Mende Nazer

The movie I am Slave is as good as the book, from scenes of wild destruction as Arab horsemen seize 12-year-old Mende Nazer from her home in the Nuba Mountains, to the slave market in Khartoum, to her days of captivity in London. The story of a plucky young woman breaking away from years of Sudanese servitude to recreate herself as a free UK citizen is inspiring: we wish her well. It also provides a dramatic glimpse of one of the stranger fruits of British multiculturalism — a slave-trade that has brought hundreds of captive African youngsters into the land of William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mende_Nazer)

This historic development is very odd. In fact it is so odd that it deserves the attention of someone who has thought long and hard about slavery, a person of broad culture and widely read, and ideally both of African background and a moral philosopher too. With such requirements it might seem hard to imagine anyone likely to qualify — hard even to know where to look. Yet there’s a man in the USA who exactly fills the bill: Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah. Born in London in 1954 before growing up in Ghana, Professor Appiah is a well-known Cambridge-educated figure who has in the past “published widely in African and African-American literary and cultural studies,” but is now, we are told, mainly concerned with “the philosophical foundations of liberalism” and “the connection between theory and practice in moral life.”

The Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Appiah is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations Democracy Fund, is currently Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies, and even a cursory look at his long list of achievements reveals a serious mover and shaker in the U.S. liberal establishment today.  (http://appiah.net/biography/)

Slavery in theory and practice

Originally from Ghana, now focused on “the connection between theory and practice in moral life”, could anyone be more suitable for bridging the gap between surreptitiously smuggled African slave-children and higher academic thought? If anyone can explain to the Mende Nazers of the world what it is that happened to them so violently and painfully in Africa, and why it is still happening to African children today, surely Kwame A. Appiah is the man. Though in the 2007 book Buying Freedom one soon discovers that the theory and practice of liberating slaves is no simple matter. Professor Appiah co-authored the Introduction, and his own essay toward the end — “What’s Wrong with Slavery?” — is one of a dozen contributions mainly concerned with the moral and economic perplexities of redeeming slaves by paying cash to slave-traders.

Those like Baroness Cox, in the UK, who forthrightly accept the practice, are opposed by others who claim that paying cash drives up the price of slaves, and increases slave-raiding. Paying cash should have that effect in theory, but whether it really does no-one is sure. Buying Freedom is a book with economic articles about the mathematics of “efficient competitive equilibrium,” on the one hand, and contributions from moral philosophers using words like “deontology” and “consequentialism” on the other. One might hope that despite the fancy vocabulary there’s something here to help Africa’s slaves. But that is uncertain. Deontologically speaking, it seems we are duty bound to buy a slave’s freedom if we can; though some argue that this “commodifies” the human subject, while others point to a whole cascade of undesirable unintended effects. A prudent man might just leave his hands in his pockets and keep walking.

As for Appiah’s own contribution, with its provocative title, we learn that as a boy in Ghana he was at first told very little about the importance of slave trading to the traditional Asante (Ashanti) economy. Only later did he learn that “the suppression of the slave trade began the period of Asante imperial decline, which was to end with final conquest by the British at the start of the twentieth century.” What he calls “the central moral questions” about liberating slaves are the author’s main concern, and he agrees that freedom comes first. But according to Appiah “freedom is not enough”. After the act of liberation we also have a duty to guarantee every freed slave respect, self-esteem, and dignity. While these are all good things, they seem to reflect the idealistic world of academic philosophy rather than the needs of actual slaves themselves. You don’t read much of Mende Nazer’s story without realizing that her own priority was liberty — it’s right there in the title of the successful 2010 stage play about her life: “Slave: A Question of Freedom.”

*    *    *

After this Appiah goes off on a long divagation about the relative status of different kinds of Asante slaves. It seems there were five degrees of enslavement in the Asante Empire, hierarchy being the leading feature of a social milieu where minute grades of status make the Russian nomenklatura seem half-hearted. It’s hard to know exactly what Appiah makes of this fact. Does he admire the overall complexity of the social system as if complexity were good in itself? Or regard an elaborate bureaucracy as something prestigious? Not all students of government feel this way. The world of the old-time Asante he describes is in fact a classical system of aristocratic rank and authority where everyone has a place and everyone is expected to keep it — a quasi-medieval system where what we might call “respect on demand” is vigorously enforced.

Appiah himself emphasizes that if you were lucky enough to be a Grade One Slave you couldn’t be sold, which is good. Then he describes another degree in which the slave was really a kind of pawn — “but then a pawn was not strictly a possession either”, going on to claim that the relationship between slave and slave owner, though unequal, was better seen as “reciprocal” and that the slave had clear rights against his master. Only at the end of what reads like the usual anthropological apologia do we descend to the inglorious level of the Grade Four and Grade Five Slaves, war captives and criminals whose fate was to be used for human sacrifice — though they might have to wait some weeks cooling their heels “until such time as it was deemed religiously auspicious to kill them.”

Human sacrifice

Latinate English is always useful for neutralising disagreeable facts, or veiling ugly realities, and the phrase “religiously auspicious” is a good example of this. In “What’s Wrong With Slavery?” Professor Appiah smoothly invites us to contemplate a world where sacrificial slaves uncomplainingly accept their fate as little more than a social convention. The scene portrayed is calm, formal, orderly, and safely ritualised. With a little imagination you might even be able to hear the victim imploring the executioner, “if His Majesty deems it religiously auspicious please take my head off now — delay is unnecessary.” Yet visitors to the region in days gone by (days as recent as the year 1900 in Appiah’s Ghana) suggest it wasn’t quite like that in the violent kingdoms of old West Africa, where capital punishment was a casual event and severed heads were part of the everyday scene.

In the nearby kingdom of Dahomey, in 1772, Robert Norris found the viceroy passing sentence on a woman who had accidentally started a fire in the market. “I requested that her life might be spared”, wrote Norris, and offered to purchase her as a slave. But the king had firmly made up his mind. Her head was to be “cut off and fixed upon a stake.” The victim’s small daughter ran up to her at this point, unaware of her mother’s situation, causing a brief diversion before the distressed woman was bludgeoned to death.

Also unmentioned by Professor Appiah are the disagreeable preliminaries Thomas Bowdich described. Bowdich was in the Asante kingdom for five months in 1817 and is usually regarded as a reliable, accurate, and racially unbiased observer. He was favourably impressed by much that he saw — the majestic deportment of the Asante king, the color and magnificence of ceremonial life, the elegance of the women, and a style of dancing where “the man encircles the woman with a piece of silk…supports her round the waist, receives her elbows in the palms of his hands,” the two then performing “a variety of figures approximating, with the time and movement, very close to the waltz.”

Less attractive were the sacrifices immediately following. “The drums announced the sacrifice of the victims… The executioners wrangled and struggled for the office: the nearest executioner snatched the sword from the others, the right hand of the victim was then lopped off, he was thrown down, and his head was sawed rather than cut off.” Bowdich writes of a typical victim en route to execution that “His hands were pinioned behind him, a knife was passed through his cheeks, to which his lips were noosed like the figure of 8; one ear was cut off and carried before him, the other hung to his head by a small bit of skin; there were several gashes in his back, and a knife thrust under each shoulder blade; he was led with a cord passed through his nose…the feeling this horrid barbarity excited must be imagined.”

Appiah’s quasi-ethnographic depiction of traditional Asante slavery, with sacrifices culturally authorised and occurring only when “religiously auspicious,” shows, some might say, a proper scholarly detachment. And perhaps it does. But it also shows an unreal legalism where forms are mistaken for facts. When he tells us that reciprocity prevailed and that the luckier slaves even had “rights” against their owners, you would never guess that he is talking about a preliterate society without books, or writing, or written laws, or constitutional guarantees; a world with no independent judiciary, and no rational adversarial procedures for obtaining and testing evidence (though plunging the accused’s hand into boiling oil was thought a useful test); a world — if truth be told — perpetually subject to the whims and passions of powerful chiefs who ruled as much by terror as by consent. In the benign environment of Princeton it may seem plausible that the formal rights of West African slaves against their owners might actually have been enforceable. But you wouldn’t want to push your luck. My guess is that an Asante slave who stood on his rights would not be standing long.

“Moral revolutions” and slavery

According to the title of a recent book by the amiable Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal we live in The Age of Empathy, something he attributes to our warmly social hominid instincts. Also just published is a book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, arguing that the modern era has been one of moral progress accompanied by a steady decline in violence. It seems that what Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process” is nowadays on many minds, and Kwame A. Appiah’s 2010 book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, might be seen as broadly in the same vein. Taking an idiosyncratic view of moral and social progress, he sees national and social honor playing a key role in the outlawing of the duel, in the abandonment of Chinese foot-binding, in the abolition of slavery, and in the ongoing struggle by enlightened men and women in Islamic lands against the horror of “honor killings”. All these changes are what he calls “moral revolutions.”

Here we are only concerned with the slavery issue and Appiah’s treatment in Chapter Three, “Suppressing Atlantic Slavery” — a title that reveals a lot. Bear in mind that we’re dealing here with a persistent African problem, wondering how a prominent American liberal trying to bring theory and practice together might have something useful to tell a woman like Mende Nazer about how and why she was enslaved in the early 1990s. The judiciously inserted “Atlantic” however makes it clear that the endemic African slavery that led to her ordeal in Khartoum, and then saw her trafficked to England, is not on the author’s agenda. Regarding slavery his eyes are firmly on the past.

Nor does this moral philosopher feel obliged to comment on the inexplicably violent and cruel attitude to life and limb still found in many parts of the continent, something as grossly visible in the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army as in the sickening events shown in the 2008 French docudrama Johnny Mad Dog. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/22/johnny-mad-dog-review) Then when he defines slavery as “the subordination of one race by another”, entailing “the systematic subjection of black people to dishonour”, a self-serving assumption is exposed. It appears that the centuries-old enslavement of black people by black people, among the very West African societies he grew up in and presumably knows best — the same West African societies that started the “Atlantic” slave trade on its hideous course back in the 15^th century — will not be discussed.

On not being dissed

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen is a curious book, hard to make sense of unless one radically changes the title. Appiah says he found the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend “fascinating” and that’s where he got the word revolution from. Lots of people have been fascinated by the word revolution — many still are — but it is not always appropriate, and is in this case downright misleading. The end of dueling, the end of foot-binding in China, the abolition of slavery, came from the incremental development of moral sentiments and legal reforms, as indeed is perfectly obvious from what Appiah writes about them himself. In fact the word revolution adds nothing but a false glamor to his argument. As for what we now see in Islamic lands regarding “honor killings”, the agonizingly slow process by which large male populations between Damascus and Kabul are discouraged from raping and murdering young women is so far from being “revolutionary” that one wonders how any thoughtful man could use the term.

But it is the word “honor” that is most confusing here. Historically it often denoted noble sentiments rather than ignoble, acts and feelings toward the courageous end of the semantic spectrum. But right from the first it is clear that this is a book more about fear than about courage, more about chronic status anxiety than about positive and helpful beliefs, and that a better title might be Face-Saving: an Aspect of Moral Conduct — or more to the psychological point, The Importance of Not Being Dissed.

In a definitive statement on page 175 he writes, “Here, then, is the picture: Having honor means being entitled to respect. As a result, if you want to know whether a society has a concern with honor, look first to see whether people there think anyone has a right to be treated with respect.” Surely most cultures treat most of their law-abiding members most of the time with respect. But indiscriminate respect is withheld because the distinction between good and bad behavior is the foundation of any social order at all. Respect is accorded when deserved; esteem and dignity are won when socially acknowledged. That is how Mende Nazer’s Nuba in the Sudan order their lives, as do hundreds of tribal peoples. That is also how modern civil society allows free individuals to autonomously win distinction — autonomy, by the way, being a major theme in much of Appiah’s writing. But what he is on about here is something else, a kind of ethical overreach to be enforced by a benevolent state. In the utopia he envisages, respect, dignity, and esteem are to be incorporated into a set of legal entitlements defined as political rights.

The contrast between the academic view and the ex-slave’s view is illuminating. While Appiah and others with status grievances appear to require state intervention (for unless respect on demand is made mandatory how exactly is it to be achieved?) you can’t see this keeping Mende Nazer awake at night. A figure of great resource and unmistakable distinction, she needs nobody else to claim respect or dignity on her behalf. Appiah has been anxious to let us know his connections with the Kumasi upper crust of high chiefs and grandly titled kings. It seems to be this aristocracy he feels most comfortable with. I can’t help wondering if he might have obtained a more realistic view of the ordinary human lot by spending some time, like Mende Nazer, as a slave.

“Morality is not enough”

The author of The Honor Code has written novels, and one way of trying to make sense of his book is to regard it as a highly digressive intellectual roman à thèse. The thesis is that “honor” is just as important in moral conduct as firm convictions about right and wrong, and should be preferred to both Christian commandments and Kantian imperatives. Appiah notes on page 181 that Kant himself said that honor “is not worthy of the highest respect, even where it happens to coincide with the common interest and with duty.” Appiah disagrees, but Kant is surely right. The reason being that honor is fundamentally atavistic, a part of our competitive animal nature shared with rutting stags and bellowing elephant seals. For that unhappy reason we find that right across the range of zoological behavior it is inseparably associated with bloodshed and aggression. A psychological aspect of defensive pride, it is often found with unmanageable levels of amour propre, and that’s why it erupts in violence nearly everywhere. In human affairs honor belongs in the touchy, unstable, and tumultuous world of the “dissed”, as they resentfully look for signs of not receiving the respect that is their due.

We may agree that honor is a moving force that prompts men to act, and that can be harnessed to moral goals. But it is entirely relativistic, and what it honors is sometimes very ugly indeed. The honor of a camorra boss in Naples may lead him to massacre an innocent family; the honor of an Islamic father may lead him to kill his own daughter; the honor of the Crips may require them to slaughter a bunch of rival Bloods at the smallest sign they’ve been “dissed”. From which the sensible conclusion is surely that honor is largely indifferent to moral conduct per se — other perhaps than the deeply ambiguous virtue of “solidarity” shared by tribes, sects, cricket teams, medieval nobility, and American street gangs. Indeed, one is bound to point out to Professor Appiah, in Princeton, that the most conspicuous sociological example close at hand is in Los Angeles, where honor and a fierce determination not to be dissed leaves the streets in some areas daily stained with gore. If you want to see the living social universe of honor, where “morality is not enough” and where the passion for face-saving goes perpetually unassuaged, the territory of the Bloods and the Crips is where to look.

Not that Appiah is unaware of the conflict between a safe social morality and his theory. Far from it. Much of The Honor Code can be read as a perverse intellectual struggle between two schemes of moral guidance that he well knows are often opposed. Item: “Honor and morality are separate systems: they can be aligned… but they can easily pull in opposite directions”… Item: “Both recognition respect and esteem can be distributed by honor codes without any regard for morality…” Item: in Pakistan we are bound to “confront one of the dark sides of honor”. And so on. But although on one page he can be found freely admitting the paradoxes within his thesis he invariably manages to ignore them on the next. An entire chapter on Islamic “honor killings” is presented, with gratuitously long novelistic sections about rape, violence, murder, and “murderous families”, all in the name of honor, without it seeming to be seriously understood, amidst all the confusion, that the implication of the very usage itself — “honor killings” — represents not merely “the dark side” of the phenomenon, it tends to make an oxymoronic absurdity of the general argument.

How did Appiah’s moral revolutions really happen?

The phrasing of Appiah’s title — The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen — implies universality. Honor is presented as a psychological constant in human affairs, and it follows from this that its unvarying action must also produce, universally, “moral revolutions” everywhere. Why doesn’t he pursue the implications of this view? Surely it is demeaning to the Rest (some might even say racist) to suggest that a universal process so necessary to the moral improvement of mankind failed to occur outside the West? Shouldn’t we also look be looking for it in Teheran, in Tokyo, in Ouadougou? In Moscow or Beijing? In Khartoum as well as the author’s Ghanaian home-town of Kumasi?

Yet his vaunted moral revolutions never began in any such places. And the reason is blindingly obvious to even a casual reader of the book. Despite colorful examples culled from a wide range of historical and literary sources, far and away the most powerful impulse driving the moral and legal reforms he discusses has come from Western Europe, sometimes embodied in the historic teachings of the Catholic Church, sometimes prompted by the efforts of Christian missions in foreign lands, and invariably driven today by the challenging cultural example of the humanitarian tradition in Western Civilization as a whole. In this humane tradition honor killings are not acceptable. Although it seems he would rather die than admit that the West was ahead of the Rest, or give credit where credit is exclusively due, Appiah’s own pages present all the evidence we need.

The duel, he says, was preceded by something called “judicial combat”, a contest in which “gentlemen of the rank of squire and above could settle legal disputes by passage of arms.” The Church opposed this as early as the ninth century, in the person of Pope Nicholas I, and in 1563 the Council of Trent denounced “the detestable custom of duelling…” The author doesn’t push his argument about national or social honor being the real factor that brought the duel to an end (his last pages on the subject contain airy literary references to Disraeli, Yeats, and Evelyn Waugh). But surely an obvious question must be asked: isn’t it more likely that the sense of honor that so impresses this moral philosopher, and which is found so widely among the touchy and the dissed, has in fact served to perpetuate duelling — just as it perpetuates the grim world of homicidal affray among the Bloods and Crips today?

*    *    *

What about foot-binding? In deference to Chinese ethnic susceptibilities the author tries to make the most of whatever evidence exists of a native revolt against the practice. Because he declines to state outright that Western influence was the primary source of resistance to foot-binding, Appiah feels bound to try and find an explanation that flatters the moral insight and revolutionary potential of the Chinese people themselves. He points to the social role of an aroused late-19^th-century urban literati, and it is suggested that a 1828 novel by Li Ruzhen, Flowers in the Mirror, amounts to an early critique of foot-binding by a member of this class. Yet on the next page Appiah all-too-typically reverses direction, admitting that “despite these early critics, the organized resistance begins only after the intrusions of the missionaries.”

Christian schools for girls began to be opened in the 1860s in many parts of the country. In Hangzhou, in the Yangtze River delta, the Church Mission opened a school for girls in 1867, which required “from the first,” as Mrs Archibald Little wrote, “that the feet of the girls should be unbound, and that they should not be compelled to marry against their own consent…” Similarly, when the Methodists opened a girl’s school in Beijing, they required all the girls to have their feet unbound.

Comment on the so-called moral revolution that abolished the slave trade is surely superfluous. The evangelical convictions of Wilberforce were fundamental, as were the activities of numerous other church groups, from the Quakers to Wesley’s Methodists to the Clapham Sect that devotedly fought to abolish the slave trade after 1750. But enough: from his own documentation it is amply clear that Appiah’s long-winded examination of honor as a source of his supposed “moral revolutions” is superfluous, distracting, and a largely academic exercise. The more pages one turns the more obvious it becomes that whatever interest it may have in the psychology of moral action, both as motive and consequence honor exists on a decidedly lower plane than whatever ethical principles it may occasionally serve. As Kant understood very well.

Fine words not nearly enough

Of course it took more than the activities of church groups to abolish the slave trade. And more than the eloquence of parliamentarians and preachers. It took concerted military action on land and sea — though you won’t find much about that in Appiah’s account. The author of The Honor Code may have no taste for war, and have never held a gun, but he must know that the only reason West African slavery and human sacrifice were stamped out is that European colonial armies went in, conquered kingdoms incurably given to these practices, and brought them forcefully to an end.

Appiah makes occasional disapproving references to Sir Garnet Wolseley, and given his African background this is understandable. Wolseley was a soldier who didn’t mess about, and his 1874 campaign against King Kofi Kakari was ruthless in crushing the Asante armies, displacing the king, and burning the “charnel house” of the city of Kumasi to the ground. Not for a moment would we claim that his main motive was idealistic and uplifting, or that he intended purely and simply to stamp out Asante slavery and human sacrifice. As elsewhere in the region, the invasion of this West African kingdom was meant to open it to trade with the coast, and to undercut such tribal peoples as the Itsekiri, “middlemen between the early European traders and the inhabitants of the hinterland”, a campaign that had gone on intermittently for many years. But you don’t need a degree in deontology to recognise that the result changed barbarism for the better.

Or does Appiah think the customs of Old Ashanti should have been kept as a living museum, pristine and untouched? Does he imagine that if the Christian missions had been kept out, if Sir Garnet had never existed, if a sufficiently determined Anthropological Preservation Society had opposed all change — then internal war, slave raiding, cannibalism, and human sacrifice, might each have been kept going all the way down to the Age of Empathy and the International Court of Justice in the Hague?

The “reluctant cannibal” and moral theory

Whether or not it’s true that “there are no jokes in Islam” (a line attributed apocryphally to the Ayatollah Khomeini), there is certainly little humor in Appiah’s world of respect on demand and instant dignity. So let’s try and lighten things up. It seems to me that as moral philosophers the British comedians Michael Flanders and Donald Swann look pretty good alongside the Ivy League professor, and when they sing their song about the “reluctant cannibal” who independently decides that “eating people is wrong” they raise serious issues for Appiah’s moral theory.

Recall first his dogma that “morality is not enough.” That individual convictions about right and wrong won’t cut it. And that both the collective reinforcement of shared beliefs and a sense of honor is needed before genuine moral progress can be made. Looking at our reluctant cannibal (let’s call him Jim) we see a man who has on his own moral initiative taken a view opposing his anthropophagous fellows. They think eating people is entirely normal. The steaks evidently taste good and they have even developed an appealing cuisine for human flesh. But when they invite Jim round, offering a dish with his favorite sauce, all he does is lecture them on their sins and pull back from the table in disgust. Jim thinks differently, feels differently, and most important of all has radically different moral convictions.

His tribal companions indignantly assure him that they have always eaten people and that there’s nothing wrong with the practice. Indeed, (and in accord with Appiah’s view of the social psychology of honor) they go further. They tell him that eating people is honorable, and that by not eating them he will bring his family into the worst kind of social disrepute. But Jim is not one of those who live in fear of being dissed. Not one of those fearful of the collective disfavour that looms so large in Professor Appiah’s scheme. Jim’s self-esteem is secure; he takes it for granted that the rule “thou shalt not eat people” is both good enough for him and good enough for everyone. He thinks that “the only thing that deserves full respect is doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do” — as Appiah ridicules the Kantian procedure he disapproves. But such ridicule has no effect on Jim. The right thing to do is embodied in a simple rule: Don’t Eat People. Jim is a Kantian through and through.

*    *    *

There must be a thousand books about Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, and whole libraries devoted to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. We hardly need more. What we need now — and which we cordially propose as Professor Appiah’s next project — is an explanation of why the moral revolution against slavery never happened in Africa. It may be this will require setting aside our admiration for exotic cultures, and our romantic enthusiasm for ways of life and being not our own. But diplomatic evasion can’t go on forever; looking African facts squarely in the face will have to be done sooner or later if we are to make sense of Mende Nazer’s world; and as we’ve already explained, nobody is better qualified for the task than Professor Appiah himself.

It happens that in 1826 a British governor on the Gold Coast, Sir Charles MacCarthy, was defeated by the Asante, who cut out his heart, ate it, and made his skull into a much admired drinking vessel for the king back in Kumasi. This was only seven years before the abolition of slavery in Britain. Did nobody in Ghana think this was wrong at the time? Where were Africa’s moral revolutionaries when they were needed? If ever there was a place where a thorough overhaul of values was called for it was West Africa in the 19^th century — and in the noble figure of the reluctant cannibal Flanders and Swann imagine a potentially heroic revolutionary figure for the times.  In Kumasi he might even have been a conscience-stricken Asante of moral sensitivity like Appiah himself. So why didn’t it happen? Why was there no Kumasi Anti-Slavery Convention led by the Appiah clan? No Benin Bill of Rights? No Dahomey Declaration of the Rights of Man? If a biographical history of the last fifty kings of Kumasi were written, would the phrase “human rights” even appear in the index?

As Flanders and Swann showed, all of this makes good comic material. Yet it is no trivial matter. It is largely because such things never did happen in Africa that the exact reverse of the civilizing process described by Norbert Elias — what amounts in fact to an uncivilizing process — is now flourishing on Europe’s fringes at the present time. For that is what the modern slave trade represents — the trade that trapped Mende Nazer in the Sudan and has doomed hundreds more African children from elsewhere.

The king of the Asante is said to have been surrounded by wise counsellors. But were they wise enough? Is it because there was no black William Wilberforce to stand up among the king’s counsellors in Kumasi and tell him forcefully that Slavery Is Wrong, that more than 200 years after the British abolition of the slave trade, Africa still practices slavery? This also relates directly to Appiah’s respectful anthropological account of the numerous grades of domestic servitude and patriarchal subordination in traditional West African society, grades blandly euphemised by numerous apologists as “our regional family culture,” and that all too easily collapse into subjection and brutality. Books take time to write, and no doubt we shall have to wait a year or two. But we look forward to learning from Professor Appiah why there was no spontaneous African push for abolition. It will certainly be of interest to the hundreds of Mende Nazers smuggled from Africa into England today.

Note: This essay is an expanded version of “The Slave Girl and the Princeton Professor,” first posted here on 22 October 2011.

Sources

Link for play about Mende Nazer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWLBxvl_yss
Mende Nazer website: http://www.mendenazer.org/
Slave, by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis. Perseus USA 2003
The History of Dahomy, by Archibald Dalzel. Frank Cass UK 1967 (1793)
Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, by T. Edward Bowdich. John Murray UK 1819
Buying Freedom, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzel. Princeton USA 2007
The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Norton USA 2010
The Fall of the Asante Empire, by Robert B. Edgerton. The Free Press USA 1995

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.

Bruce Parry and Friend, Bhutan

Of course in 1922 the film-maker didn’t have an anthropologist along with him in Hudson Bay, and that may have influenced things. To begin with, anthropologists are mostly serious chaps who have been to college, whereas tribal people are tough chaps who have not — and to speak plainly, the serious chaps and the tough chaps have little in common. Robert Flaherty himself was a robust and hearty prospector who had spent some years looking for iron ore. One of the tough. He was fully accepted by the Inuit, whom he admired for their indestructible good humour, while the Inuit in turn took to Flaherty as someone able to handle Arctic hardships smilingly day after day.

Most anthropologists are rather different. As romantics (and anthropology is the home of academic romanticism) they incline to a tragically moralistic view of life the opposite of their hosts. Hunters learn to expect misfortune and bad days, but whatever happens you have to get on with it. A moping hunter who sat around complaining that life wasn’t fair would be dead in a week.

Again, where Flaherty was fully accepted as an equal long before shooting his film, your average anthropologist yearns for a social acceptance that is always uncertain, and even after years of fieldwork may never arrive. A creature of the seminar room whose mentality has been formed by the ambiguous pleasures of university life, his own tribe is incurably academic. Abroad, he tiptoes through the forests of alien cultures fearful of solecism and hardly daring to laugh at all.

There are other problems too. The academic outlook in Brian Moser’s distinguished Disappearing World series in the 1970s was both pedagogic and high-minded, and high-mindedness comes at a price. Tribal humour was never intended for classroom use. Granada’s editorial guidelines ensured that in one place after another, all over the world, an entire comic universe of ribaldry and sexual taunting and obscene hilarity was hardly glimpsed.

A ceremony I myself filmed in Central Australia at around the same time featured a much-loved priapic hero, Wadaingula. During his dance he carried a phallic emblem six feet long, with other dimensions to match, and after white feathers had been stuck onto it with human blood it was menacingly waved about. Bush flies in Central Australia are not just a nuisance, they’re a curse, and imaginary flies that landed on the sacred emblem were indignantly brushed off by the dancer, while the audience howled with delight. But in Canberra the whole event was considered unfortunate: the film was solemnly locked away and has not been seen since.

Multiculturalism reinforced this bowdlerising. It ensured that a proper respect was shown during editing and that disagreeable customs were either unmentioned, euphemised, or cut. Cannibalism was certainly unmentionable. Whipping rituals designed to harden women and children against pain were likely to be suppressed. And in one Disappearing World production clitorodectomy among the Masai was actually compared to “a white wedding”.

In such an atmosphere humour suffocates and laughter dies. And that’s why the recent BBC series Tribe is so refreshing. Everywhere indigenes are seen joking, teasing, and generally enjoying themselves. The rationale for the show was that Bruce Parry, a self-described “explorer” and “expedition leader”, should step out of his aircraft and walk straight into the homes of Siberian reindeer herders or Papuan forest hunters, eating raw liver, drinking blood from the communal calabash, and living “as one of the tribe”. But how on earth can you live as one of a tribe whose language you don’t speak, whose most ordinary routines are unfamiliar, and whose food — from rats’ intestines to sago grubs — you find disgusting? Yet in a roundabout and unintended way it works, triumphantly restoring laughter to men and women we have rarely seen laughing before.

This is not because our explorer cuts an impressive figure — quite the reverse. It works because he’s an unimpressive figure, the butt of children’s jokes, who should at times be wearing a jester’s cap and bells. In Outer Mongolia he’s keen to ride, but after losing his saddle bag he manages to lose his horse. In Ethiopia’s Omo Valley young Suri men joust ferociously, trying to disable each other with long pointed hardwood sticks. Parry plans to show his mettle. But the Suri King, used to hot-heads, foresees disaster and intervenes — though not before the tyro’s clumsy efforts bring gales of laughter from a delighted audience. Everywhere Parry is eager to join the hunt. Hunting is manly action and he wants in. But his presence hinders. He disturbs the quarry. He can’t keep up. So he’s often treated as a backward child and told to stay home with the women.

But this is all for the best. Among these women we meet some splendid characters and discover what the word “unflinching” truly means. In Ethiopia a smiling Suri girl is cicatrised on her breasts, and banters with Parry as her blood streams down (he himself, to much amusement, gaspingly suffers a single cut). Among the nearby Dassanech an elder named Abanesh forthrightly defends female genital mutilation, and shows why cultural change will always be slow. Abanesh does not persuade this viewer that FMG is acceptable, and she doesn’t convince Parry, but her warmth and wisdom are memorable.

Anthropologists are unimpressed. They say that Parry is academically unqualified, that he only speaks English, that his stays in the field are short, that he makes no reference to previous anthropological research. All of which is no doubt true.

But like others of his temperament Parry is game for anything. Just as Flaherty’s hosts admired his adventurous spirit, Parry’s hosts find this admirable too. Among the Hamar he leaps over a dozen cows stark naked, in New Guinea he runs barefoot along thorny trails, in South America he ingests narcotic potions that bring on delirium and have to be vomited up.

Only when he finds himself hit on at night by a male admirer in the romantic setting of a tree house, and has to firmly decline, does he feel that life as one of the tribe might have its limits. In his own brash way he is faithful to the father of participant observation, Malinowski himself. “It is good for the ethnographer”, wrote the author of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, “to put aside camera, notebook and pencil, and join in himself in what is going on… Though the degree of success varies, the attempt is possible for everyone.”

It would be absurd to regard Tribe as a substitute for Disappearing World. An ordinary viewer with a taste for realism however may reasonably regard the two as complementary. Struggling to down bowls of semi-coagulated gore for breakfast in Africa, or helpings of rat pudding in Assam, he provides a nice mixture of blood and laughter for millions — and more importantly, brief intervals of welcome entertainment for the tribal peoples themselves. Considering their trials and tribulations (and on this matter the series contains poignant material from both the Akie of Tanzania and from Sarawak’s pitifully besieged Penan) they deserve some compensation. But if Parry wants to go on like this he may need to be more careful what he eats.

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?