance values—the continuous care of house and home—into disarray. But you can’t blame colonial history for everything. The majority of countries in Africa have been independent for two generations now. Here we’re talking about the present situation and about people’s attitudes today.

* * *

Three things are thought to explain much Third World decline and dereliction. In Africa misappropriated funds heads the list—the Big Man at the top plays Winner Takes All—and there’s no question this is fundamental. Others point to the lawlessness of life where nothing gets done because even the smallest investment is always at risk… so, nothing gets done.

A third explanation sees communal claims and the parasitism of extended family, clan, and tribe making individual progress impossible and nepotism inevitable. These reasons for the engulfing mess and hopelessness come variously combined in different places—as we find in the reports of Tim Harford, Paul Theroux, and V. S. Naipaul.

Case one: Cameroon

At first sight Cameroon’s troubles look like a straightforward game of Winner Takes All. In Tim Harford’s recent book The Undercover Economist a Cameroonian highway “is a strip of potholes that 20 years ago was a road”, there’s been no serious maintenance for 19 years, and if you ask whether people complain you’re told “yes, they complain, but nothing is done.”

“There is plenty of money coming from the World Bank and from France and Britain and America, but President Biya and his friends put it in their pockets. They do not spend it on the roads.”

This is the standard “top-down” explanation for African dereliction, and in the case of public highways it is surely true. In Cameroon and elsewhere the link between high-level political theft and poor public facilities is direct and obvious. Harford deploys a theory of government that distinguishes the benefits of long-term from short-term despotism. Short-term despots take the money and run; long-term despots buy fleets of Mercedes, find they need decent roads to drive on, and are forced with extreme reluctance to fill in a few of the holes. Ergo, long-term despots are best.

But what our author says about lawlessness and endemic violence is more revealing. It stifles economic initiative at every turn, and the effect on public morale is devastating. Though the rot starts with government, he writes, it afflicts the entire society, and in the extract below he explains why the absence of law, of enough honest men and women, and of incorruptible institutions, paralyses modern life and economic progress:

There’s no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So you might as well become a thief yourself.) There’s no point in paying your phone bill because no court can make you pay. (So there’s no point being a phone company.) There’s no point setting up an import business because the customs officers will be the ones to benefit. (So the customs office is under-funded and looks even harder for bribes.) There’s no point getting an education because jobs are not awarded on merit. (And you can’t borrow money for school fees because the bank can’t collect on the loan.)

Hernando de Soto at the Institute for Democracy in Peru has emphasized the importance of legal title to land for there to be any hope of residential progress. The situation described by Tim Harford supports this general argument. But above and beyond freehold title, a man in Cameroon will not invest in business, not establish a company, not even bother with education because all ventures and investments are permanently at risk.

Nor is he likely to fix the sagging gate or give the window frames a lick of paint. According to The Undercover Economist – a recent book from OUP containing a brilliant analysis of globalization and economic progress – lawlessness is making Africa a social and economic desert.

Case two: Malawi

Reporting from Malawi, Paul Theroux writes that at one time the country was in tolerable order, but now that everything has broken, collapsed, and fallen into ruin, there is neither the will nor the capacity to fix it up.

Visiting a school where he taught in 1962, Theroux found it almost unrecognisable forty years later:

“What had been a set of school buildings in a large grove of trees was a semi-derelict compound of battered buildings in a muddy open field. The trees had been cut down, the grass was chest-high.

At first glance the place was so poorly maintained as to seem abandoned: broken windows, doors ajar, mildewed walls, gashes in the roofs, and just a few people standing around, empty-handed, doing nothing but gaping at me.

I walked to the house I had once lived in. The building had once lain behind hedges, in a bower of blossoming shrubs, but the shrubbery was gone, replaced by a small scrappy garden of withered maize and cassava at one corner…

The building was scorched and patched, one sooty wall where the boiler fire was fed, and the veranda roof broken. Mats lay in the driveway, mounds of white flour drying on it—except that falling rain had begun to turn it to paste. Faggots of firewood had been thrown in a higgledy-piggledy stack outside the kitchen.”

The once orderly Soche School had been founded by Sir Martin Roseveare, a “meticulous green-fingered gardener”, and he and his wife had taught there for many years. Both the Roseveares are now dead, but there is a book of memoirs by Sir Martin with the title “Joys, Jobs and Jaunts” suggesting the energy they brought to every activity in their lives, and the delight they took in caring for house and home.

* * *

Theroux was a member of the Peace Corps on his original visit to Malawi. In Dark Star Safari he says it is not for him to blame the Africans who inherited the estate for “chopping the trees up for firewood, or slashing the hedges, or growing cassava where I had grown petunias”, or even for turning an English chalet-bungalow into an unlovely hut. Yet he feels bound to comment on the needless and preventable dereliction. “I did regret that the paint had peeled from the trim and eaves, that the wood had rotted and brickwork had cracked and the windows had slipped from their frames.”

Malawi suffered under a long-term despot, Dr Hastings Banda, but it’s hard to see how he can be blamed for the universal desolation. Yet as soon as Theroux asks whose fault it is, “the government” is blamed: two million dollars from a European donor country had allegedly been embezzled by Malawi’s finance minister. And when he finds all the books in a once useful library have been stolen, and it is now “a black hole of ignorance and plunder”, a young visitor from Scotland, keen to do good wherever good can be done, says defensively that there’s “a serious money shortage.”

But that’s not the point. What is missing at the Soche School has to do with attitude and morale. What is lacking is work and care. “How much does a broom cost?” Theroux asks. “The students could sweep this place and cut the grass. I don’t think it’s a money problem. I think it’s more serious. No one cares. You’re here from Scotland to do the work, and you’re willing, so why should anyone help?” A deep dependency has taken root. The prevailing attitude is that if someone will come all the way from Scotland to sweep the floor, why not let them?

I wanted to see some African volunteers caring for the place, sweeping the floor, cutting grass, washing windows, gluing the spines back onto the few remaining books, scrubbing the slime off the classroom walls.

* * *

At a dinner given in his honor Theroux meets the vice-chancellor of the University of Malawi and a sometime Malawian ambassador to Germany. The subject of the expulsion of Indian traders and shop-keepers comes up. “The Indians were chased away,” says the ex-ambassador. “We wanted Africans to be given a chance to run the shops. So that Africans could go into business. The shops were handed over. I bought one myself!”

With what result? asks Theroux.

Ha-ha! Not much. It didn’t work. They all got finished!

The result of this deliberate destruction of Indian commercial activity was that throughout Malawi’s rural areas there were soon no shops at all—“and, twenty-seven years later, still no shops.” When Theroux points this out the ex-ambassador turns to ridiculing Indian business acumen as a contemptible numerical obsession. “They sit there, you see, and they have these little pieces of paper, and have these columns of numbers. And one Indian is running the calculator, and another is counting the sacks of flour and the tins of condensed milk. One-two-three. One-two-three.”

Theroux comments:

What this educated African in his plummy British voice intended as mockery—the apparent absurdity of all this counting—was the description of people doing a simple inventory of goods in a shop.

“We Africans are not raised in this way,” the ex-ambassador goes on, nodding to the others for approval. “What do we care about shops and counting? We have a much freer existence. We have no interest in this. Shops are not our strong point.” Then as the evening draws to a close he finally acknowledges another problem—the inability, in societies dominated by family, clan, and tribe, to protect one’s property from communal exploitation by parasitic relatives:

I’ll tell you why these shops didn’t work out, said the former ambassador, addressing the table at large. When Africans run businesses their families come and stay with them and eat all their food—just live off them. As soon as an African succeeds in something he has his family cadging from him. Not so?

That is true, brother, the other man said.

And we are not cut out for this shop-keeping and book-keeping and (he winked at me) this number crunching.

This infuriates Theroux:

I had never heard such bullshit… The man was saying: This is all too much for us. We cannot learn how to do business. We must be given money, we must be given sinecures, because we don’t know how to make a profit.

I said, If you’re no good at book-keeping and keeping track of expenses, why do you expect donor countries to go on giving you money?

* * *

Today, long after Malawi’s book-keeping Indians were driven out with blows and intimidation, and their shops abandoned, the surviving commercial activity in rural areas consists largely of women traders sitting in the mud selling bananas and peanuts.

Meanwhile the academic and bureaucratic African elite enjoy the “freer” and certainly better-fed existence represented by this dinner party, using incomes that can only be obtained from western aid both to load the table with wine and food, and to ensure their children are educated in Europe and the USA.

Case three: Trinidad

Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years’ lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert… The magic of property turns sand into gold. Arthur Young, 1788

Is this the problem? Is the lack of a proprietorial ethic underwritten by clear and enforceable law the reason why the yard is a mess, the thatched roof leaks, the house looks about to fall down? It is certainly part of the problem in many places. But the belief that the secure ownership of property will on its own ensure care, maintenance, and the preservation of civilized standards can be misleading, as V. S. Naipaul’s account of the terrible Tulsis of Trinidad suggests.

The Tulsis are rich, not poor. No political despot is depriving their country of funds, no hierarchy of bandits lie in waiting for them, and while it is true that they represent an extended Hindu family with sons and daughters, husbands, widows, wives, and innumerable children, clan or family parasitism is not the issue. Yet what happens when they move into the colonial splendour of the Shorthills Estate closely resembles the fate of the Roseveare bungalow in Malawi.

Once owned by a French family, their new and grandiose establishment has a swimming pool, a cricket field much used by local villagers, and a driveway lined with palms. There are woods of cedar and cocoa trees, shaded walks through orange groves, stands of avocado and paw-paw, a cherry tree and a great mango tree too. Inside the house a folding screen “separated the regal drawing-room from the regal dining-room, and there was a multiplicity of rooms whose purposes were uncertain.”

Because the estate has been neglected in recent years it is in need of attention, but having spread themselves luxuriously about its spacious rooms the Tulsis wait for others to fix things up—and everything slides.

Someone cuts down the mango tree and builds a kennel-like hut. Plundered avocados and paw-paws are sold to cafes in Port of Spain. The cherry tree is axed. And when the palm trees lining the drive are felled, their edible hearts, which are thought to have medicinal value, are devoured by Mrs Tulsi herself. Next an entire forest of cedars are levelled to provide timber for a furniture factory: but the factory is a chimera and the cedar ends up as firewood. Unrepaired, the electricity generator is melted down and its lead made into dumb-bells. The cricket pavilion is knocked over and replaced by a cowshed. The plumbing remains broken, the toilets unusable—a latrine is built on the hillside behind.

Ravaged and looted, a large part of the estate is now destroyed by fire and ends in charred and smoking desolation. Local people were “confirmed in their belief that their village had been taken over by vandals.”

Care and maintenance

In the poet’s lexicon care is synonymous with burdens, worry, stress, even depression (begone dull care!) and to be “free of care” provides one definition of happiness. Well, let’s face it: care and maintenance require steady attention. Yards must be swept, cracked walls mended, thatch repaired to keep out the weather. In short, work must be done.

But the story of the Tulsis of Trinidad raises larger issues too. A House for Mr Biswas is a novel, a great novel, and like all the best fiction its meanings reach well beyond the covers of the book. The tale of the all-destroying Tulsis tells us what can happen when people inherit a civilization they know little about, seem not to value, have no real use for, and thoughtlessly wreck and ruin.

Just as the English chalet-bungalow in Malawi becomes reduced to an African hut, so the French colonial estate is turned into a wilderness of cowsheds, tree-stumps, and latrines. The barbarians have taken over—but this is not the forgivable barbarism of the oppressed. It is the less forgivable barbarity of a prosperous elite who might be expected to know better, yet show only indifference, habitual indolence, and neglect instead of care. That it applies just as much to the barbarians within the West as to the less fortunate in the world outside should go without saying.

* * *

At the end of that unusual and original book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—a book that has much to say about care—an eleven-year-old boy, who has ridden behind on his father’s Honda from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean, asks

“Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?’

His father replies: “If you take care of it.” They then discuss what taking care of something means, and the boy wonders if he will be able to cope. Is it going to be hard? he asks. “Not if you have the right attitudes his father replies. “It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard.” That goes for civilization too.

Reading: Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist: Exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor―and why you can never buy a decent used car! (Harford’s book is an indispensable guide to modern global economics.)  Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The entire episode illustrates the political backwardness of this struggling country. But can these events, which included the attempted poison-murder of the ultimately successful candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, also be read more positively? Karytnycky thinks so—but I wonder. Do they indicate, as he believes, that a responsible middle class now exists in sufficient numbers to influence things for the better? Or are the underlying problems far more intractable, and deeply a part of traditional pre-modern cultures more generally?

For years throughout the Soviet era we witnessed the comedy of mock “elections” in which the winning party regularly got about 98% of the vote. Nothing more startlingly illustrated the primeval political mentality of the Soviets. One can imagine the smiling arguments that went on among the Party directorate as to whether the opposition should be allowed 2% of the vote, or only 1.5%. But who cared? Everywhere in the Soviet world so-called “elections” took place as if the outside world wasn’t looking, mainly because in one-party states the “electorate” could do absolutely nothing about it.

Not surprisingly, Ukrainians expected something better last year. So when Mr Yanukovich was declared to be getting 92% of the vote in the eastern Donetsk it was all too obvious what was going on—Grand Vote Theft on a huge scale. Karatnycky reports that according to the non-partisan Committee of Voters of Ukraine, which had 10,000 monitors on the ground, no less that “85,000 local government officials helped perpetrate the fraud, and at least 2.8 million ballots were rigged in favor of Yanukovich.

Clans and corruption

But why? How in this new and open era could such a brazen political hijack possibly succeed? And how could so many officials be involved? These questions lead to a conspicuous feature of Ukrainian political life—the primitivism of a society strongly built around clans, with loyalty to clan outweighing other loyalties and responsibilities, especially in the eastern part of the country. I emphasize the clan system first, because all over the world people are talking about “corruption” as if it is something to be considered by itself and on its own. For example, we are told over and over that Africa’s leaders are “corrupt”.

In ethnic affairs in various other places, from Canada to New Zealand and Australia, the same accusation is made—and it’s often true as far as it goes. But if critical analysis ceases with the charge that there’s “corruption at the top” or that there are “corrupt elites”, and that nepotism is rampant, we are not going to make much progress understanding the problem—let alone dealing with it.

It is certainly true that corruption went right to the top in Ukraine: in 2000, President Kuchma’s former bodyguard leaked hundreds of hours of transcripts of his private conversations. Karatnycky writes that “On the tapes, Kuchma is heard dispensing favors, paying massive kickbacks, and conspiring to suppress his opponents—making it clear that the president sat at the head of a vast criminal system.”

Now it would be wrong to suggest that this “criminal system” was coextensive in the strictest sense with the “clan system”. Yet it is obvious from Karatnycky’s discussion that the clan system, with its strong territorial connections (Kiev, Donetsk, Transcarpathia), was certainly the social and political foundation of the criminal system he describes. In this milieu, as in Africa, corruption is not something between A and B, occurring in private and alone. Nor is it something between one oligarch and one sub-oligarchic client.

Nor can it be dealt with simply by condemning or even removing the individuals involved. It involves vast extended “families” of beneficiaries, and almost equally vast armies of enforcers, all of them determined to protect what westerners may call “ill-gotten gains”, but which clan members see as perfectly legitimate claims. After describing how a number of “oligarchic clans” came to dominate Ukrainian politics in the early 1990s, Karatnycky writes:

Each interest group established its own political party in parliament. The Kiev clan ran the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine. The Donetsk oligarchs created the Party of Regions, the ranks of which included a local governor who later became prime minister: Yanukovich. The Dnipropetrovsk group created and backed the Labor Party.

For a decade after 1989 everything ran smoothly. Prominent clan members divided the spoils of privatisation among themselves—steel mills worth billions were got for a few million; energy companies sold for a song; while the manipulative control of taxation, by inspections and fines enforced by what are in effect state-supported standover men, was used by rival clans to harass or force out of business their opponents.

Then toward the end of the 1990s the criminal/clan/oligarchic system began to unravel, with other Big Men growing powerful enough to threaten President Kuchma, and the nasty murder of an investigative journalist being traceable to Kuchma himself.

New man, old culture

We know the upshot. A new election produced a new “clean” leader in Mr Yushchenko—a man whose persistence in the face of his own attempted murder and the disfiguring sickness of dioxin poisoning, concerted harassment throughout the campaign including denial of landing rights to his aircraft, constant denigration in the media controlled by his opponent, road barriers plus an attempt to cause a fatal accident by forcing his car into a ditch, amounts to heroism on a truly Churchillian scale.

His triumph was magnificent. No-one can take that away. But it might be timely to stand back a little and recognise that this has been the easy part. For it is surely true that the structure of Ukraine’s clan-dominated society remains much the same as before. This means first of all that many Ukrainians, especially in the east, do not expect to earn a livelihood as autonomous citizens independently creating wealth; they hope to enjoy the spoils of office by using whatever pressure and influence their “family” connections allow.

Secondly, it means that whatever entrepreneurial activity takes place will have to be within the severely constraining framework of the clan system. Mr Karatnycky talks in his first paragraph, as optimistic Americans often talk, about “the rise of a powerful civic movement”, about “a skilled political opposition group”, and about the “determined middle class” that resisted the Kuchma regime. And he reports that

The Yushchenko camp has stated its gratitude for the long-term efforts of the U.S. Agency for International Development to support free media, the rule of law, civil society, and civic election monitoring there.

But exactly what laws will be imposed by those who rule? Will they allow a hair-dresser to set up on the corner and ply her trade? Will a man be able to build a delicatessen nearby? Will another man be able to set up a timber yard, or an automotive repair shop, and will they be able to obtain the secure title to their properties they need in order to safeguard their investments? Or will they be everlastingly shadowed by one clan or another, and subject to obstruction, harassment, standover men, extortionists, all of them connected with this mob or that and making up the law as they go? One would like to know.

It’s the culture, stupid

As we said before, the clan problem is not confined to the Ukraine. Far from it. It’s a common problem in traditional, pre-modern cultures, and is of course conspicuous in Africa. And wherever it is found, corruption and nepotism—or what is called corruption by all media commentators, and by many others who should perhaps think more deeply—is routinely associated with it. Something else we see is that the journalists who point this out often strongly imply that the removal of someone at the top, or of some small and corrupt clique, is all that is needed to produce a thriving modern democracy. Such people may even imply that “regime change” induced by guillotine or firing squad recommends itself as an attractive quick fix.

The outpouring of recent commentary on Africa has brought a great deal of this sort of thing. In an article in the British Spectator for June 25, 2005 Aidan Hartley tells “How African leaders spend our money”. It’s a funny and biting survey of the Wabenzi and their taste for big and expensive cars, arguing that aid hasn’t worked, and quoting a Merrill Lynch report which estimates that 100,000 Africans own $380 billion (most of it siphoned from international aid) while 300 million others live on 50 pence a day. Hartley concludes that “The West needs to help Africans get better leaders before it increases aid.”

But how exactly would you “help” Africans to do that? Would regime change do it? An entertaining Max Boot tirade in the LA Times for July 7, 2005 goes further. Ridiculing the rock-and-roll activities of Live-8, and claiming that in Africa what Bob Geldof himself has called “corruption and thuggery” is the main problem, he ends with the following politics-by-numbers suggestion: “Use the G-8’s jillions 2 hire mercenaries 4 the overthrow of the 6 most thuggish regimes in Africa. That would do more to help ordinary Africans than any number of musical extravaganzas.” Ordinary Africans, we are to understand from this, have quite different values from the men at the top.

In the Wall Street Journal for July 5, 2005 an economically more responsible contribution from Moeletsi Mbeki (a brother of South African president Thabo Mbeki), a man who is by no means an ordinary African and who is at the University of Witwatersrand, writes that “at the root of Africa’s problems are ruling political elites that have squandered the continent’s wealth and choked its productivity over the last 40 years.” In the case of each of these writers, the main thing you have to do is remove a dictator, overthrow a regime, or displace and neutralise a sinister “ruling political elite”… Then everything will be just fine.

So you remove the corrupt leader—what then?

But let us try a little thought experiment. Let us remove Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, and any of a dozen others you care to name. Let us then see what happens next as we start with what is optimistically called a “clean slate.”

Assuming you’re not going to install an outsider, who shall be appointed and where do you find him? If he or she is going to simply be a member of the same tribe and clan-based cultural milieu that produced the original despot, working in the same context of ambiguous and unenforceable law, and gravely imperfect or rudimentary political institutions, how are you to get a replacement with better ideas about politics, economics, and social life?

Why is it assumed that the mere decapitation of a political body will in itself bring improvement? Are the political genes that made the body utterly different from the political genes that made the head —if you will pardon the metaphor? “Regime change” is a splendid phrase; but it looks rather less splendid if it means that you must be prepared to appoint, staff, direct, and manage each new regime yourself—all of this while under fire.

Then there’s that word “corruption”. Of course I use it myself to describe the conduct of certain political leaders, in Africa and elsewhere. But at the same time I also realise it is a moralistic term that assumes certain norms regarding business practice and truly belongs in a western context. In brief, it belongs in prosperous countries where politicians, business leaders, public figures, and notables of one kind or another, are not supposed to enrich themselves by means of bribes and kickbacks.

But what if this kind of enrichment is expected? One doesn’t have to be a moral relativist to see the inappropriateness of the word “corruption” in certain contexts. Is it appropriate to use it in a scornfully moralistic tone of Africa (or of the Ukraine for that matter) where bribes, kickbacks, under-the-table payments, ‘sweeteners’ and so on, are all part of the normal way in which the wealth of society is distributed. In such places they are payments made to those with power and influence for services rendered. That is how “blat” was used in the strange, quasi-feudal, pre-modern society of Soviet Russia—and that is how it is doubtless used in much of Russia today. What we call corruption is simply daily life: it’s the culture, stupid!

It also seems to me unhelpful to classify such payments as part of the “informal economy” as economists are inclined to do. Both those who are forced to offer bribes, and those who demand them, simply assume that that is how life is lived, and that is how things get done if they are going to be done at all. Call it formal, informal, whatever. It is in short “the culture”—the ubiquitous culture of backward dysfunctional lands lacking all effective social, political, and economic institutions. In other words it is part of a comprehensive pattern of values, expectations, conduct and consequences that have always made the traditional world go round.

Does this mean that I take a relaxed view of such behavior, or condone it in the modern world? Not at all. In America, Australia, and New Zealand 99% of the people are literate, are entirely westernised, and the law on corruption is known and accepted. Nor in such places is poverty an incentive to corruption. The ethnic minority in these countries who try to exploit remnant traditions of clan and tribe for their own advantage, and act corruptly within this or that government bureaucracy (their usual means of access to large cash funds), deserve to be vigorously prosecuted and appropriately punished.

But where 99% of the people live under quite different conditions, where lawlessness prevails and the judicial system is a joke; where poverty is universal; and where the provision of basic services to one’s farm or house or office may take years of effort and countless bribes to countless officials—plainly a rather different attitude is required.

Social evolution and remnant traditions

In the early world—once upon a time, in some remote sociological Eden—All was One and All was Unity. Political power, economic activity, religious belief, social mores, and the definitions of good and evil and true and false by which we live, were all facets of a compound unity bound together by relations of kith and kin—the kinship of family, clan, and tribe.

If the tribe said evil was good, then it was good; if the tribe said black was white, then black was white. And if the chief or priest of the tribe said evil was good, or black was white, no-one dared say him nay. For westerners that world is irrevocably past, and has been since the Renaissance; and to yearn for it today, as many anthropologists urge us to, is just silly. Modernity means that politics, economics, religious belief, social mores, and what each of us call good and evil are all separated; and this differentiation is a defining feature of modern life. We do not allow clan leaders to define right and wrong. We do not allow chiefs to determine justice. We do not allow priests to define scientific truth and falsehood. And we do not allow clan leaders, chiefs, or priests to run our economic affairs. In political life, and in American judicial practice, this differentiation is most familiar in terms of the separation of powers.

But throughout much of the rest of the world, remnant shreds and patches of traditional cultural patterns persist, as they do throughout Africa, and in parts of Asia, and as they still do even on the periphery of the West itself in Ukraine and other Slavic nations. In such places political, economic, and judicial authority may be strongly influenced by clan affiliation. In Africa, where modernity has never really taken root, this fact virtually defines the human world, and it is surely sensible for the West to adopt policies that take account of this fact.

One practical consequence is that we should stop pretending that although there are evil men at the top, everyone else is like you and me. They are not. Nor are they evil. Many are perfectly nice people to visit, to share a beer with, or to dance with to the intoxicating rhythms of local bands. But it is equally true that they necessarily think pretty much the same way as the men at the top think, and whatever they may say in private, they will behave the same way if put in a position of leadership, because they will experience just the same clan- and family-based cultural pressures and constraints.

Another consequence we must face up to concerns aid, for the expectation of beneficial effects in such societies is bound to be disappointed. Whatever Blair and Bush say at Gleneagles, only the infinitely rich, the entirely blind, and the pathologically optimistic will say it makes sense to persist in voluntarily throwing billions of good money after bad. As numerous pessimists have argued year after year, it is the economic equivalent of pouring water straight onto desert sands. But it’s not water—it’s your money and mine.

Following on from this is the even more serious matter of vaguely military fantasizing to be found among people like Max Boot, Aidan Hartley, and Moeletsi Mbeki—about forcefully removing despots, annihilating cliques, neutralising elites, etc. Much blood and treasure may be lost trying to do this, as in Iraq today, but the outcome is doubtful. Only where most people are well-educated, literate, and already largely westernised (as they appear to be in Ukraine) and represent, in Adrian Karatnycky’s words, a clear electoral majority favoring “free media, the rule of law, civil society, and civic election monitoring”, does there seem to be a better than even chance of success.

This article complements ‘Can Sudan be Saved?’ December 2004 issue of Commentary.

The South will be “overwhelmed—and indeed more or less enslaved”. Fears voiced by British Foreign Office staffer, September 1, 1943.

It all started in Turkey in 1872. General Gordon had just made a nostalgic visit to the Crimea, and was on his way home, when he called at the British Embassy in Constantinople and was spotted by the Prime Minister of Egypt. At first the Egyptian hadn’t the faintest idea who he was, but after making some enquiries about this remarkable Englishman, whose personality was so impressive and whose conversation he enjoyed for over an hour, he felt sure that Gordon was exactly the man they needed to fix up things in the Sudan—things that the PM and his superior, the wily Khedive of Egypt, had no intention of trying to fix by themselves.

The Khedive’s name was Ismail Pasha, and his troubles were of two main kinds. On the one hand there was the fuss about slavery being made in England by the Prince of Wales, by the Royal Geographical Society, and by the Anti-Slavery Society. The British parliament had abolished slavery in 1807, after decades of bitter debate, and it seemed downright scandalous that fifty years later, in the middle of the enlightened 19^th century and during the reign of Queen Victoria herself, slave-trading was still going on in the Sudan. The province of Equatoria might be in darkest Africa, and a very long way up the Nile, but something would have to be done.

Just as embarrassing was the fuss being made by European financial institutions. Years of lavish spending had got Ismail Pasha into serious difficulties, and western banks and bondholders were pressing him hard. In the words of Charles Chenevix Trench:

He spent and borrowed with no thought for the morrow, and as little for the rate of interest (up to 36 percent for such risky investment) or his subjects’ taxable capacity. Between 1863 and 1877, the public debt rose from 4 million pounds to 87 million, to service which a doubling of the taxes screwed out of the unhappy fellahin (peasants) was totally inadequate.” (Charley Gordon, an Eminent Victorian Re-assessed, 70)

While some of this had been spent on necessary public works, a lot more had gone on an Egyptian imitation of Hausmann’s renovation of Paris, on palaces and gardens, on opera-houses and theatres, on a Cairo production of Verdi’s Aida to mark the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, on lavish hospitality provided for visiting kings, actors, sopranos, adventurers—and on the fleshpots of Paris too. Now he was being harassed by his creditors in Europe. They didn’t like slavery, they loudly said so, and they also insisted that something be done.

Ismail Pasha however was disinclined to do anything. Nor would any self-respecting member of the Egyptian establishment dream of spending months in the south and its mosquito-ridden swamps in pursuit of Arab slavers—it was an exile ten times worse than Siberia, a place where the worst criminals were sent to languish and die, and it was also largely beyond Cairo’s control. If however a foolhardy foreigner like Gordon could be persuaded to go tramping around in the pesthole of Equatoria, with malaria, tsetse fly, crocodiles and vipers and tribal savages—well, so much the better. Whether he managed to stop a few shipments of slaves, or failed to stop them, how could it matter? For his part Ismail would be happy to provide Gordon with a handful of convict-troops, gladly clearing out Cairo’s jails for the purpose. And he knew just how to handle his high-minded visitor. Described by Trench as a bulky, ginger-whiskered Albanian with his tarbush askew, Constantinople’s viceroy in Cairo

“had a remarkable gift of persuasion, due in part to his invariably conveying the impression that anyone he met was the one person he wished to see: men who went to see him bursting with exasperation would emerge purring with contentment and not realize for several hours that they had been bamboozled. He was adept at reading the character of those with whom he had to deal; to one he would offer money, to another flattery, to a third, a frank man-to-man confidence.”

In retrospect one can see they were made for each other, the upright Christian soldier and the suave Khedive. When General Gordon looked at slavery he saw an iniquity to be crushed in the service of God. When the serpentine Ismail Pasha looked at General Gordon he saw a man he could use; for if the world could be made to believe that this English paragon was fighting the slave-trade at Cairo’s behest, the viceroy’s present embarrassments might fade away: Gordon would provide both ethical cover and a way of saving the Khedive’s hide.

Doing good: suppressing slavery

General Gordon was not the first Englishman brought in to do what the Ottoman viceroy in Cairo wouldn’t and couldn’t do. In 1869 there’d been Sir Samuel Baker. During his period of service Baker relentlessly hunted slavers in a military sort of way; but he was clumsy, didn’t care who he offended, and we are told that he raided even friendly tribes to get supplies. His achievement consisted of mapping part of the Nile, establishing three police posts 300 miles apart, and leaving at each of them “about 600 miserable, unpaid convict-soldiers engaged solely in living at the expense of the natives. There was not even the most basic administration and the soldiers could not move half a mile from their posts except in large, armed gangs. Slavers operated without let or hindrance, from merchant princes dealing in human beings by the thousand to small traders picking up job-lots of half-a-dozen in a country where a healthy young female could be bought from her parents for a packet of needles.” (Trench, 116)

Now, in 1874, it was to be Gordon’s turn, and Gordon would surround himself with other westerners from France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the USA. Whether anyone had thought about the long-term effects of having Christians rearrange Sudanese Muslim society, ban slavery—the most grievous of its sins—and make the region ethically aware of the modern world, is hard to say. But they certainly should have thought about it. The people of Khartoum had already been shocked by the 1857 appointment of Arakil Bey al-Armani, an Armenian Christian, as Governor General of Sudan (this under Ismail’s precedessor Said Pasha) and in the judgment of Robert O. Collins and Robert L Tignor, authors of Egypt and the Sudan, “the precedent of appointing Christian administrators was to have fateful consequences for subsequent administrations”.

One thing at least was sure: the appointment of a Christian Armenian as Governor General, and a Christian Englishman as Governor of Equatoria, established the pattern of northern Muslim response: first incredulity, then growing hostility, then steadily mounting resistance to what would be seen as an audacious, imperious, patronising and alien moral reproach by Christian outsiders on the issue of slavery.

This was bound to be the reaction of those who knew that attacking slavery attacked the heart of Sudanese society. Whole cities in the region then depended on the slave trade, and in Khartoum, as Trench puts it, all the tasks done in prosperous English homes at that time “by cooks, parlourmaids, housemaids, footmen, gardeners, and grooms, were done in Khartoum by slaves. Indeed it would be hard to find any householder so poor as not to own at least one slave… the economics of the country required a constant flow of fresh slaves and the vast majority of these were pagan blacks. Could any reasonable man” the residents of Khartoum thought, “deny that the life of a Negro—fed, clothed, kindly treated, lightly worked and converted to the Faith—as a slave in Egypt, the Sudan, Turkey or Syria was infinitely preferable to his life in Equatoria or the Congo, poor, nasty, brutish and short?”

For hundreds of years, perhaps millennia, the dispersed African communities of the south had been treated as if they were scattered human herds to be periodically harvested by the peoples of the north: “Females were allocated to concubinage or domestic service. Most of the males became servants or agricultural laborers; the lucky ones became bazingers, slave soldiers, to carry out raids in their turn; the unlucky ones were castrated for harem service, an operation performed in insanitary conditions, without anaesthetics, which was generally fatal.”

The slave trade: unexpected perplexities

Gordon was optimistic at first: “I shall not have any difficulty with slavers or the natives.” There was initially a lot of passive resistance by the Arab slavers, he wrote, “but if you are firm, they give in… I apprehend not the least difficulty in the work; the greatest will be to gain the people’s confidence again. They have been hardly treated.”

But it wasn’t long before he realized things were more complicated than they seemed, and a lot more complicated than the Anti-Slavery Society back in London understood. Closing the Nile as a route for shipping their goods northward had only forced the slavers into semi-desert to the west, where they marched their defenceless victims northward for days in fearful heat: “Up to the present,” he informed the Secretary of the Society, “the slave is worse off through your efforts… I am sure a poor child walking across the burning plains would say, ‘Oh, I do wish those gentlemen had left us alone to come down by boat!’”

He also found that the way many slaves felt about themselves and their situation did not accord with English preconceptions. In the first place, equatorial Africans were not as reluctant to leave their homes as was thought. He wrote to the Anti-Slavery society that “I have never witnessed the harrowing scenes related by other travellers. The slaves I have come across never will return to their tribes. I can only account for this by the consideration that they have found it much more amusing to be in civilized parts than where life is monotonous and food is scarce… (Most blacks would) give their all to be enslaved in a good Cairo house.”

He was also disturbed by what appeared like African callousness and lack of affection for children. When one of his servants stole a cow, and was caught, the thief reimbursed the cow’s owner by giving him one of his little sons. Gordon was upset to find the child missing, and asked the mother whether she was sorry. No, she said, she’d much rather have the cow. As he observed other examples of this sort of thing Gordon despaired, even suggesting at one point that the best way of dealing with what seemed a vicious and unalterable cultural pattern might be to make the slave trade a state monopoly—in other words to monitor and control what could not be suppressed.

But how can this be true?

Yet surely it is preposterous to claim that Constantinople’s viceroy in Cairo, the Khedive Ismail, actually hoped that Gordon and all the other foreigners running around in pursuit of slave-traders would fail? Surely it was to Egypt’s advantage to stamp the slave-trade out? But if this was so why didn’t the Khedive use what authority he had to try and stop it himself? He did nothing—even his letters to Gordon were insincere. He simultaneously encouraged Gordon’s efforts, while advising his own administrative staff to carry on as before: “The Khedive writes to me quite harshly to stop this slave-trade”, wrote Gordon, “but you see his own Mudirs (district officers) helping it on… The real culprits are his local authorities and the Khartoum merchants who are entirely in his power…”

But again (so it might be argued), hadn’t an earlier viceroy in Cairo already tried to act? Is it not true that Said Pasha had directly responded to Western pressure in 1854 by setting up a police station at Fashoda to halt the slave trade? And whatever may be said of Ismail Pasha, wasn’t the earlier Said Pasha sincere? The evidence suggests that Said may indeed have begun with high hopes; but a tour of Sudan in 1857 seems to have finally convinced him of the futility of trying to do anything at all in this remote, desolate, and backward region, and “he considered abandoning the country altogether”. (Egypt and the Sudan, 70)

But what about the Anglo-Egyptian Slave Convention signed in 1877, two years before Ismail’s fall? Surely this meant something? Alas, more clever window-dressing is what it mainly meant. Though threatening death for anyone found trafficking slaves, “the decree permitted the sale of slaves from family to family for seven years in Egypt and twelve years in the Sudan” and any astute slaver well knew how to escape conviction.

Meanwhile, what was going on elsewhere? What policies were being followed in those vast and arid regions to the west where native northern Sudanese, not imported Christian governors, remained in charge? While the evangelical General with his Bible was thrashing about in the mosquito-ridden swamps near Gondokoro, what were the Arabs up to? In a province which has been much in the news lately, Bahr el-Ghazal, Arab slavers in the 1860s had established huge empires, with private armies and hundreds of trading stations, and from these stations “long lines of human chattels were sent overland through Darfur and Kordofan to the slave markets of the Northern Sudan, Egypt, and Arabia.” (Egypt and the Sudan, 73)

The bones of thousands who fell by the wayside still litter the desert today—and eventually the whole of Bahr el-Ghazal came under the rule of the paramount slaver Zobeir Pasha. But not only this. Even more remarkably, Ismail Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, the viceroy of the Ottoman Empire in Cairo, made this notorious chieftain governor of the province since this was “the only way to establish at least the nominal sovereignty of Cairo” over that enormous territory.

Doing good: protecting the natives

So much for the first stage of British involvement in the South up to 1900. It would of course be absurd to pretend that British concerns in the Nile Valley were purely disinterested and philanthropic: that is definitely not what is argued here. The importance of the Suez Canal as an imperial route to India and beyond was the main reason why the British secured control of Egypt. At the same time a scramble for Africa was taking place, so that Gordon’s other duty in the southern region, besides arresting slavers, was to scout the situation on the borders of colonizable land in British East Africa. Officially he was there to assert Egyptian influence, and perhaps win over the King of Baganda and annex his domain; but he also had an implicit brief on behalf of the British crown to ensure the Belgians and the French didn’t move in and seize control. (The “Fashoda Incident” of 1898 ended the French effort.)

Yet after they had effective control over the entire Nile Valley, there was a growing sense that little by little the British administration had taken on a custodial duty of care for the tribal peoples of the southern region—along with a concern that unless a positive effort were made to protect them from the political, commercial, and religious drive of Islam to the South, and from the assertiveness of Arab nationalism in Khartoum, populations like the Dinka and the Nuer would be overwhelmed. The protectionism of what soon came to be called the “southern policy”, a policy similar to that which has seen special refuges called reservations established for tribal peoples almost everywhere, was a growing source of northern resentment between 1899 to 1955.

Right from the start Sudanese leaders suspected the British of trying to separate northern from southern Sudan. That suspicion was fully justified. “In 1922 the south was formally declared to be a ‘closed district’ and Arab traders and others were practically debarred from entry to many parts of it, while the Permits to Trade Order, of 1925, further controlled entry into, and trading in, the south.” (Edgar O’Ballance, The Secret War in the Sudan, 28)

By 1930 Sir John Maffey, the British Governor General in Khartoum, believed that while it might still be possible to isolate the south, it would be dangerous because of mounting Arab-nationalist sentiment in the north. Nevertheless, whatever the dangers, a policy of ethnic rejuvenation was embraced designed to encourage the southern tribal peoples in “the cultivation of their languages, and conservation and sublimation of all that is of value in their customs and institutions”, the object being to “build up a series of self-contained racial and tribal units with a structure and organization based, to whatever extent the requirements of equity and good government permit, upon indigenous customs, traditional usages and beliefs.” (Peter Woodward, Condominium and Sudanese Nationalism, 11; O’Ballance, The Secret War, 30)

But this anthropological turn in policy raised serious questions. Modernization was coming one way or another—not least because of the influence of Christian missions among the Dinka, and the education and literacy they provided. Preserving indigenes like butterflies in amber, even on the upper Nile, was impossible. And if in contrast to teaching children how to read and write the emphasis was to be on fostering “indigenous customs, traditional usages, and beliefs”, where would modern education and literacy fit into the picture? More ominously, if it didn’t, and the British left, how would educationally ill-equipped and illiterate tribal people defend themselves?

As the colonial era neared its end in the 1940s, and it became more and more certain that the British would be forced to abandon a soon-to-be-independent Sudan, a crisis born of these historic policy contradictions loomed. With little change in traditional Arab attitudes toward African slavery, on the one hand, and with a nostalgic and unrealistic tribal rejuvenation endorsed by the British on the other, the possibility foreseen in 1943, and referred to with alarm by the British Foreign Office, that the Dinka, the Nuer, the Shillook, and the Azande would be “overwhelmed—and indeed more or less enslaved” became more and more grimly probable.

The unintended result of doing good: guerrilla war

Inevitably, in 1955 the British left. Three years before this happened, the Governor of Equatoria, E. H. Nightingale, had foreseen the reaction of the people: “The shock of discovering that the British propose to withdraw and abandon them within the next three years to other administrators who are distrusted or even hated by the majority of the population will, I believe, leave them bewildered and resentful.” Disgust at the prospect of Arab rule by Khartoum was general. Letters begging the British to stay came in. One of them concluded that “If the Northerners and Egyptians want to join with the South let them bring with them our grandfathers and grandmothers, and all our brethren whom they carried away as slaves long ago.” (Woodward, Condominium, 148)

Soon resentment turned to resistance, and before long, in August 1955, a mutiny by African troops in the Equatoria Corps announced the beginning of open revolt. The early period from 1955 to 1963 , according to Edgar O’Ballance, “was simply one of guerrilla survival, scarcely removed from banditry.” The fighters called themselves Anya-Nya (“snake poison”) and originally consisted or some 800 southerners who had been jailed after the 1955 mutiny, with only 200 firearms, little ammunition, and otherwise just bows and arrows, spears and machetes. Action consisted of ambushes, shootings, and minor but provocative attacks. And in reprisal in 1964 the expulsion of foreign missionaries began.

Offers from Khartoum of federal autonomy failed to persuade the increasingly active guerrillas to lay down their arms. What they now wanted was what the British had failed to provide: an independent southern state. The subsequent vengefulness of the government closely resembled what is going on in Darfur today. A minor personal incident between a Muslim and an African in 1965 led the Muslim garrison in Juba to run amok, with 3000 African huts burned and an estimated 1019 southerners killed in two days. As news of this spread throughout the South, southerners claimed that the “brutal and barbaric killing” at Juba was “not an accident but part and parcel of a plan to depopulate the South.” In hindsight we might say that at this stage genocide was being trialled, but had yet to be perfected.

The northern army particularly targeted Christian missions and mission schools, the devastation being such that in August 1965 the Pope appealed to the Sudanese premier, Mahgoub, to find a peaceful solution. Mahgoub replied with asperity that he had already asked the rebels to lay down their arms; it was now up to the Pope himself to petition the rebels. Next, voices were heard in Khartoum alleging that certain “irresponsible people” were trying to turn the “southern problem” into a crusade. By October the Church Missionary society estimated that half the churches in the south had been destroyed and that whole communities had fled from “murder, torture, and wholesale destruction.” Late in 1965 Anthony Carthew secretly visited Equatoria province and wrote in the Daily Mail for January 31^st 1966:

For mile after mile in this wilderness it is the wreck of a civilization which meets the eye: the burned-out shells of African villages put to the torch by Arab troops of the Sudanese Army. The smell of burning was always in my nostrils. It still is. Where once men worked and children played and cattle grazed, there is no sound except the coughing of the baboons and the wind rattling the dagger spikes of the thorn trees. (O’Ballance, 87)

By 1969 MIGs were being used by President Numeiri of Sudan against villages suspected of being Anya-Nya bases in the south. The Christian Science Monitor reported on January 14^th 1970 that during 1969 Numeiri’s army had wiped out entire villages and a large part of their population in at least 212 cases. At Marial Aguog, a village in Bahr el-Ghazal province, all 700 inhabitants were allegedly machine-gunned, while at the police post of Ulang in Upper Nile province, around 2000 people were killed, and their cattle seized and driven northwards.

No-one will ever know how many died in this “secret war” before a ceasefire granting a degree of political autonomy in the South was arranged in 1972, though O’Ballance believes the often mentioned figure of 500,000 to be exaggerated. But the procedures followed were identical to those being followed by the government of Omar al-Bashir in Dafur today: African villages were razed to the ground, their inhabitants abandoned their agricultural land, men, women, and children were machine-gunned from the air, while thousands more died from malnutrition, neglect, and famine. And what the southerners were fighting for was the same too: “the annulment of Khartoum’s policy of the Arabization of the South.”

Conclusion

It is now exactly 150 years since the first western-inspired humanitarian intervention on behalf of the peoples of southern Sudan. In 1854 Said Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy at that time in Cairo, established a police-station to prosecute slave-traders about 260 miles south of Khartoum at Fashoda. This represented the first of many efforts, major and minor, sometimes effective and sometimes not, to intervene in this Arab country on behalf of its African inhabitants, and to suppress the slave traffic from Central Africa to the North. From the days of the Anti-Slavery Society in the mid-19^th century one purpose of these efforts had been to protect indigenous peoples and cultures, some of them making their way toward modernity through Christianity and the adoption of English, from the militant expansion of sundry Arabizing Egyptian and north-Sudanese regimes.

It cannot be said that this aim has been successful. Only territorial independence could have saved the peoples of the South, and when it came to the sticking point, this was too much for the British, with their weakening hold on the situation, to try and achieve. Influenced by anthropological sentiment, they rashly—if understandably—adopted a policy of ethnic salvation and rejuvenation, of trying to restore already disintegrating indigenous institutions: but this left most southerners illiterate, uneducated, and defenceless.

In the light of history, intervention to stop slave-trading was the only moral course open to west-Europeans in the 19^th century. Then, once Britain had territorial control of the region, some attempt to shield the people of the South from cultural aggrandisement and conversion was almost equally inevitable. But tragically, the implicit custodial duty of care which outside powers embrace, in the course of the temporary occupation of foreign lands, cannot ultimately be honored. That this is so—that millions may have to be abandoned to their fate—is something to be deeply pondered by anyone contemplating similar action today.

“Allah laughed when he made the Sudan” — Arab saying.
“Allah cried when he made the Sudan” — another Arab saying.

by Gerald Vouga

Now about ninety, with his fangs seemingly drawn, the old man spends his days peacefully pottering in an English garden. But Basil Davidson represents the most willful single-handed effort to mythologise African history, and his numerous books have misled millions on a continental scale.

Barbaric kingdoms were romanticised, tyrants whitewashed, and cruel and bloodthirsty customs expunged (or simply ignored) in order to impress well-meaning western middle-classes who wanted to believe only the best about the cultures of the new, free, ‘liberated’ African states.

The romantic adventurer

Beginning as a romantic adventurer, Davidson was smuggled into Yugoslavia during World War II by the SOE (the Special Operations Executive run by the British Government). His boss was James Klugman, head of Special Ops Balkan operations at Bari, and a life-long communist and Cambridge contemporary of Kim Philby and his friends.

After the war Davidson resumed his pre-war career in journalism and worked for various national papers. He also produced his own pamphlets published by the Union of Democratic Control, a small Leftist group inherited from his father. He was available as a free-lancer for various “progressive” causes ranging from that of newly-established People’s China to the tiny anti-Salazar Portuguese Opposition in exile.

Strangely, however, considering what should have counted as his worthy and reputable Left-wing writing, the International Department of the British Communist Party warned party-members against trusting Davidson, telling them he was a Colonial Office agent. This was in the early 1950s, a time when London was seething with numerous groups of African exiles agitating for independence.

Propaganda: the true vocation

It was among these exiles that Davidson discovered his true vocation. With the independence of a growing number of African states his books entered the remunerative field of required reading for students of African History on campuses throughout the world. Davidson found himself in constant demand as a lecturer, and apotheosis was reached when the BBC commissioned him to direct a highly successful TV series of doubtful scholarship on African history.

Fame and fortune came not just in the West. There were vastly greater rewards from translations in the communist world. In the Soviet Union and its satellites editions of politically acceptable works reached astronomical figures by Western standards.

There was however a royalty problem. The USSR and its vassals were not signatories to international copyright agreements and hence under no compulsion to pay royalties. Any ingenuous Western author who imagined he would automatically receive them soon realized he would have to toe the line. Davidson was perfectly aware of the constraints placed upon him. In his case they were twofold. He had to satisfy not only his communist publishers, but also his African supporters. It was probably the second who first gave him the idea of embroidering history to provide an inspiring vision of the African past.

Davidson first came into contact with African folklore in the halcyon days of négritude. Its most talented exponents were to be found in a circle around the Paris magazine Présence Africaine. One of these was the Angolan Mário de Andrade, a founder of the MPLA, (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) the political party which was to rule Angola after independence a quarter of a century later.

Andrade held the highly original view that Angola, at its time of first contact with the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century, enjoyed a level of civilization equivalent to that of eighteenth-century Europe. Davidson lapped this fantasy up and proceeded to direct his research and writing towards an extravagant eulogy of pre-colonial African kingdoms, their technology, and their philosophy. This approach pleased not only Mário de Andrade but also the generality of African liberationists in exile.

Admirer of kings and courts

It was the “majesty” of West African kingdoms that Davidson found specially appealing. And no more majestic kingdom could be found than Benin. In his book African Kingdoms he remarks on the glory of “court life, of royal hunting parties and ceremonial occasions”, and notes with approval how severely “the forms of protocol” were royally enforced.

But only an assiduous reader will find that the ceremonial occasions frequently involved human sacrifice; and as for the severities of protocol, no mention whatever is heard of the custom of proskynesis (obligatory prostration before the almighty Royal Person) by which a West African king’s subjects were required to inch their way toward the Divine Presence on their bellies, signifying their degraded status by squirming through the courtyard mud to kiss his feet.

Announcing “the awesome power of Benin’s king”, Davidson tells with enthusiasm how “the Oba of Benin was an absolute monarch who could command anything he wished with the knowledge that he would instantly be obeyed”, how his “time was taken up by countless ceremonies and sacrifices and by his harem of a hundred or more wives”, how anyone who questioned the divinity of the monarch “was executed as a heretic”—all of these being uncritically presented as if they were natural features of political life.

This ability to omit the distasteful, to find praiseworthy elements in backward and barbaric customs—to invert values and mystify realities—soon drew the attention of the masters of Soviet propaganda. They were fully aware of the strategic importance in the Cold War of winning allies among future African leaders, and this was where Davidson proved especially useful. He soon became one of the principal propagandists for African independence movements sponsored by the Soviet Union.

Working for the MPLA

In the case of Angola this meant the MPLA. Sponsored by the underground Portuguese Communist Party, with very little support inside Angola itself, this organization depended largely on Angolans of various backgrounds who were studying in Europe. Their activity was chiefly one of propaganda and only marginally of armed struggle.

In early 1963, the spuriousness of the MPLA’s claims to represent Angolan political and military liberation had become so scandalous that the Organization of African Unity established an inquiry into the relative merits of the organizations claiming to lead the fight against Portuguese colonialism. To the consternation of its supporters on the European Left, the MPLA was found to be an unworthy contender, and the OAU formally recognized a rival organization—the allegedly pro-American FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola or National Front for the Liberation of Angola).

As soon as the decision was made public Basil Davidson hastened to Algiers (then a hive of liberationist activity) only to confirm that he had backed the wrong horse. And he admitted as much to friends. But he also said that he could not now change his allegiance and would have to continue his support for the MPLA come what may. Those he spoke to could only speculate about the reason, and whether or not it had to do with a grim financial dilemma: this being the possibility that if he changed his allegiance his royalties from the Soviet Union might dry up.

Soviet loyalties

So Davidson remained loyal to his first Angolan friends and to the Russians. As a creature of the Portuguese Communist Party the MPLA enjoyed a privileged position in the independence negotiations that followed the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in l974.

It has governed Angola ever since, winning a bloody civil war by force of Soviet arms, Cuban soldiery, and the assassination of rivals. Davidson has been treated as a VIP on visits to Angola and although circulation of his many books may no doubt suffer from Russia’s present economic adversity, they continue to enjoy a vast reading public in the West. They also continue to encourage a plethora of political misinformation, economic delusion, and anthropological fantasizing—all of which is of little help dealing with Africa’s manifold problems today.

Gerald Vouga is a long-time observer of the European scene.

The African peoples now being pillaged and destroyed have names like Zaghawa, Fur, and Massalit, and they live in the extensive region of Western Sudan called Darfur. The Arab horsemen of the apocalypse laying waste the land are called janjaweed, and they are acting for familiar reasons: an unswerving sense of racial destiny, a demand for Lebensraum, and a fierce belief that only one form of divine justice shall prevail.

In Darfur itself—a mainly Islamic district, unlike the Sudanese areas running southward toward the Upper Nile where the part-Christian Dinka and Nuer live—religion happens not to be the issue. In Darfur the invaders want water and grazing land. That is why Arab Muslims have been bombing and shooting African Muslims: the Arab nomad with his cattle and horses wants the African farmer’s fields—while raping his wife and burning his house down too. With the Sahara inching southward and the continual degradation of the parched Sahel, and after years of pressure from burning heat and drought, the Arabs are driving the Africans out of the more fertile country and seizing the wells to water their cattle. In the capital city of Khartoum, the government smiles broadly and looks away.

Of course Khartoum denies it is doing any such thing, and President Omar al-Bashir has regularly claimed that everything possible has been done to restrain the murderous bandits. But the slaughter goes on. A recent “Sudan Situation Report” prepared for the United Nations reads as follows:

On 12 October IDPs from Uma Kasara reported that their village was burned down by unidentified gunmen on 2 October, displacing approximately 650 families from their village, and from two adjacent villages of Gendoul and Goz. Three policemen were reported as killed, and property looted. According to the same source, ten people are missing from the village and the rest have moved to the newly established camp in Nyala town, El Sereif.

Yes, approximately 650 families—and four more villages are mentioned later in the same report. Can it be that the word from Khartoum is somehow not getting through to the troops?

The stricken and the doomed

But what is an IDP? One answer might be that it is a way of using the vocabulary of social work to neutralize the horror of what is happening and the fate of the people concerned. An IDP is an Internally Displaced Person—as if we were dealing with someone mildly disoriented and needing help to get home. There is also a collective term issuing from the UN and its agencies that similarly needs glossing. In the aggregate, tens of thousands of IDPs become “conflict-affected populations.” That is no doubt true; but English provides better ways of describing those in Sudan whose villages have been burned, whose crops and animals have been destroyed, whose children have been massacred, and whose men and women have been savaged and slain. Let us call them the stricken and the doomed.

According to the UN, the number of the stricken and the doomed in Sudan runs to about 2.2 million. Harrowing accounts by victims appeared in the October 4 issue of Time, and readers with an appetite for this sort of thing can learn more at various websites. One such site tells about the work of the Atrocities Documentation Team assembled by the U.S. State Department’s bureau of democracy, human rights, and labor in conjunction with the Coalition for International Justice.

This group, which conducted 1,165 interviews with survivors, reports “a consistent pattern of atrocities, suggesting close coordination between governmental forces and Arab militia elements, commonly known as the janjaweed.” The site also provides a brief history of the crisis in Darfur, and along the way explains some of the puzzling acronyms worn by the local resistance movements that, by defending their land and patrimony, have been challenging the ambitions of one Khartoum government after another for 50 years.

On the side of those fighting the janjaweed today there is a double-fisted organization, the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement, with both a military and a political wing. Its 4,000 members, along with a smaller outfit called the Justice and Equality Movement, are the ones carrying the fight to the Sudanese government. As is only to be expected, in the course of many years’ bitter fighting there have been injustices and atrocities committed by the rebels too. This fact is exploited to the full by a government seeking to obfuscate its own responsibility for the present catastrophe.

On July 30, 2004 the UN adopted Security Council Resolution 1556 demanding that the Sudanese government act to disarm the janjaweed militias and  bring their leaders to justice. The demand has been ignored. Nor has Jan Pronk, the man appointed by Kofi Annan to handle these issues, been helpful in stemming the drift of events.

Genocide?

That hardly comes as a surprise. A member of the Dutch Labor Party, Pronk was well known in the past for his strong interest in African liberation movements and his support for Cuba; he is even better known today for his role in the Dutch peace mission in the former Yugoslavia that ended with the murder of thousands of citizens of Srebenica—after which he resigned from ministerial office. Now he is the UN’s peacekeeper in Sudan. “Atrocities, very bad things, killings, rape, burning of villages have taken place,” her told a press conference in Khartoum in late September, although he had found nothing that he thought fit to describe as genocide.

In American diplomacy, the “G” word has taken a somewhat different path. The Bush administration was the first to air the charge, which was then seconded by Congress in a unanimous declaration. But the administration subsequently backed off a bit, perhaps to let the UN and the African Union try to sort things out. In any event, to raise the issue of genocide is to ask whether there is a racial component in the violence, as there has been in other longstanding criminal practices in Sudan.

When the janjaweed attack, they do unmistakably hurl racial abuse at their victims, alleging in particular that Africans are born to be slaves: “Slaves, run! Leave the country. You don’t belong; why are you not leaving this area for the Arab cattle to graze?” It is not impossible that similar taunts were heard in Pharaonic times, since slavery seems to have been around in the Nile Valley for thousands of years. In the 1990s, indeed, before the present crisis, Sudan was notorious for its flourishing slave trade. The victims in that case were not Muslims but mostly African Christians.

That this practice should have been allowed to continue unabated into the late 20^th century is a story in itself. In thinking about it, and about its relevance to the role played by sympathetic outsiders in the current crisis, it might be helpful to have a brief look backward.

British efforts to stamp out slavery

In the 19^th century, a series of notable Englishmen were appointed by the Khedive, the viceroy of the Turkish sultan in Egypt, to stamp out the slave trade in neighboring Sudan. In their various capacities as provincial governors or governors-general, Sir Samuel Baker, General Charles George Gordon, and Sir Reginald Wingate all tried to do so. Yet they did not completely succeed. As late as 1933, Sir James Robertson, then a district commissioner in Kordofan, found something odd in the hollow tree behind his house. It seems that his Sudanese cook, when short of cash, had embarked on “a profitable line of trade beyond his normal duties”:

When on tour with his master he would from time to time acquire a small Nuba or Dinka child whom he brought back with him and hid in this hollow tree until he found a purchaser for him. In the end his illicit trade was brought to light and he paid for it with a long term of imprisonment.

The memoirist goes on to talk amiably about the rather brackish water in the well and other mild vexations, with the story of the child in the tree being smoothly worked into a broader narrative of the kind that members of the British colonial administration often wrote in retirement in leafy Wiltshire. The anecdote is quaint and humorous, and although not moralistic it is in the end quietly edifying: the slave trader goes to jail.

It is the attitude revealed that is most interesting. What we are shown in this glimpse of the administrative mind is a relatively relaxed accommodation of ineradicable Sudanese ways. In 1933, this corresponded to a widely shared English upper-class conception of civilized colonial rule: live and let live, ensure that economic activity is more or less unhindered, and allow as much latitude as you can to existing authorities and existing conduct. More than this, the anecdote also embodies the kind of relativism that is the humane side of aristocratic management: culturally speaking, the lower orders are what they are: trying too hard to change them is a mistake; ultimately the African world is too deeply mysterious to grasp—and noblesse oblige.

A second, contrasting approach to Sudan may be found in the life and personality of General Gordon, who did not return to write his memoirs. (on January 26, 1885, the forces of the Mahdi, the Islamic fanatic of the day, attacked the besieged city of Khartoum, overcame all resistance, and within two hours killed and beheaded Gordon himself.) Unlike the Oxford-educated Robertson, General Gordon took most of his intellectual guidance from the pocket Bible he carried everywhere, and most of his inspiration from God. There was in him an exalted piety, an unrelaxed evangelical fervor, and a sense that not only slavery but evil itself should be extirpated wherever it was found—all of which contributed to his astonishing successes, and also to his doom.

A Sudanese view

A third view of Sudan slavery and the Sudanese situation can be had from the boy in the tree—not the boy himself, of course, but a distinguished present-day representative of the same Dinka people to whom the boy belonged, and who are now one of the tribes most cruelly oppressed. I have in mind War and Slavery in the Sudan, a 2001 book by Jok Madut Jok, a Sudanese historian at Loyola Marymount University. Writing with pained dignity, muffled grief, and remarkable moral poise, Jok offers a moving testament to the suffering of his people; his book is recommended reading for anyone tempted to rush impetuously into the mélée.

Although he sketches the historical background, Jok’s main subject is the current wave of slavery in Sudan. As I have noted, this began earlier than the recent developments in Darfur; it involved the districts of Equatoria and Bahr el-Ghazal and Upper Nile, bordering a number of countries in central Africa. Starting about 1983 with the renewal of an endemic and essentially racial conflict, the Sudanese government undertook to exploit traditional animosities to fight a war on the cheap:

Cattle-herding Arab tribesmen, known as the Baggara, were recruited as a low-cost counter-insurgency militia and deployed against the southern opposition force…

Soon the Baggara discovered a very effective method of suppressing the rebellion in the south: destroying civilian villages and frightening the population into deserting their homes. But… the Baggara received only meager government assistance. It was more lucrative to capture large numbers of women, children, and any able-bodied men they could subdue, and take them into slavery in their northern provinces of Darfur and Kordofan.

There was nothing new about the terrorist style of assault described by Jok. When the Nile explorer Sir Samuel Baker was in the region in 1862, he “observed that a slave trader would sail to the south from Khartoum in the dry season with armed men and find a convenient village. The slavers would surround the village in the night, then just before dawn fall upon the village, burning the huts and shooting to frighten the people.” Then they rounded up the women and children, looted the village of all cattle, grain, and ivory, and burned and destroyed everything else.

Reinforcing the racial pattern, at least in the south, is religious enmity. Islamic law (shari’a), officially imposed in 1983, expresses the government’s belief that Arabism, the Arabic language, and Islamic culture in general should prevail over the mixture of Christian and animistic beliefs among southern Sudanese. During the half-century preceding Sudan’s independence in 1956, the British had actively opposed any such project, deliberately shielding the non-Islamic cultures of the south. For thus interrupting the march of Islam through Africa they were bitterly resented by northerners. “This is why,” Jok writes, “the policies of assimilation and Arabization in the south have been so vigorous and bloody, turning south Sudan into a graveyard over the years.”

All this is clear enough. But what should be done? Here an understandable ambivalence enters into what Jok has to say. Despite describing scenes of barbaric savagery arguably worse than those witnessed by such 19^th-century anti-slavery men as Sir Samuel Baker, General Gordon, and David Livingstone himself, he plainly feels a little uncomfortable about the efforts of the numerous aid agencies that have come to help. Some gestures have been welcome—“Operation Lifeline Sudan has been greatly appreciated”—but there are too many policy disputes, too much distracting argument about possible dependency effects, too many “affluent representatives of a different world who make the gap between the haves and the have-nots only too glaring”. And whose arrogance and insensitivity are hard to bear.

The humanitarian agencies

This portrait would hurt many of the frontline aid workers in the field. They are not naturally arrogant. They want to help. But they must often find themselves completely out of their depth. They do not know the language, they are surrounded by hundreds of dead and dying, by heat and dust and flies and smells. Is it any wonder that they sometimes end up impatiently pushing and shoving and even abusing the miserable victims they have come to save?

More generally, however, and especially in light of the multitude of summer missionaries now spread around the world digging wells and repairing roofs and painting walls, it seems reasonable to ask a different question. Has all this benevolent endeavor helped the peoples it is designed to help, the Africans pre-eminently among them?

One typical listing on the web, the World Guide to Humanitarian and Development Volunteering, advertises “over 180 projects worldwide, from two weeks to two years or more, how to spend either a holiday-with-a-difference or a longer period—for students, professionals, retirees, and those with and without work experience, plus information on finding thousands more opportunities on the Internet.” It asks for doctors, accountants, agronomists, surveyors, and teachers ready for work in Africa and elsewhere.

On one sidebar there is even an item about “Singles in Sudan”. The most poignant feature on the page, which could easily go unnoticed, shows a young African girl, aged about twelve and colourfully attired in local costume, embracing an aid worker of indeterminate sex. The African girl looks sideways and down and seems either puzzled or embarrassed or both. The aid worker looks upward to the heavens with the expression of a desperately seeking loner who has at last found love.

Some of these humanitarian workers describe themselves, or have been described by others, as secular missionaries. But Christian missionaries had a defined and terminable assignment. They converted the Fijians or Samoans, suggested helpful alternatives to eating taro and making war, put women into clothes, got everyone singing hymns—and then went home. But contrast, no matter what happens to their exotic charges, big and aggressively redistributive charities like Oxfam have no intention whatsoever of going home. Their purpose is to share Western wealth with whoever seems a worthy recipient, and their zealous staffs will go on doing this as long as anyone in the West is wealthy and anyone elsewhere present an outstretched hand.

The higher mendicancy and its expectations

Others are more inclined to see the humanitarian NGOs as a kind of mendicant order in which the monastic virtues of poverty, chastity, and humility have been reinvented in forms more compatible with the vast sums they control, the living opportunities they offer, and the personal aggrandizement available within their bureaucracies. There are 8,770 employees in the World Food Program, over 600 in Rome alone. About 70 different organizations are active in three distinct regions of Darfur (north, south, and west), including Action Contre la Faim, the German Red Cross, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Care International, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, and so on. A complete list can be found in the UN document “Darfur Humanitarian Profile No. 6.”

The first thing to be said about the new medicant orders is that the stricken and the doomed could not do without them. It is upon the activities of such organizations that the survival of millions in Sudan and elsewhere depends, and they are a vital part of the contemporary philanthropic scene. But this must not blind us to the peculiar ideology their leaders promote. As one rises up the hierarchical ladder that leads from the hard-pressed frontline troops to the people in the directorial chairs at the top—from the dust of deserts to the air-conditioned bureaucracy where men like the Dutchman Jan Pronk have made their careers—serious contradictions emerge.

At one UN website we are teasingly invited to “Tell a friend about Global Policy Forum.” And indeed—why not? At the GPF site we find page after page revealing the conflict between the wealth the Global Policv Forum seeks to appropriate, channel, and disburse, and the hostility of the professional disbursers toward those who produce that wealth. We find, in short, a commitment to the project of global redistribution—combined with the unexamined assumption that showers of cash will continue for as long as the mendicant orders require.

Thus, there is a page telling us how to resist and regulate globalization. It asserts that free-trade agreements like NAFTA “make trade ‘free’ for northern exports, without prohibiting the rich countries’ protectionist measures”; that multinational corporations menace health and labor standards everywhere; that the World Trade Organization has been rightly criticized for its “opaque, undemocratic operating procedures and neo-liberal ideology” (using “neo-liberal” as a pejorative synonym for “free-market”); and that the “neo-liberal reforms of the IMF” only “exacerbate poverty”. Last but not least, the Forum promotes the golden prospect of global taxation, in order “to fund the UN, its agencies, and other programs for worldwide human security and development.”

In fact, these pages leave the abiding impression that their authors could hardly run a corner deli. Yet that does not prevent them issuing a stream of global economic edicts, political fatwas, and social anathemas.

Nor is that the end of contradictions. Is it possible that humanitarian projects in Africa are being painstakingly devised for a world that does not really exist? Might it be the case that some projects cannot be carried out, because the improvements contemplated can no longer be made? That they are intended for beneficiaries whose lives have already been largely destroyed by violence and mayhem? And that, for reasons of institutional inertia, such projects—on which hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent—keep rolling along even though their goals are absurd?

Impossible projects

A page welcoming us to the executive board of the World Food Program shows an enormous oval conference table in an even more enormous room, and helpfully gives access to all the available executive-board documents dating back to 1996. For our purposes, we may concentrate on agenda items four and eight of the Third Regular Session for 2004. The first of these bears the title “Expanded School Feeding and Health Program: New Partnerships in Uganda.” Describing a five-year program that is to cost $332 million “in its first phase”, the item begins with a seemingly unexceptionable claim: “The central development challenge confronting African countries today is the reduction of poverty, particularly among the rural poor.”

Now, as economists like the late P.T. Bauer have shown, it is a striking fact that most of the African countries now receiving aid for “poverty” once had self-supporting farmers who grew crops successfully and fed their families and often had a surplus for sale. What has changed? Is poverty “the central development challenge,” or is it rather the complete collapse of the security needed for a peasant farmer to get on with his life, grow his crops, and feed and educate his children?

If the latter is the case, then a principal cause of poverty is the violence and killing that make productive farming difficult, and that will certainly make educational routines nearly impossible. Might it then be true that the causes of poverty and of educational backwardness cannot be dealt with by aid at all—that both of them depend on first solving the unending civil disorders of the region?

The $332 million, we are told, will be managed by the Ugandan “Ministry of Education and Sport working with sectoral support from line ministries,” and funds are to be specially directed to “conflict-affected areas.” In these areas, the Ugandan ministry declares, “the number of both primary and secondary beneficiaries will expand during implementation of the program,” these beneficiaries being “schoolchildren in day schools, teachers, and cooks.”

The Lord’s Resistance Army

The significance of this becomes clear when we get to the second text, agenda item eight: “Targeted Food Assistance for Relief and Recovery of Refugees, Displaced Persons, and Vulnerable Groups in Uganda.” The budget for this three-year project has undergone no fewer than four revisions upward since its initial approval in 2002, and now stands at $249,266,641. But it turns out that in precisely those “conflict-affected areas” where schoolchildren, teachers, and cooks are supposedly going about their educational tasks, there has been a violent insurgency by an Afro-Christian cult called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

“In February 2004,” we read, “over 200 people were massacred by LRA rebels in a single attack… Major humanitarian corridors… remain extremely insecure; many camps are inaccessible without military escort.” As for the children, “40,000 seek overnight shelter in churches, hospital compounds, and NGO night shelters… for fear of being abducted.”

Thanks to the Lord’s Resistance Army, it emerges, most of the stricken and the doomed in northern Uganda, exactly as in Sudan in West Darfur, are forced “to remain in camps; they have limited access to their fields and few possibilities of obtaining food and income”. And the LRS continues to attack those camps, “burning, looting, raping and killing, and abducting children. They have disrupted travel by ambushing vehicles on most of the main roads… Social and cultural structures are breaking down: men are leaving their families, there are frequent teenage pregnancies, vulnerable groups lack care, and HIV/AIDS incidence and risks are increasing.”

With the best will in the world, it is difficult to see how the allocated school funds can be used as planned. Is it out of order to ask what happens to those hundreds of millions when they cannot be spent?

The UN commission

After a flurry of interest and visits to Khartoum by important persons, and calls for Western military intervention in Sudan, Washington, at least, seems to have grown cool to the idea of forceful action. Although the State Department is exerting what it calls “calibrated pressure” on Khartoum, the calibration has seemed much too fine to have any effect. In the meantime, Kofi Annan has appointed an international commission, consisting of a panel of international jurists, “to determine whether acts of genocide have occurred in the Darfur region of Sudan.”

The panel appears to have at least one member of judicial distinction, Antonio Cassese, president of the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It also includes four rather less distinguished members, including one from Ghana whose judicial utterances are seemingly not on record and another, Dumisa Ntsebeza of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who has waxed indignant about “the self-styled policeperson of the world, the U.S.” and has invidiously compared American policy on reparations to Jewish victims of Nazism with the American position on reparation claims for black slavery.

Of course, what the panel decides is largely academic. What matters is what America and the West decide. On my own reading of the evidence, influenced both by contemporary documents and by War and Slavery in Sudan, there can be no question that genocide or something very like it is taking place. The question is what the West can conceivably do about cultural patterns that provide no way of reconciling differences or resolving disputes, that in country after country across the sub-Saharan region repeatedly escalate into massacres and pogroms, and that in Sudan are driven by a regime determined to dominate, subject, convert, and if necessary murder its opponents.

To send in the troops of the African Union, as some have suggested, is not just temporising—it’s a joke. A recent Rwandan unit found itself without most of the supporting equipment it required, and might just as well have been on guard duty back in Kigali. A few years ago, a Nigerian force, in a fit of pique, shot about 100 or of its hosts.

Military intervention

If piecemeal action were possible—biting off a western chunk of this vast territory and making a refuge with a defensible perimeter—perhaps it might be considered. But taking responsibility for a million or two million people and positioning an army to defend them might have awful collateral consequences, like the vengeful murder in reprisal of defenceless millions still under the control of a ruthless government. Is it worth taking the risk?

Also to be borne in mind is what happens in the longer term to people who become wards of occupying powers. Humanitarian organizations will undoubtedly see it as their duty to help such men and women leave Sudan for other countries. If I were a Sudanese, I would most certainly try to escape, and I would do everything I could to enter either Europe or the U.S. Indeed, I believe this is the natural, right, and proper thing for any Sudanese who cares about his life and his family to try to do. But how many refugees can, or should—or would—either Europe or America take in? There is an implicit custodial contract for the safekeeping of the stricken and the doomed, and this is something any occupying power would need to think about not just sympathetically but long and hard.

As for armed intervention by Western forces, the spirit quakes. It might be useful to visualize Sudan not as a quagmire but as a La Brea tar pit the size of Lake Superior, infinitely hospitable to bones, with endless uncontrollable frontiers alongside Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Egypt, Eritrea, not to mention a useful stretch of the Red Sea coast directly opposite Mecca.

An Italian who spent 30 years in the south wrote in his journals in 1877 that “it must be borne in mind that the Egyptian Sudan is vast in extent and, if the government of a region wanted to keep watch on all the roads, an army of 100,000 troops would not be enough.” Strategists might also consider the fate of Colonel Hicks and his 10,000 men, sent off to destroy the Mahdi in 1883 and slaughtered almost to the last man in an ambush. A modern army differs in many ways from a body of reluctantly dragooned Egyptian troops in 1883, but the picture is worth contemplating.

Humanitarian realism

In thinking about humanitarian action, two ethical touchstones are relevant: pity, which was Rousseau’s criterion in the 18^th century, and the argument by Hugo Grotius a century earlier that force is justified to stop the maltreatment by a state of its own nationals when that conduct is so brutal and large-scale as to shock the conscience of the community of nations.

Tragically, however, despite what Jok Madut Jok tells us about the ruin of his people, and despite what we read in the newspapers every day, it must be seriously questioned whether an ideal and transcendental concept of justice can be allowed to determine the issue. What must be equally weighed in the end is what foreign soldiers can practically do, and foreign states can reasonably pay for.

The West, including especially Europe, has been deeply implicated in the modern disorders of the Muslim Middle East. By contrast, the West did not cause this African catastrophe; the West is not responsible for it; and it is most unlikely that the West can fix it. In Sudan its roots are both domestic and endemic, go back hundreds of years, and lie at the deepest levels of a pathologically racist ethnic psyche.

In the meantime, despite the dubious policy choices and the even more dubious pronouncements of the elites who guide them, the front-line workers of the humanitarian agencies must of course be helped to do all in their immediate power for the stricken and the doomed—relieve distress, minister to the sick, displaced, and dying, and save those it is possible to save.

The Egyptian Sudan.

From England they mainly came—Sir Samuel Baker, General Gordon, Sir Reginald Wingate; but also many other outsiders, who were usually Christian, from Austria, Italy, Germany, France, and America… And those are just the ones we know about. In the second half of the 19^th-century all of them were hired and imported by Egypt’s rulers to do what the inhabitants of the Nile Valley would not, could not, did not, and—incredibly—still in 2004 cannot do for themselves: stop slave-trading and abolish slavery.

It’s very odd, and just as odd is the fact that most people know little about this history, and nothing whatever about the disastrous unintended effects of 150 years of humanitarian western intervention in Sudan, and therefore have trouble understanding the tragedy as it has unfolded today. Here, for the record, is one key episode from the past:

• In the 1860s and 1870s an oriental sybarite named Ismail Pasha got Egypt way over its head in debt as a result of his taste for grandiose public works, sumptuous entertainment, and the fleshpots of Paris
• Western banks had already been telling him enough is enough (“and we strongly disapprove of the thousands of slaves you keep”)
• The sybaritic Ismail Pasha, aka the Egyptian Khedive, then cleverly appeased his creditors, won western approval, and saved his hide, by a promise to stop trafficking African slaves from the Sudan

but

• Because he knew that no self-respecting Arab would lift a finger against the time-honored enslavement of Africans
• Because much of 19^th-century civilization in the Nile Valley depended on slave labor, in the fields, the house, and the boudoir
• Because both Ismail Pasha and his Prime Minister were deeply insincere and hoped, in their heart of hearts, that nothing would be done to disturb their lifestyle (being adepts ofKetman—see item on Czeslaw Milosz below)

They therefore appointed a whole series of outsiders from the West to do what the region would not do for itself—abolish slavery —correctly expecting them to fail

See also Humanitarian Disasters and Can Sudan be Saved?

The Sudan

Mr Ahmed Diraige of Sudan has my sympathy. On August 4th he entered a BBC London studio soliciting help for his native land. The way he sees it the “international community” has a clear obligation to go and stop his countrymen killing each other (something they’ve been doing for fifty years) to separate combatants, to calm them down, to feed them, clothe them, and enable them to get on with their lives. He couldn’t have been more polite. Yet at the BBC he got mercilessly banged about the head.

“Why is it that all the problems in Africa have to be solved with large quantities of blood? Why do we never learn any lessons?” asked Tim Sebastian of Hardtalk. And when Mr Diraige started in on the sins of the colonial powers fifty years ago he was rudely stopped: “You can’t blame the colonial powers for a million dead in Rwanda, three million dead in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a million people at risk of dying in Darfur…”

But Mr Sebastian had only started. He wanted to know “why killing seems to be a first resort rather than a last resort in Africa?”, why Africa itself wasn’t taking responsibility, why the African Union was failing to do anything effective, why well-dressed people like Mr Diraige were travelling about the world calling for the “international community” to send troops when the root problem was plainly not one that could be settled by force.

As he sat there blinking awkwardly behind his glasses it seemed to me pretty clear that the Chairman of the Federal Democratic Alliance, one of Sudan’s opposition parties, is a good man who means well. When Tim Sebastian asked him whether he didn’t want to weep when he saw the state of his country Ahmed Diraige answered simply: “I did several times, believe me. Several times I did.” And personally I believe him. It was a small but poignant reminder of the human reality behind the politicians and their arguments for intervention.

International bureaucrats

Yet tears or no tears, and despite the fact that men like Kofi Annan may well have their hearts in the right place too, they are incapable of dealing with the problem. Because of course it isn’t a “problem” in any useful sense of the word. Problems are manageable. Problems have solutions. Human intelligence and human will can puzzle them out.

But the immeasurable gulf between the existing state of African society and the modern world, the “big ditch” dividing communal kin-based cultures and modern economic arrangements in country after country, on a continental scale, is not something bridgeable by political will. Nor (in the case of Sudan) can a war in a huge country be terminated by uncomprehending foreign soldiers when it has been going on for fifty years, and before that intermittently for centuries, and has today a strong messianic element in which the Arab north sees itself as having an Islamic duty to overrule, dominate, convert, and if necessary murder the part-Christian non-Arab south.

As if this didn’t make things bad enough, add also the fact that the Kofi Annans of the world belong to a rarefied and very privileged African elite of international bureaucrats who think in terms of Commissions and Conferences at which more-or-less impractical protocols are discussed and more-or-less noble resolutions are passed . They have personally escaped and put behind them the murders and misery of their homelands, they have risen into the well-fed social stratosphere of diplomacy in Geneva, Paris, London, and New York, and they understandably value the glittering lifestyle this provides. They constitute a class with distinct interests of their own, interests not necessarily coinciding with those of millions of subsistence farmers trying to scratch a living from the African soil.

Machetes chopping off heads in Sierra Leone, or Rwanda, or wherever—the flies, the corpses in the sun, the cries of grief and the stench—are matters such bureaucrats are separated from by a huge and irreducible social gulf. While in some cases sincerely appalled, like Ahmed Diraige, as Africans themselves they seem unable to honestly describe such things or to offer any realistic explanation. They are perpetually on the defensive, invariably use the “legacy of colonialism” to intimidate Africa’s critics into a state of guilty fear—after which the “international community” is invited to come and sort things out.

Western morale

The morale of the West is very much the morale of its numerous well-meaning educated middle classes. In the African case, what media influences play on their minds today? They are firstly bombarded day and night with appeals. In today’s newspaper Amnesty International reports that “countless thousands of women and girls have been raped in Darfur, many in front of their families and their communities” and urges “the international community to prevent further attacks”.

In the post comes a letter from Médecins sans Frontières telling of a “crisis of epic proportions unfolding in the Sudan. Over 1.2 million people have been displaced by militias and their villages have been burnt to the ground … Please make an immediate tax-deductible donation to Médecins sans Frontières to help the Sudanese people…” Also in the post is the August National Geographic with an article about Loango National Park in Gabon. Unsurprisingly, it enthuses about the wildlife but makes no mention of either child trafficking or the fact that after three and a half decades of corrupt and autocratic rule President Omar Bongo is one of the world’s richest men (Freedom in the World).

In the May Literary Review the 36th Kabaka of Uganda (who the Review refers to as His Majesty and who almost certainly resides in the UK) reviews a book by Tom Stacey idealizing African ethnic culture in unmeasured terms. He tells us approvingly that Mr Stacey’s “belief in the tribe and ethnicity is almost religious: ‘the proper sense of his ethnicity feeds Man the conviction of his identity and a glimpse of his grandeur. No substitute exists for that food. For a man to be deprived of it in the context of his grandeur is as for a man to be deprived of his childhood in the eye of his maturity … Ethnicity is a requirement of soul’”. That in Africa whole hecatombs are day after day sacrificed to this romantic vision of the ethnic soul does not seem to trouble either Mr Stacey or the reviewer one little bit.

In the Times Literary Supplement for August 6 a well-informed Sudanese writer and historian named Bona Malwal reviews Douglas H. Johnson’s The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Indiana University Press), but declines to share the author’s “guarded optimism concerning the peace negotiations” currently under way. Finally, the August issue of Prospect magazine has the heading INTO AFRICA blazing inch-high across its cover, superimposed upon an image of a train travelling through a landscape of South African bush, and it turns out that this is a short story about Hutus and Tutsis by Damon Galgut. Mr Galgut, “a key author in the new South Africa”, recounts an episode from Rwanda in which one brother mutilates, rapes, and kills not only his brother’s wife and family but his own mother.

High expectations

No—there’s nothing new out of Africa. Not any more. Not today. Maybe there was in Ancient Rome in the days of Pliny the Elder, and that’s what inspired his much repeated and deeply misleading quotation—’out of Africa always something new’. But that was long ago: for the rest of us it’s been an unending chronicle of chaos and corruption and cadavers since 1960.

Yet how high our hopes were back then! I was teaching at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and we had a documentary showing Kwame Nkrumah at home in Ghana giving a speech. The African crowd in Accra loved it. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! they cried at us from the screen, and Nkrumah and his enthusiastic assembly were so carried away it looked as if the very idea of liberty might be enough to do the trick—the trick of course being how to take the tribal fabric of Old Africa, and using a western pattern, create a modern civil society overnight.

To the children in the theatre at the American Museum of Natural History gazing up at all this African excitement—many of them from schools in Harlem—there didn’t seem to be a problem. Nor did I point out any. Nobody did. As for Kwame Nkrumah, a left-wing journalist who had lived in London and the USA and who knew every rhetorical trick in the book, he too seemed to think independence would be a breeze. As he wrote in his book Africa Must Unite, the first task was to expropriate the expropriators:

“The colonial powers were all rapacious; they all subserved the needs of the subject lands to their own demands: they all circumscribed human rights and liberties; they all repressed and despoiled, degraded and oppressed. They took our lands, our lives, our resources and our dignity. Without exception, they left us nothing but our resentment …”

This looting of the continent by the whites had left its peoples destitute: “It was when they had gone and we were faced with the stark realities, as in Ghana on the morrow of our independence, that the destitution of the land after long years of colonial rule was brought home to us.”

The colonial reality

Such passages were certainly stirring—but were they true? The late, distinguished economic historian Peter Bauer was the author of two books drawing on his African experience—Reality and Rhetoric: Studies in the Economics of Development (1984), and Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (1981). He describes Nkrumah’s statements as nothing but “effrontery playing on guilt and ignorance”, since in the years before colonial rule “conditions in the Gold Coast (as Ghana was formerly known) were extremely primitive and life was short and perilous. People’s circumstances improved out of all recognition during the colonial period”.

Colonial conquest involved bloodshed. But in West Africa this was largely over by the end of the nineteenth century, and during the first decades of the twentieth century “British colonial administrations governed firmly but lightly. They did not attempt to control closely the lives and activities of their subjects. Taxation was modest and people enjoyed virtually complete personal freedom, including the freedom to choose their own activities, to move around the country unheeded, and to dispose of their incomes as they wished. Tribal warfare, slavery and slave-trading—formerly widespread or endemic—had been effectively suppressed.”

The essential principles of British colonial rule in Africa were described by the novelist Joyce Cary, reminiscing about his life in the colonial service of Nigeria:

“It was the rule then in the Nigerian Service, and this has always been one of the guiding principles of British colonial policy, to preserve local law and custom as far as possible, and to do nothing that might break the continuity of local government. Tribal chiefs and tribal councils were to be maintained, and progress made by educating chiefs, by improving their roads, public services—which (as experience shows) by itself modifies the whole situation and can (if that end is kept in view) quite quickly build up a class capable of some share in the government.”

Cary’s picture is doubtless somewhat idealized. There were many slips between policy statements and policy implementation. Nevertheless, in Bauer’s words, colonial government in West Africa ensured “The establishment and maintenance of public security (which encompassed suppression of slavery and slave-trading and also of tribal warfare); the effective management of the monetary and fiscal systems; construction and maintenance of transport facilities; provision of some basic educational, public health and veterinary services; and some agricultural extension work.”

Post-colonial chaos

That was then. This is now. Today there is no public security. Slavery is found once more in Sudan, and sinister forms of domestic enslavement that involve the trafficking of children exist elsewhere too. Fiscal management is a farce—and Nigerian misappropriation of public funds is a farce played on a global stage. Transport is haphazard and unreliable. Education and public health struggle on in deplorable conditions. And nothing can be done without lies and bribes and payoffs at every step and every social and political level, all public revenues tending to leak away into private hands.

Corruption is universal, malignant, and destructive, and the joke retold by Keith B. Richburg in his Out of America: a Black Man Confronts Africa says it all. A western-educated African visits an old university friend in Indonesia and is impressed by his spectacular house, his three Mercedes, his huge swimming pool and numerous servants. How on earth, he asks, can his Asian friend afford all that? The Indonesian points to a grand elevated highway in the distance, and patting himself on the chest says “ten percent”.

A few years later the Indonesian visits the African at his home and is staggered to see a whole fleet of Mercedes, air-conditioned indoor tennis courts, and an army of uniformed chauffeurs and servants. How on earth can his friend afford it all? “You see that highway?” says the African—but when the Indonesian looks he sees nothing at all, just empty fields right out to the horizon. His host looks at him with a smile, taps himself on the chest, and says “One hundred percent!”

The boneyard

On television today (August 15 2004) viewers were given a break from fly-covered skeletal infants in Darfur—what they saw was a massacre in Rwanda instead. One hundred and eighty Tutsi had been killed by a raiding group of Hutu. The usual ruined huts, scattered clothing, pitiful household items lying about, but of course never the really grisly stuff Keith B. Richburg describes from Tutsiland exactly ten years ago, the “bloated, discoloured bodies floating down a river and over a waterfall”, the unbearable stench, this going on for days. Today, turning from the smoking ruins, the cameraman finds a spokesman asking for the “international community” to take action through the UN to stop this sort of thing.

Author Richburg spent three years covering Africa for the Washington Post and wrote about it in his book Out of America: a Black Man Confronts Africa—“three years of watching bodies, if not floating down the river in Tanzania, then stacked up like firewood in the refugee camps of Zaire, waiting to be dumped into a mass pit… Or the bodies lying unburied along the roadsides in Somalia, people dropping dead of starvation as they tried to make it just a few more miles into town where the foreign-aid agencies were handing out free food.”

All this was an ordeal because as a black American, Richburg writes, “when I see these nameless, faceless, anonymous bodies washing over a waterfall or piled up on the back of trucks, what I see most is that they look like me.”

We must all sympathise. How can millions of Afro-Americans feel when they see this sort of thing, even cleaned up and sanitized and moralized to accord with mass media expectations, on the evening news? How does the young woman I recall meeting as a student at Columbia, and who became an industrial chemist, feel about what she sees? Or the talented young man from the Caribbean who was making a career for himself in French literature: how can he feel today? I suppose the three of us do the same thing—change the channel as quickly as possible so we don’t have to see it at all.

For roughly fifty years African history and culture has been the province of uplifting idealistic mythomania, part of it from socialist ideologues who imagined that a new era and a new kind of African socialism were being pioneered in places like Tanzania, part of it the work of the academic Afrocentrist industry. Tanzania’s “new socialism” involved rural collectivisation that looked all too like the old socialism in the Soviet Union, brought calamitous falls in agricultural output, and saw the destruction of traditional tribal life and the pauperisation of tens of thousands. Afrocentrist mythologizing itself is a huge field which has been studied and analysed with exemplary patience and detachment by Stephen Howe: his Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (Verso 1998) presents a scholarly treatment of this controversial topic of the highest order.

He notes at the outset that Afrocentrism comes in two versions—weak and strong. In its weak version it may “mean little more than an emphasis on shared African origins among all ‘black’ people, taking a pride in those origins and an interest in African history and culture”, and is fairly innocuous. In its strong version “it provides a direct analogue to the extreme forms of cultural nationalism, premised on beliefs about race, which flourished in nineteenth-century Europe.” Like German and Serbian ethnonationalism, “strong Afrocentrism is accompanied by a body of racial pseudo-science, in this case much of it centred on grotesque ideas about the skin-coloring chemical melanin.” It has produced an orgy of mythography, of feel-good pseudo-scholarship utterly useless as a guide to Africa or its people today.

As one crisis after another assails us, now is surely the time for everyone to come to their senses. Readers anxious to know about the pre-independence colonial world might usefully start with Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960, five volumes from the Cambridge University Press edited by Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan and published between 1969 and 1975. Volume Three contains twelve essays on African traditional societies by leading anthropologists of the day. Volume Four is on the economics of colonialism. Volume Five is a 500-page “Bibliographic Guide to Colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa”. This annotates a wide range of materials in history, law, anthropology, economics, and geography, most significant work up until 1973 being included. Later economic history worth looking at can be found in the chapter ‘The Africans’ in Thomas Sowell’s 1998 Conquests and Cultures, a book which also discusses the post-1960 African leaders and their disastrous policies, Kwame Nkrumah among them.

Painful cultural facts

But whatever the past can teach us, we still have to come back to the present situation and the decline into genocidal mayhem of one country after another—and must also decide what we should do. Plainly, the efforts of various agencies such as Amnesty International and Médecins sans Frontières should be encouraged. Relief should be provided where practicable and effective, especially where it can be seen to be so.

The generous impulses of western middle classes, however misled they may often be, are not to be discouraged or dismissed. Doubtless there are even some places where the political situation warrants direct government-to-government help: one wishes there were more men like Ahmed Diraige around to deal with. But pressure on the West by the international African diplomatic bureaucracy, led by Kofi Annan, to define the entire continent of Africa as deserving the permanent, official, mendicant status of a ward of the UN or the “international community”, a vast region to be economically supported by the West into the indefinite future, and to be militarily pacified by western troops whenever and wherever it is incapable of pacifying itself—this should be strongly resisted.

The disagreeable fact must also be faced that in Africa life has always been cheap, that extraordinary cruelties have been all too common, and that anything even vaguely resembling notions of human rights in its traditional societies were entirely unknown. Events of the kind reported each month or so in the media, and described in the story by Damon Galgut printed in Prospect magazine, are alas not exceptional when seen in the context of African cultural history as a whole. Two examples from the 19th century are printed below as appendices. These describe what visitors saw in two different African kingdoms in widely separated parts of the continent—the Bemba of north-eastern Tanzania, and Benin in West Africa. They don’t make pleasant reading—they are horrible—but perhaps a sharp reality check may be useful.

The Bemba, according to Gann and Duignan in Burden of Empire (140-141), “supplemented their income by raiding, and in time terrorized all the tribes on the boundary of their kingdom. Differences in living standards between Bemba noblemen and commoners were not great, yet the Bemba developed an exceptionally rigidly organized state and a very violent form of rule”. Of Benin they say that “the more centralized forms of African kingships commonly had a grim and bloody side to their makeup which is sometimes ignored by modern African historiography. In 1897 the British occupied Benin in Nigeria. They found a gruesome charnel house, a kind of small-scale Belsen”. These grim documents provide, from a century ago, a useful perspective on modern horrors.

Excerpts from the report of the 1897 British expedition can be read in Great Benin, Its Customs, Art and Horrors, by H. Ling Roth. This was first published in 1903. Roth was an anthropologist who also wrote about the peasantry of Eastern Russia, about the Tasmanian Aborigines, and about northern Borneo. His book was reprinted in facsimile by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1968, with 275 illustrations, and provides one of the few accessible accounts of the situation in 1897 in Benin. It is possible that the scale of the human sacrifices witnessed by the incoming soldiery had been increased by fear of their own arrival, and had been adopted as a defensive measure to prevent it. But if so, what the troops witnessed was still only normal practice carried to excess.

Appendix one: the Bemba

“In nearly every village are to be seen men and women whose eyes have been gouged out; the removal of one eye and one hand is hardly worthy of remark. Men and women are seen whose ears, nose and lips have been sliced off and both hands amputated. The cutting off of breasts of women has been extensively practised as a punishment for adultery but … some of the victims … are mere children … Indeed these mutilations were inflicted with the utmost callousness; every chief for instance has a retinue of good singers and drummers who invariably have their eyes gouged out to prevent them running away.”

Appendix two: Benin

“Altars covered with streams of dried human blood, the stench of which was awful … huge pits, forty to fifty feet deep, were found filled with human bodies, dead and dying, and a few wretched captives were rescued alive … everywhere sacrificial trees on which were the corpses of the latest victims—everywhere, on each path, were newly sacrificed corpses. On the principal sacrificial tree, facing the main gate of the King’s Compound, there were two crucified bodies, at the foot of the tree seventeen newly decapitated bodies and forty-three more in various stages of decomposition. On another tree a wretched woman was found crucified, whilst at its foot were four more decapitated bodies. To the westward of the King’s house was a large open space, about three hundred yards in length, simply covered with the remains of some hundreds of human sacrifices in all stages of decomposition. The same sights were met with all over the city.”

“The government of Ethiopia is establishing a social and economic system that will produce starving people for generations to come”. — Cultural Survival, Inc. 1986

Do I know your face from somewhere—the emaciated child with the sorrowful haunted eyes? Didn’t we meet in 1984? Of course it can’t possibly be the same child, who must have perished in one of those communist “resettlement” camps where peasants died in tens of thousands, yet the picture is almost indistinguishable from one circulated at the height of the famine twenty years ago. Today no less than 1,119 NGOs operate in Ethiopia (that’s the official 2005 figure from its own Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Has nothing changed?

And there’s something else too which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to briskly write out a check for $100 and send it to my charity of choice. This country is Ethiopia—not Mali or Uganda or Mozambique; and isn’t Ethiopia supposed to be historically a very different place? We all know that elsewhere many African peoples experienced long years of imperial subjection, and there the Aid Game and the Blame Game might be at least notionally coupled. But in Ethiopia, aside from a brief Italian episode between 1936 and 1941, there was no serious colonial occupation on which its present dismal condition can be blamed: “Unique among African countries, the ancient Ethiopian monarchy maintained its freedom from colonial rule…” This is the opening sentence of the The World Factbook entry; but it could be from any number of sources.

So if Ethiopia’s background is different why does it look the same? Why are the images of starving children like those from so many other parts of Africa? Why does it need 1,119 charities to look after its people? Can it be that its misery is largely self-inflicted, that its ruling class has for many years suffered from delusions of grandeur, and that what is called “maintaining its freedom” in fact meant maintaining imperial rule over scores of poor and oppressed ethnic groups; that the dominant Amhara elite has always been too proud to work, too arrogant to admit its faults, couldn’t care less whether the stricken and the doomed in famine camps live or die, and is happy to have westerners with tear-stained cheeks attending to them; that the “ancient Ethiopian monarchy” was a Johnny-come-lately affair, that the title of “Emperor” was misapplied, and that only western romantics who love crowns and feudal trappings—however tacky and absurd—could have taken it seriously in the first place?

Romantic misunderstandings

Whether you start with the portrayals to be found in Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief and Waugh in Abyssinia, or go back four hundred years to a much earlier epoch, there is an inescapably striking contrast between the idealised Abyssinia (which Waugh satirised) and the realities described by candid observers on the ground. Whole centuries of wishful thinking went into the legend of Prester John, for example, “one of the most persistent fantasies of the Middle Ages” according to a recent historian, a story “invented to shore up religious morale in a time of frailty, then given new impetus by a literary hoax.”

From the account supplied in Richard Hall’s Empires of the Monsoon the fantasy of Prester John began around 1144, when a tale was circulated about a Christian kingdom somewhere in the East. In the build-up to the Second Crusade of 1147, and with the whole crusading enterprise in doubt, it was reassuring to think that distant co-religionists might be available for help when needed. Soon after this came “a masterpiece of invention”—possibly concocted by Archbishop Christian of Mainz—a letter reporting that in Prester John’s fabulous domain there were “crystal waters, great caches of precious stones and forests of pepper trees. On a mountain of fire, salamanders spin threads for the precious royal garments. Prester John speaks of his beautiful wives, and of how he limits his congress with them to only four times a year; for the rest of the time he sleeps on a ‘cold bed of sapphire’ to subdue his lust”.

Exactly where that cold bed of sapphire was supposedly located remained for a long time obscure, though it eventually shifted from the East to Africa. And in the early 14th century a Dominican priest named Jordanus, who had vainly sought for Prester John in India, decided Ethiopia was a better bet. “Of Ethiopia, I say that it is a very great land, and very hot. There are many monsters there, such as gryphons that guard the golden mountains… The lord of that country I believe to be more potent than any man in the world, and richer in gold and silver and in precious stones. He is said to have under him 52 kings.”

But a Portuguese embassy sent to visit Prester John in 1520 was less impressed by both the land and its inhabitants:

They are a poor civil people with miserable clothes, and they come into the water uncovered, a black, tall people with thick matted locks, which from their birth they neither cut nor comb, so that they wear their hair like a lump of wool, and they carry pointed oiled sticks with which they scratch the vermin which crawl beneath, because they cannot reach their scalps with their fingers, and scratching their heads is their sole occupation.

No doubt this is somewhat severe: even in Ethiopia in 1520 men could scarcely live by scratching their heads alone. Nevertheless, similar reports from a very acute observer 400 years later, of members of the Ethiopian ruling class in the 1930s sitting idly around waiting for others to do things for them, suggest that the picture it offers is by no means fanciful, and it does help to put things in perspective.

Delusions of grandeur

Bernard Shaw said somewhere that “Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.” Perhaps this is so. But there is nothing to suggest that even the most grandiose titles ever embarrassed the late Emperor Haile Selassie, Lion of Judah and King of Kings, or his like-minded Amhara progeny, and the reason for his honorific self-congratulation would have been immediately obvious to Shaw. It is the deep sense of insecurity that afflicts the nouveau riche—nouveau riche royalty included—for in Ethiopia the uncertain legitimacy of a new aristocracy was at the heart of the problem. The current “empire” with its “emperor” and “ancestral throne” only dated from 1889, the year when a local princeling named Menelik embarked on the conquest of the rest of Abyssinia, inspired by the old title King of Kings…

“We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim…”

This of course is just Evelyn Waugh’s parody of imperial titular pretension under Haile Selassie, dating from 1932, and perhaps apologies are due for including it here. Yet it sounds very like the original; while nothing in Black Mischief could approach the absurdity of the self-proclaimed titles and offices later piled on Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Marxist boss of the country after Haile Selassie was strangled by Mengistu’s minions in 1974. This close ally of Moscow, a man whose collectivization projects turned whole provinces of his country into a wasteland and who starved to death up to a million people, expected to be introduced as follows:

Strength of Mary Mengistu, Chairman of the Military Council of the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia, Secretary General of the Council of Peasants and Workers of Ethiopia, Chief of staff of the Air and Land Forces, General in Command of the Bureau for Armed Struggle against Imperialist Aggression in Tigré and Eritrea, Head of the Security Advisory Committee.

What does all this puffery—these advertisements by a dictator for himself—ominously signify? In Ethiopia especially? Aside from anything else they indicate a strong desire to put the furthest possible distance between the ruler and the common man. Like his predecessor Haile Selassie, the Marxist Mengistu Haile Mariam is letting you know that he is an uncommon man, and when his terrified underlings insisted on repeating this nomenclatural mish-mash over and over on the one and only state television channel, they were emphasizing that Mengistu, its new communist emperor, was a leader above the ordinary in human affairs.

So far above, in fact, that he no longer understood the world around him. A Red Cross doctor who wrote about the Ethiopian famine of 1984 provides an unforgettable picture of Mengistu and his entourage helicoptering into a town in Wollo province on an inspection tour of the death camps he had himself created. Here the Chairman of the Military Council of the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia was shown his handiwork—a tentful of dying children. It is possible that not since Marie Antoinette’s legendary remarks about letting the masses eat cake had anyone heard such tasteless comments.

Mengistu looked at the children—shrivelled, skeletal, and dying simply from lack of food—and said to the doctor: “Why don’t you give them all blood transfusions?”

The doctor and author to whom the question was addressed, Myles F. Harris, commented later in his book Breakfast in Hell: “A unit of blood cost one hundred dollars, enough to feed all the children in the tent for a month. The nearest blood bank was in the capital and, besides, produced only enough blood for one person in every thousand in the country. In a radius of two hundred miles from where Mengistu stood there were eight million people starving to death.”

Communist collectivization

On March 4, 1975, the Marxist Dergue nationalised all rural land in Ethiopia. (The “Dergue” was the name of the controlling communist directorate. It means simply “committee”. RS) “All land to the tillers!” had been Lenin’s slogan in 1917, and there was a similar attempt to whip up enthusiasm for the collectivist goals of Addis Ababa. But as Paul B. Henze explained in his 1986 account of communism in Ethiopia, the situation there was very different from Russia. In the African case there were a variety of systems of land tenure throughout the country, and not only that, the country people were generally happy with the way things were. Ethiopia’s “peasants did not need to be placated or to have their demands satisfied. They had, with rare exceptions, been passive onlookers during the revolutionary process.”

Now they were allocated plots for their own purposes; but they had only the use of this land, and no title to it. Henze writes that they were also forbidden to buy or rent additional land or to employ others to work for them. But how was this to be enforced? “Peasant associations” were organised, and these were supposed to serve as the primary instrument to persuade, police, and enforce the process of collectivization in the countryside. “Though tenancy was abolished, all peasants became in effect tenants of the socialist state”.

What followed was a hideous caricature of Soviet collectivization in the 1930s, and soon led to the complete breakdown of agricultural production. Anyone interested should obtain Politics and the Ethiopian Famine: 1984–1985, by Jason W. Clay and Bonnie K. Holcomb, a book which not only describes the whole dreadful business with its forced seizures of grain and livestock, the compulsory sale of grain to the state at below cost, and then, as people began to starve, the deportation of millions to places where many died on arrival—it also provides numerous direct statements from the victims themselves.

On the forced sale of grain to the state:

We were forced to pay tax in a secret way by selling to the government 50 kg of grain for E$25. The same amount that the Agricultural Marketing Corporation (AMC) buys from us for E$25 can be sold for E$80 to the town population. We do not know what the government does with the grain of the AMC, but we heard that it is for the town population of Addis Ababa and Asmara who can afford to pay a high price.

On reprisals against peasants who resist the state:

The army took 500 cows and oxen from my village, they burned people’s houses and took honey, butter, and anything made of leather. They even took old clothes. They didn’t bother to carry the grain; they just burned it. The army burned my grain in 1983 and they took 24 tins of honey which were worth E$7 each… In 1982 the army came through our village and forced me to pay E$400. I had to borrow the money from a neighbor. Because of the money that I had to pay the army and the grain that they burned I had to sell all my animals in 1984. Now I have nothing. That’s why I am here.

On endless political indoctrination meetings:

During the meetings the weeds take over the crops and the wild pigs finish the rest later while we are forced to sit in the peasant association meetings, our wives sit in women’s association meetings, and the children sit in youth association meetings… The government is the friend of the pigs and monkeys. It gives them free access to the fields while we sit imprisoned in useless harangues about paying more tax out of a crop that is being eaten by wild animals while we talk… They should put the baboons in the meetings and let us go to farm the fields. Then we could eat and get fat like the animals do.

Those rounded up for resettlement far from their homes were kept in holding camps where resisters were subject to beating with rifle butts, running and crawling over thorns, rape, and killing. Upon first seeing the camp where he was to be resettled, a peasant said:

When I saw Asosa I thought about committing suicide; I don’t understand much about government matters, but I thought it would be better to die than to live under such a government.

The ruling class pattern

But surely this Marxist government represented a gross aberration in Ethiopian history? Surely nothing like this had been seen before—its policies attributable, perhaps, to the over-enthusiasm of radical intellectuals, to their understandable eagerness for change, to the rigidity of government cadres, to the need to impress their Soviet masters that something was being done, to haste, to poor planning, etc. It couldn’t possibly reflect a deep and endemic Amhara ruling class contempt for the countryside and its people.

If only that were so. What Clay and Holcomb make amply clear in their opening discussion is that the original imperial conquests by Menelik in the 19th century—which “were brutal and involved much killing, property destruction, looting, and abduction of slaves”—were also accompanied by a “destruction of the agricultural base, so extensive in some Oromo and Sidama regions that severe famines followed the military campaigns”. (CH, p14)

Menelik changed land tenure throughout the conquered areas. He declared all conquered peoples his subjects and all land the property of the crown. These decrees, upheld by the military, laid the foundation for the relations of production within the empire and set the stage for the conflict between nations that continues today. (ie, in 1986)

Soldiers from Abyssinia who helped win the military campaigns… were rewarded for their role in state building with grants of land in the conquered regions, as well as the right to use subjugated indigenous peoples as slaves to fulfil labor requirements… Local elites from the conquered populations who collaborated with the conquering power during the formation of the new political system were also given land-use rights in return for their service to the Abyssinian, now Ethiopian, emperor. They could not, however, pass these rights on to their children.”

Land tenure in the south was transformed from a system in which land was centrally allocated by indigenous authorities or regional representatives to one in which most residents became sharecroppers or serfs who were expected to give most of their crops to resident and visiting landlords in addition to other payments and obligations in service or in kind. These northern (ie, Amhara) landlords also served as tax collectors, judges, and functionaries in the state administration of the empire-cum-state.

Throughout the conquered areas in the south the standard of living plummeted. Most new tenants had Abyssinian landlords, many of whom were infamous for their harsh treatment of local people from whom they were to wrest their livelihood. Some were such poor farm managers that large numbers of tenants had to be sold as slaves in order to pay their debts or to acquire currency.

Evelyn Waugh’s report

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. From this we appear to be dealing with a cultural pattern that is profoundly Ethiopian in origin and character, that periodically recurs, and that owes nothing whatever to the outside world. It is the culture of an arrogant ethnic master-class determined to protect its privileges, a class just as contemptuous of the scattered “lesser breeds” within the imperium as the contempt of Khartoum for its southern peoples in neighboring Sudan. In any case, the grim nature and manifold failings of Ethiopia were vividly set down by a rather more distinguished writer than myself 70 years ago. In Waugh in Abyssinia, referring to Menelik and his successors, Evelyn Waugh wrote that in contrast to the generally benevolent consequences of empire elsewhere, Ethiopia’s domestic imperialism was

devoid of a single redeeming element… The Abyssinians had nothing to give their subject peoples, nothing to teach them. They brought no crafts or knowledge, no new system of agriculture, drainage or roadmaking, no medicine or hygiene, no higher political organisation, no superiority except in their magazine rifles and belts of cartridges.

They built nothing; they squatted in the villages in the thatched huts of the conquered people, dirty, idle and domineering, burning the timber, devouring the crops, taxing the meagre stream of commerce that seeped in from outside, enslaving the people.

It was not, as in the early days of the Belgian Congo, that bad men with too much power, too far from supervision, were yielding to appetites of which their own people denied them satisfaction. The Abyssinians imposed what was, by its nature, a deadly and hopeless system…

Waugh went on to describe a westernizing reform movement of the 1920s and 1930s among the more educated younger generation, but he regarded it as shallow, imitative, and too beholden to a thoroughly despicable ruling class ever to have much ameliorative effect:

Even in the Jeunesse d’Ethiopie itself there was little real desire for change; a weekly visit to the cinema, a taste for whisky, toothbrush moustaches in place of the traditional and imposing beards, patent leather shoes and a passable dexterity with fork and spoon were the Western innovations that these young men relished; these, and a safe climb to eminence behind the broad, oxlike backs of the hereditary aristocracy.

Perhaps the Emperor himself thought of something more ambitious; perhaps a handful of his circle vaguely shared his thoughts; but the governing class as a whole were immoveable. Something, it was realised, had to be done to ensure the support of the mysterious, remote, incalculably powerful organization at Geneva of which Abyssinia had become a part (ie, the League of Nations), something on paper, neatly typewritten in French and English.

Tricking the European was a national craft; evading issues, promising without the intention of fulfilment, tricking the paid foreign advisers, tricking the legations, tricking the visiting international committees—these were the ways by which Abyssinia had survived and prospered. (Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, 25-27. Longmans, 1936)

The situation now

And unless I’m mistaken, tricking visiting foreign advisers, evading issues, making promises never to be fulfilled—these are still the secretive and devious ways Ethiopia survives, even if it can hardly be said to prosper. Recently, in the same week that the usual starving child was being shamelessly exhibited for fundraising on TV, there was an election in which Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s party, The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (little more than a Marxist factional spin-off of the Dergue) was thoroughly trounced.

Afterwards the Ethiopian premier launched a crackdown on all opposition. According to the LA Times the violent clashes that took place left 36 dead, while “as many as 4,000 people, including journalists, human rights investigators and members of opposition parties, were arrested in massive government sweeps. A newly elected opposition lawmaker, allegedly shot by police, was among the dead.” This of course was quickly followed by demands that Western governments send in troops to sort out the mess.

No—all in all I don’t think I’ll be writing a check for one of Ethiopia’s 1,119 NGOs. Not this time. Not even to help the Second Coming of Bob Geldof. Perhaps never. Because Ethiopia is indeed a different place and a different case. Of Sudan I wrote last December that despite vicious government policies “the front-line workers of the humanitarian agencies must of course be helped to do all in their immediate power for the stricken and the doomed—relieve distress, minister to the sick, displaced, and dying, and save those it is possible to save.” And I still believe that.

But in the case of Ethiopia I frankly don’t know. Last year the BBC reported that in the past 20 years “Ethiopia has received more relief aid than any other country on earth”, that the average income of $190 in 1984 had by 2004 fallen to $108, that food production per head had fallen from 450 kgs in 1984/5 to 140 kgs in 2002/3, and that about six million Ethiopians now have to be annually fed by the outside world.

And the basic reason for this situation is starkly clear. The Dergue may have gone, but a collection of like-minded doctrinaire Marxists remain in control. The original disastrous Soviet development and nationalities policies have never been abandoned—quite the reverse. Nor has the current communist directorate cancelled the nationalisation of land. All land belongs to the state, and 60% of the population lives on starvation plots so small that 7 out of 8 people must survive as subsistence farmers. A London conference last November under the auspices of the Royal African Society, addressed by the editor of the Journal of Modern African Studies, Christopher Clapham, was told that the government remains as centralized and as secretive as ever, and that the ideological assumptions of those in control are indistinguishable from those of the Dergue in 1984-85.

So if Ethiopia’s purgatory is self-created; if after twenty years things are clearly worse; if 1,119 NGOs have not prevented this—what possible sense is there in private citizens in the West throwing good money after bad? My heart is moved; but my checkbook is untouched. And it is likely to stay that way until I see more evidence that those who run the country are doing something useful with the billions they have already received, and show the energy, the political capacity, the economic understanding, and the moral will to drag Ethiopia out of the mire themselves.