African States since Independence: Order, Development, and Democracy 9780300244946

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The Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, and Economics

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Darin Christensen & David D. Laitin

African States Since Independence: O R D E R , DEVELOPMENT, & DEMOCRACY

Yale University Press, New Haven and London

Copyright © 2019 by Darin Christensen and David D. Laitin All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953649 ISBN 978-0-300-22661-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Parts of this book were given as the Castle Lectures in Yale’s Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, delivered by David Laitin in 2015.

The Castle Lectures were endowed by Mr. John K. Castle. They honor his ancestor the Reverend James Pierpont, one of Yale’s original founders. Given by established public figures, Castle Lectures are intended to promote reflection on the moral foundation of society and government and to enhance understanding of ethical issues facing individuals in our complex modern society.

For those many students of African politics whose research has guided us to rethink the region’s past and see its future more clearly

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Preface Region & Country Codes Introduction I

From Great Expectations to Unfulfilled Dreams

Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Chapter 3: Chapter 4: II

Geographic & Historical Constraints

Chapter 5: Chapter 6: Chapter 7: Chapter 8: Chapter 9: III

The Charismatic Founders and Their Dreams Lag in Human Development Lag in Democracy Lag in Social Order

Geography and Demography Extractive Institutions The Missionaries The Partition of Africa The Colonial State

Post-Independence Policies

Chapter 10: Chapter 11: Chapter 12:

Cultural Policy Foreign Policy Economic Policy

ix xiii xv xix 1 11

13 31 49 83 113

115 133 155 167 189 205

207 227 243

viii

IV

Toward a New Era?

Chapter 13: Democratization and the “Third Wave” Chapter 14: Economic Stabilization Chapter 15: Rebuilding War-Torn States Chapter 16: Conclusion References Index of Authors General Index

269

271 299 319 347 351 377 385

Figures

1

Conceptual Framework

5

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9

Number of Independent States, 1940-2010 Kwame Nkrumah Julius Nyerere Jomo Kenyatta Léopold Senghor Ahmed Sékou Touré Patrice Lumumba Obafemi Awolowo Nnamdi Azikiwe

14 17 19 21 23 24 25 27 27

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

GDP per Capita by Region, 1960-1990 GDP per Capita in Selected Cases, 1960-1990 Share of Population in Poverty Years of Schooling by Region, 1960-1990 Infant Mortality by Country, 1960-1990

32 33 34 35 38

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8

Average Polity Score by Region, 1960-1990 Deluge of Coups in Africa Regime Change in Selected Cases, 1960-1990 Nigeria’s Largest Ethnic Groups “Nigeria at 49” Average Governance Score in 1996 Electoral Quality, 1960-1990 Ugandan MP’s Scorecard

53 54 56 56 67 68 78 79

4.1 4.2

Failed State-Years by Region and Decade Trends in Armed Conflict by Region, 1960-1999

85 86

x

4.3 4.4

Cumulative Deaths from Civil Wars Trade-off Between Coups and Insurgency

94 110

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11

Difficult Geographies Population Distribution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Hinterland Geographies Population Distribution in Mauritania Favorable Geographies Population Distribution in Rwanda GDP per Capita by Geography, 1960-2008 Probability of Rebellion by Distance from Country’s Capital City Ethnic Fractionalization and Distance to the Equator Correlation Between Malaria Deaths and Distance to the Equator Conceptual Framework: Geography & Demography

116 116 117 117 119 119 122 123 125 126 130

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

Settler Mortality and Economic Development Cumulative Slave Exports by Country Slavery and an Economic Reversal of Fortune Economic Development by Exposure to the Slave Trade Slave Exports and State Development Conceptual Framework: Extractive Institutions

135 140 141 142 143 154

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Christian Missionary Activity and Contemporary School Enrollment Protestant Missionaries and Democracy Contemporary Religious Composition in African States Correlates of Muslim Concentration Conceptual Framework: The Missionaries

161 162 163 164 166

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8

The Berlin Conference, 1884-85 Murdock’s 1959 Map of Ethnic Homelands Partitioned Populations and Economic Development Partitioned Groups and Conflict Incidence The Congo Crisis The Casamance Region of Senegal Somalia’s Ethnic Territories Conceptual Framework: The Partition of Africa

168 170 171 172 176 178 182 188

9.1

Income Tax (% GDP) by Region

195

xi

9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5

Human Capital and Infrastructure by Colonizer, 1961-65 Political Institutions Prior to Independence Convergence in Average Polity Scores Conceptual Framework: The Colonial State

196 197 198 202

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5

Linguistic Distance and Economic Development Indigenous Language Instruction and Learning Outcomes Language and Interpersonal Relations Busia, Kenya, and Meatu, Tanzania Conceptual Framework: Cultural Policy

212 215 217 219 225

11.1 Changing Composition of Conflict, 1816-2008 11.2 Number of Civil Wars by Country, 1960-2010 11.3 Conceptual Framework: Foreign Policy

236 237 241

12.1 Income Growth in Ghana vs. Côte d’Ivoire 12.2 Increased Disbursements of Foreign Aid to Africa 12.3 Conceptual Framework: Economic Policy

246 256 266

13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4

Political Liberalization in Africa, 1980-2010 Nelson Mandela The Increased Prevalence of Election Monitoring Opposition Vote Share in African Elections

272 273 282 291

14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5

Recent Increases in GDP per Capita Botswana’s Outlying Economic Performance Improvements in Governance and Economic Growth Manufacturing Employment and Economic Development Adjusted (“Genuine”) Savings as a Percentage of Gross National Income

300 302 305 309 312

15.1 African Countries Mired in Conflict Post-Independence 15.2 Active UN Peacekeeping Operations, 1948-2014 15.3 Probability of Success for Different Types of PKOs

319 325 328

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Tables

2.1

Average Maternal Mortality

38

3.1 3.2 3.3

The Shadow Economy Ethnic Power Relations in Africa, 1960-1990 Ethnic Power Sharing and Civil War in African States, 1960-1990

71 76 77

4.1 4.2 4.3

Failed State Index by Region Probability of Civil War Onset, 1960-1999 Low-Level Conflicts by Region, 1960-2014

84 86 88

5.1 5.2 5.3

Frequency of Herbst’s Types Probability of Civil War by Geography Latitude and Probability of Civil War

115 123 126

8.1

Separatist Conflicts in Africa

173

10.1 Average Distance from the Official Language by Region

210

15.1 UN PKOs in Africa

326

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Preface

Africans have taken a long and troubled march from their exuberant moment of freedom in the early 1960s. But now is a moment for renewed optimism. Today, many countries are providing growth, political voice, and security to their citizens. Still, dark clouds remain on the horizon. Throughout much of Africa, countries harbor terrorists in ungoverned spaces, struggle to control diseases that cross borders, and expel refugees fleeing civil war and abject poverty. Nonetheless, this is a moment of great possibility for African states to overcome the barriers — to economic development, to democracy, and to order — that have stifled them for a generation. Their success is consequential for all of us, whether in Africa or abroad. Despite Africa’s importance, ignorance about the continent abounds. The current US president had trouble pronouncing “Namibia” in a speech to African leaders. But this ignorance is not only among foreigners. Lecturing to a large audience of college-educated Nigerians at Stanford, one of the authors (David Laitin) found that none of them could recall the details of a civil war that had killed a million of their fellow citizens just a generation ago. This limited awareness of African affairs persists despite an outpouring of academic research in and about Africa in the past quarter century. Unfortunately, this

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research — our own included — is written in technical language and buried in specialized journals. In this book, we endeavor to make the findings from these works available to a wider audience. We also develop a framework for integrating decades of research across multiple disciplines, providing an explanation for why Africa’s leaders, despite charisma and high hopes, have struggled to escape their countries’ geographic and historical constraints and implement effective policies. We hope the synthesis offered here will be of use to activists in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil servants, entrepreneurs, university students, and the general public. This book was motivated by an invitation to David Laitin to deliver the Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. He was invited by Nicolas Sambanis and Ian Shapiro and acknowledges the honor bestowed upon him to deliver these prestigious lectures. Darin Christensen helped to craft those lectures and agreed to dramatically expand the three presentations into a broad-based book as an equal co-author. At Yale, comments by Kate Baldwin were inspiring. Melina Platas Izama pointed us to omissions and carefully reviewed part I. In early draft stage, members of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) read and commented on the manuscript. Comments at that WGAPE meeting by Daniel Posner, Karen Ferree, James Fearon, and Jeremy Weinstein were especially useful in reorganizing the material. We presented a revised version to the Center for African Studies at Stanford University, where comments by James Ferguson, Richard Roberts, Marcel Fafchamps, and David Abernethy compelled us to make further revisions. We are especially indebted to Nelson Kasfir, who read the manuscript twice, each time correcting errors while offering continued encouragement. We also received penetrating comments on our economic policy chapters from Thomas Callaghy and Nicolas van

PREFACE

de Walle. Kennedy Opalo provided final feedback with his exceptional knowledge of the literature on African politics. We are grateful to all these generous scholars for their critical comments and suggestions. We thank Kristin Christensen, who scolded us for jargon. We received excellent research assistance from Alex Ziff and Andrew Brooks, both of whom assiduously factchecked and cleared up ambiguities. And we are especially grateful to John Castle for inspiring and facilitating the production of this book.

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Region & Country Codes World Bank Regions EAP LAC NA SSA

East Asia & Pacific Latin America & Caribbean North America Sub-Saharan Africa

ECA MENA SA

Europe & Central Asia Middle East & North Africa South Asia

MOZ MRT MUS MWI NAM NER NGA RWA SDN SEN SLE SOM SSD STP SWZ SYC TCD TGO TZA UGA ZAF ZAR ZMB ZWE

Mozambique Mauritania Mauritius Malawi Namibia Niger Nigeria Rwanda Sudan Senegal Sierra Leone Somalia South Sudan Sao Tome and Principe Swaziland Seychelles Chad Togo United Republic of Tanzania Uganda South Africa Democratic Republic of the Congo Zambia Zimbabwe

Country Codes AGO BDI BEN BFA BWA CAF CIV CMR COG COM CPV ERI ETH GAB GHA GIN GMB GNB GNQ KEN LBR LSO MDG MLI

Angola Burundi Benin Burkina Faso Botswana Central African Republic Côte d’Ivoire Cameroon Congo Comoros Cabo Verde Eritrea Ethiopia Gabon Ghana Guinea Gambia Guinea-Bissau Equatorial Guinea Kenya Liberia Lesotho Madagascar Mali

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Introduction

T H I S B O O K addresses a fundamental question for those interested in sub-Saharan Africa. Why have its postcolonial states not fulfilled their promise to deliver prosperity, good governance, and security? On these three goals, at least through a generation of independent rule, most subSaharan states did not keep pace with other world regions that were also considered “underdeveloped” in the early 1960s, the decade of independence for most African states. Nor had many of them fulfilled the promises of their independence movements and the charismatic leaders who heralded a promising future. Many expected sub-Saharan countries to flourish once they were freed from the colonial yoke. The soaring rhetoric of Africa’s founding fathers, the assessments of international officials, and the more staid analysis of academics all predicted rapid economic and political development. The UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, after an extended early-1960 tour of Africa, wrote that he had just visited “a continent launched on the road to cooperative success by new and able young leaders” (Young, 2012, 12). Economic forecasts from a World Bank report confirmed this travelogue, claiming that Africa’s growth potential surpassed East Asia’s prospects, with at least seven newly independent countries “‘clearly [having] the potential to reach or surpass’ a 7 percent growth rate” (Easterly, 2002). Political scientists documented a sense

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AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

of optimism among Africans: Crawford Young, one of the eminent scholars conducting field work during the early independence years, recalled, “The dawn of independence seemed full of promise. . . euphoria was widely shared across the continent” (Young, 2012, 10). They were also energized by the opportunities for crafting new political cultures and institutions. Even one of the more hard-nosed early analysts of African independence, Aristide Zolberg, seemed awed by Africa’s bright prospects: Most political scientists who were in the field [of African politics] sufficiently early to share in the enthusiasm of the new men at the helm of the liberating movement were caught up in the drama of man’s search for polity which was being re-enacted in a new and strange environment. The study of African politics provided a great and exciting intellectual adventure comparable to the quests which earlier had driven explorers to overcome apparently insurmountable obstacles on the same continent. These intrepid men no longer sought to trace the sources of the Nile or the course of the Niger. The new challenge was to discover, with the help of imaginative theories of society, a system of rivulets which might merge into a new stream of democracy. (Zolberg, 1966, 1)

But the optimism was short-lived. In part I, we illustrate the failures to meet these high expectations. In the first three decades after independence, sub-Saharan African countries fell behind other regions on standard indicators of development, democracy, and order. In terms of the distribution of power and resources, economic resources failed to grow and political power quickly became concentrated in the hands of (semi)authoritarian rulers, who struggled to maintain order. Part II offers a more sober look at the conditions facing the founding fathers of Africa’s new states. The sharp divergence between expectations and performance becomes easier to explain after reviewing the constraints under which Africa’s post-independence leaders worked. We

INTRODUCTION

consider, for example, how geography and demography — expansive, sparsely populated, and ethnically diverse states — affected leaders’ calculations regarding whether to expand the administrative reach of the state to peripheral regions. We also discuss those constraints imposed by the slave trade and other extractive institutions, the presence of missionaries, the partition of the continent by poorly informed European diplomats, and the strategies of rule employed by colonial states. No matter how inventive or ambitious the new African leaders were, these inheritances restricted the scope of feasible reform. In part III, we discuss the policy choices in the postindependence period that contributed to economic stagnation, weak but repressive states, and internal conflict. Due to historical constraints and unrealistic ideological commitments, new leaders and their successors failed to provide growth and security. Africa stagnated for a generation. While our review is not exhaustive, we cover several important policy areas, including language choices, foreign policy, and the economic doctrines that guided government spending and monetary policy. Lest one lose faith in the ability of governments to surmount constraints and promote economic and political development, in part IV we discuss several recent successes. Beginning in the early 1990s, despite a few notable setbacks, movements to replace military rule and one-party states with democracy made meaningful progress. Aided by a boom in mineral prices, economic growth during the first decade of this century has been impressive in many African countries. And new solidarity pacts exemplified in the African Union have helped cauterize civil conflict and restrain dictatorial tendencies among fellow presidents. The negative framing of African affairs through the 1980s and 1990s is therefore being challenged, a cautiously hopeful sign for the future.

3

4

AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

The Logic of Political Rule in Africa After establishing in part I the dimensions of Africa’s post-independence lag, parts II-IV proceed (for the most part) chronologically: we begin with geographic or historical constraints, discuss post-independence policy choices, and then end with a discussion of more promising recent trends. Yet, we also see these sections as illuminating different aspects of a more general political problem: working within the constraints imposed by history or geography, how do leaders survive in office and realize their policy (or personal) goals? The policy failures of the postindependence period were not simply due to bad ideas (though there were certainly some of those). A political logic guided African leaders’ decisions to champion or shelve certain policies. Where reform threatened an incumbent’s political base or outstripped the weak bureaucracy inherited from the colonial state, we should not be surprised that a leader opted for the status quo or muddled through with a suboptimal alternative. By describing the constraints facing leaders and their political objectives, we can make sense of policies that, ultimately, contributed to three decades of dismal economic growth and political instability for too many of Africa’s newly independent states. To be sure, there have been impressive economic successes, as in Botswana and Lesotho. And countries such as Tanzania avoided violent breakdowns. But on average, compared with other postcolonial regions, African states faced policy failure. To account for this failure, we develop a simple analytical framework here that we return to throughout the book to help explain the early policy failures, as well as examine the possibilities for a more successful future. When discussing leaders’ choices, we consider both sides of the political ledger — the benefits (e.g., status, economic growth) and costs (e.g., fomenting opposition, running budget deficits) that inform leaders’ decisions. We ex-

INTRODUCTION

pect that leaders choose policies that maximize the expected value of office, adopting initiatives that they expect will deliver benefits without dramatically decreasing their odds of retaining power or imposing prohibitive costs.1 The diagram below (adapted from Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2005), illustrates our framework. Starting on the left of figure 1, geography and history — both distant and more recent — shape the distribution of power and resources that leaders inherit. Some leaders inherit a country that is ethnically homogeneous; others, an ethnically diverse population. Some inherit an incompetent bureaucracy; others, a meritocratic civil service. Some enjoy oil reserves; others rely heavily on cash crops for foreign exchange. Some oversee a population that (unevenly) benefited from missionaries’ educational efforts; others, a citizenry displaced and distrustful after centuries of slave trading. Some enjoy widespread support; others can count few supporters outside of their own region or ethnic group. This inheritance weighs heavily on the leader, constraining what is feasible. In part II, we examine how history and geography limit leaders’ choices.

1

For those comfortable with symbolic representation, we can express the leader’s problem as max p∈ P {S( p)[ B( p) − CS ( p)] − [1 − S( p)]CNS ( p)} where S( p) is the probability of survival given policy choice p in the set of feasible policies P, and B( p) is the benefit the leader receives from policy p. CS ( p) is costs paid if the leader survives, while CNS ( p) is costs paid if leader does not survive. We set (or normalize) the benefits to be zero if the leader doesn’t survive.

Direct Effect

Economic Development Historic Distribution of Power & Resources

Constraints Policy Choice

Democracy

Leader’s Objectives Political Order Future Distribution of Power & Resources Feedback Loop

Moving to the right on our diagram, leaders make policy choices. Upon coming to power, they have their own objectives: industrializing, fostering equality, and promot-

5

Figure 1 Conceptual Framework

6

AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

ing new national or transnational identities. Guided by these objectives and given their historical and contemporary constraints, these leaders pursue reforms that deliver policy or personal benefits without jeopardizing their political survival.2 In part III we unpack the ideological baggage that leaders bring to office, which provides the material for their cultural and economic policies. But leaders do not always choose the optimal policy from the perspective of overall welfare. Constrained or not, leaders want to retain control and are unlikely to implement reforms that imperil their status, wealth, and continued rule. A potentially more beneficial policy for growth, for security, or for democracy may simply be ignored if that policy also compromises the leader’s incumbency. Rooting out corruption, for example, could improve public service delivery, but also anger elites that depend on rents and extortion under the corrupt system. If the leader depends on the support (or acquiescence) of those same corrupt elites, reform is unlikely. Or a floating exchange rate: while this monetary policy could boost exports, leaders might dismiss the prospect out of hand, fearing the riots that would erupt from price hikes on the imported goods that urban constituents demand. At the far right of our diagram, we see that policy choices shape the future distribution of power and resources. Winners win; losers lose. In redistributing economic and political power, policies also change the constraints facing the leader in the future — thus, the feedback loop connecting future to historic resources and power (one government’s future is its successor’s history). However, policy rarely reconfigures the social order, especially in weak states and where the social order reflects powerful historical and geographical forces. For example, a landlocked country faces constraints to international trade, whether under colonial rule or after independence.

2

We interchange the words policy and reform. However, we recognize that the leader might opt for the status quo — a clear policy choice, but not one that entails reform.

INTRODUCTION

Hence, we allow for persistence in the distribution of economic and political power over time (i.e., a direct effect). As we go through the historical and geographic constraints (in part II) and early policies instituted by postcolonial leaders (in part III), we use each chapter’s conclusion to refer back to this framework, filling in the boxes with specific constraints and policies.

Distinguishing Our Approach Our analytical framework might appear subject to Thandika Mkandawire’s (2001) powerful, oft-cited critique of African development studies. Mkandawire highlights two contradictory sentiments in the writing of Western commentators: “the pessimism of the diagnosis and the optimism of the prescription” (289). These analysts can in the same breath — or, at least, a single work — lament the “impossibility of developmental states in Africa” and offer confident prescriptions for reforms that will ensure success. We cannot deny that our review of the first thirty years of independence may feel bleak. However, we wish to highlight that Africa’s geography and history, rather than serving as inescapable and enduring shackles, represent real but surmountable constraints. Moreover, we make no prescriptions for reform and remain cautiously hopeful about more recent improvements in economic development and political liberalization. Similarly, we avoid simple dichotomies posing, for example, policy versus destiny as competing explanations for African countries’ slow growth (Collier and Gunning, 1999). As we hope is already becoming apparent, we see these as complementary explanations. Although we don’t deny that history and geography can have direct effects on contemporary outcomes, they also constrain policy decisions. Another fault line in the study of African politics di-

7

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AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

vides “joiners” and “splitters.” Splitters through their teaching and research have sought to undermine popular views of a culturally and political homogeneous continent. Some societies, they note, are matrilineal; others patrilineal. Some societies are pastoral, others agricultural, and still others are highly dependent upon mining. Some tribes are hierarchical; others acephalous (i.e., leaderless). Some countries faced indirect rule; others direct rule. Joiners have, on the other hand, searched for commonalities. Until relatively recently, they wrote about Africa’s growth tragedy (Easterly and Levine, 1997). As economic prospects have improved, they’ve started to ask, “Is this Africa’s time?” (Robertson, 2012) Here African countries are seen as facing common constraints and opportunities. Our innovation — and it may not totally satisfy either camp — is to draw upon both bodies of scholarship to help explain cross-national differences in human welfare. We’re interested in why Kenya has grown faster than Somalia, but failed to keep pace with Thailand (which had nearly the same per capita gross domestic product [GDP] in 1965). The splitters help us to answer the first part of this question, recounting Kenya’s relatively peaceful post-independence history, which contrasts sharply with Somalia’s persistent struggle to maintain peace. The joiners take a broader perspective, explaining why East Asia and East Africa followed different policy and economic trajectories.3 It becomes imprudent to remain as joiners in addressing policy choices and outcomes post-1990. At this point, variation across African states becomes more prominent in our analysis. Indeed, in this period, a divide has opened between states that are advancing economically and instituting political reforms and those that are mired in slow growth, personalist rule, and peripheral rebellion. In the African Economic Research Consortium’s (AERC) re-

3

What readers, especially the splitters among them, may find missing in this book is much discussion of differences within individual African countries and how these contribute to inequalities across towns or provinces (e.g., between Western and Central Kenya).

INTRODUCTION

view of African growth from 1960 to 2000, Ndulu and O’Connell (2008, 26) point out that the “variation in longrun growth within SSA [sub-Saharan Africa] dwarfs the difference between average growth in SSA and average growth in any other region.” Therefore, in part IV, we narrow our focus in an effort to chart divergent outcomes — stories of tentative successes and ongoing stagnation — among African states. Whether splitters or joiners, scholars have recently made progress in getting to the roots of Africa’s lag by engaging in careful empirical research that, while keenly aware of the difficulties, tries to identify variables that have a causal effect on democracy, on economic growth, and on security. An important goal of this volume is to synthesize those contributions along each dimension. Empirical research on the question of African states’ unfulfilled promise has been impressively robust in the past several years, but it exists mostly in highly technical journals. Here, we accept the challenge of making these studies available to the general reader in a way that is both accessible and persuasive. In this endeavor, we seek, through graphical presentations and case studies, to convey and animate core findings. However, we must warn readers that we cannot offer definitive answers on the causes of democratic failure, economic stagnation, and conflict. The causal pathways from, for example, colonial rule to contemporary economic, political, and social outcomes are numerous, intersecting, and perhaps beyond the tools of social science to map fully. Moreover, failure on one outcome can impede progress on another, and vice versa: the failure to educate children, for example, leads to poorly informed voters, who struggle to punish officials who fail to deliver increased spending on teachers or schools. These feedback loops (in this instance, poor education low accountability poor education) trap countries in a ru-

9

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AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

inous autocratic and low growth equilibrium. This makes it all the more difficult to isolate cause and effect. We hope that as the book progresses, each chapter will elaborate on our novel conceptual scheme of heroic goals confronting daunting constraints and the policy compromises and outcomes that result from this collision. Both the reasons for Africa’s lag and the tentative steps being taken to correct it should become clearer as the book progresses. We see in this framework a realistic foundation for imagining a more democratic, a more secure, and a more prosperous continent.

Part I. From Great Expectations to Unfulfilled Dreams

In their first half-century of self-rule, newly independent African states have lagged behind the rest of the world in terms of economic development, the establishment of effective governance capable of securing social order, and the consolidation of democracy. Here in part I, we first seek to capture a moment in the late 1950s: a new generation of Africans was on the threshold of becoming the founding fathers of states escaping colonialism. Although they acknowledged the challenges that independence would bring, their optimism and goals to restore the greatness of Africa, as we document in chapter 1, were exhilarating. Yet, as chapters 2-4 recount, the displacement of elected leaders with military dictators, the disease of corruption, and the specter of violence and civil war cumulatively undermined early optimism. African states’ progress was far less impressive than in other world regions on most indicators of human development and security. The symptoms of this failure plagued African polities at least through the early 1990s. In chapter 2, we focus on the lag in human development, examining indicators of income, health, and education. In chapter 3, we consider democracy and the rule of law, cataloging the undermining of democracy (with one-party states) and the cascade of coups that brought military dictatorships to many African countries. In addition, we highlight the

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A F R I C A N S TAT E S S I N C E I N D E P E N D E N C E

corruption in both civilian and military regimes that undermined the rule of law. In chapter 4, our focus turns to the breakdown of social order through communal conflict and civil war. In these three chapters, relying on statistical evidence and accompanying case studies, we compare African states with other regions to reckon the magnitude of Africa’s lag and convey its human costs. These chapters raise the fundamental question of this book — what explains African states’ struggles in the first half-century of independence?

1. The Charismatic Founders and Their Dreams

W E B E G I N T H I S B O O K at a moment of great promise. A decade into the post–World War II peace, complementary geopolitical and ideological changes enabled aspiring elites in the colonial world not only to articulate but also to fulfill a vision of dividing empires into nations. A new generation of Africans, imbued with ideals of nationalism, pan-Africanism, and independence, articulated the aspirations of their colonized brethren. Their idea that African states would escape the colonial yoke became an achievable goal as the dust settled from World War II. The war had incapacitated former empires. France had been occupied, and General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the anti-Nazi French resistance, ruled in exile until 1944. Brazzaville in the Congo, not Paris, became the symbolic capital of La France libre (Free France). Meanwhile, Britain had made vast concessions to the Congress Party in India about a future independence in return for its support during the war. All the European metropoles had expanded their armed forces by recruiting and training soldiers from their colonies, and European warfare gave African soldiers an experience of the wider world and a confidence that they could succeed with selfrule. Independence movements in sub-Saharan Africa came

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A F R I C A N S TAT E S S I N C E I N D E P E N D E N C E

on the heels of successful struggles elsewhere (figure 1.1). Nationalist uprisings against colonial rule in Vietnam (French retreat after defeat in Dien Bien Phu in 1954) and Algeria (the National Liberation Front was the bête noire of the French Fourth Republic, helping its demise in 1958) were the major world conflicts during the postwar peace. In 1955 Sukarno, the nationalist leader of Indonesia, invited compatriots from other nationalist movements throughout Asia and Africa to Bandung. This was the origin of a “non-aligned” movement that foreshadowed a new era of independent states. In 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had overthrown a traditionalist monarchy in Egypt, burnished his nationalist credentials through the nationalizing of the Suez Canal, successfully defying the British and the French, who could no longer maintain their imperial control over this crucial chokepoint of international shipping. The United States, the dominant state post–World War II, played a passive but important role in advancing the nationalist agenda. President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to support the French in their attempt to retain Vietnam as a colony and seethed with anger over France and Britain’s military campaign to reestablish control over the Suez Canal. Through diplomatic channels, Eisenhower made clear that he would not wage war to sustain European empires. More publicly, the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, gave a visionary speech in the Senate in support of Algeria’s National Liberation Front on July 2, 1957, only a few months after taking his seat: The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile; it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. . . . If we are to secure the friendship of the Arab, the African, and the Asian — and we must, despite what Mr. Dulles [the secretary of state] says about

Figure 1.1 Number of Independent States, 1940-2010 200 World

150 100 50 0 1940

SSA

1960

1980

2000

T H E C H A R I S M AT I C F O U N D E R S A N D T H E I R D R E A M S

our not being in a popularity contest — we cannot hope to accomplish it solely by means of billion-dollar foreign aid programs. We cannot win their hearts by making them dependent upon our handouts. Nor can we keep them free by selling them free enterprise, by describing the perils of communism or the prosperity of the United States, or limiting our dealings to military pacts. No, the strength of our appeal to these key populations — and it is rightfully our appeal, and not that of the Communists — lies in our traditional and deeply felt philosophy of freedom and independence for all peoples everywhere. (Kennedy, 1957)

This message was not ignored in imperial headquarters. Recognizing a new era, Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan traveled to South Africa with a speech (on February 3, 1960) before the apartheid-supporting South African Parliament. “The wind of change,” he declared, “is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.” The inevitability of independence for Indonesia, for India, for Vietnam, and for Algeria after World War II brought a new perspective on nationalism. Liberals and democrats had long seen nationalism as antithetical to a liberal state and associated it with doctrines such as Fascism and Nazism. But the anticolonial moment provided a new positive valence to nationalism — it came to represent liberation of all third-world peoples (Emerson, 1960). Aspiring African leaders would take full advantage of this moment to press for liberation. In this chapter, we seek to reconstruct this optimistic and forward-looking moment in Africa’s political history.

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History Moved Through “Charismatic Leadership”

Third-world nationalism required a dynamic leader who could both constitute a nation from the diverse populations contained within colonial boundaries and also negotiate with the metropole over the transition to native rule. These leaders had to not only connect with and unite their populations but also convince colonial administrators that they were ready to rule. They succeeded in the former by presenting themselves as icons of the nation rather than their tribe. Indeed, nearly half of the initial heads of government were not from the dominant ethnic group of their newly independent state and could gain wide support only by associating themselves with the nation.1 Many of them also earned legitimacy after being incarcerated by colonial authorities. They succeeded in the latter, in part, due to their Western educations — childhoods in missionary schools and university degrees from Europe and the US — which assuaged the racist concerns of colonial authorities. New leaders inspired their fellow nationals with an almost magical quality, a phenomenon that the German sociologist Max Weber called “charisma” (from the Greek, literally “gift of grace”). Weber argued that it takes such leadership to overcome the routinized politics of everyday life; in this case, the narrow scope of political activity permitted by the colonial bureaucracy. These charismatic leaders had to convince their fellow nationals that independence was inevitable and on the path to a surmountable mountaintop, rather than an impossible uphill battle against a still dominant empire. The biographies of prominent founding fathers provide a compelling view into this pivotal moment in African history and convey their optimism regarding their countries’ and the region’s future.2

1

Of the forty states that became independent in this moment, only twenty-three out of forty inaugural heads of state came from the dominant ethnic groups in their countries (Mitchell, Morrison, and Paden, 1989).

2

Readers might wonder why Nelson Mandela is absent from these vignettes. His charismatic moment was in the 1990s. See Mandela (1990) for a collection of his speeches and writings from 1944 through to his release from prison in 1990.

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Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah (figure 1.2), the charismatic founder of Ghana (from the British Gold Coast colony), was a prominent guest of Sukarno in Bandung and one of the visionaries of the non-aligned movement. He was born in 1909 to an Nzima-speaking family, a language group representing less than 3 percent of the Gold Coast’s population. In the Gold Coast, Nkrumah was educated by Catholic missionaries and won a scholarship to the prestigious colonial college Achimoto. He did not qualify for a university scholarship in London but, through the intervention of an uncle, he was accepted to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (one of America’s historic black colleges and universities); after that, he enrolled in the London School of Economics. Still abroad in 1947, Nkrumah was induced to return home by J. B. Danquah, the founder of the earliest nationalist organization in the Gold Coast, the United Gold Coast Convention. Danquah offered the young Nkrumah the position of party secretary. Shortly after Nkrumah assumed this position, veterans of World War II rallied in Accra demanding their rightful benefits. A riot ensued that led to two deaths. Colonial authorities implicated Nkrumah, and he was detained in a remote village in the colony’s north. Upon his release, he challenged Danquah’s conservatism and created the Convention People’s Party (CPP). Civil disobedience campaigns organized by the CPP led to Nkrumah’s arrest and a prison sentence of fourteen months. Upon his release, 100,000 people were waiting for him on the streets. He had now established his street credibility. An enlightened colonial governor, Charles Noble Arden-Clarke, understood the threat and opportunity that Nkrumah represented and brilliantly appointed him as the colony’s prime minister. The sources of Nkrumah’s charismatic appeal were

Figure 1.2 Kwame Nkrumah

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manifold. He articulated a theory of “consciencism” (Nkrumah, 1970) that skillfully combined the EuroChristian, the Islamic, and the African traditions into a compelling ideology for modern Africa. Wearing Western suits, he could earn the trust of the British governor as a serious and responsible future leader, yet (wearing kente cloth robes), he could also earn the trust of country villagers as a simple man who could sit on the ground and share a meal with them. In the Gold Coast, he stood for youth against age, for peasants against chiefs, and for “Ghanaians” against the British. Nkrumah was savvy enough to be on the right side of history on all three of these dimensions. This revealed impressive vision and earned him admiration to match the charismatic aura that he exuded. His vision was clear, powerful, and yet initially deemed implausible. He envisioned self-government for a re-named country, Ghana (after a defunct but once powerful West African kingdom), as a first step to liberating and uniting all of Africa. He presented this vision in his protest speeches, in Parliament in his role as prime minister, and in speeches throughout the countryside, which he traversed in his Cadillac. Speaking to Nkrumah’s charisma, journalistic reports claimed that touching that car yielded ecstasy and a sense of connection to the future among his rural audiences. Thanks to the presence of the American journalist John Gunther (Gunther, 1955, 809–812), we have a record of Nkrumah’s “independence” resolution in the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly in July 1953. He stood before the Legislative Assembly wearing “a cotton smock, white with vertical black stripes [that] symbolizes simplicity in contrast to the ornate regalia of the chiefs.” He began with a quotation from Edmund Burke emphasizing the need for political maturity and then one from Aristotle emphasizing the need for political virtue. He moved from

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biblical imagery (“The heroes of our future will be those who can lead our people out of. . . serfdom, into the valley of light”) to practical wisdom (“As long as somebody else has charge of us, we can lay our mistakes at their door”). Yet his purpose was unmistakable: “We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility.” To be sure, Nkrumah faced opposition in the Assembly, especially from the cocoa regions that were to be heavily taxed to support his grand schemes. But on that day, the cheers at virtually every line were dutifully recorded by the Hansard stenographers. Gunther reports that upon leaving his private anteroom after this speech, Nkrumah was “lifted off his feet. Deputies, party friends, colleagues, seized him and, while he was laughing and struggling, carried him on their hands around and around the open square. There was a mad clatter of excitement and the parliamentarism we had just seen exploded into a wild, cheerful frenzy, and people began to sing and dance. Breathless, Nkrumah got off the shoulders of his partisans. “If Winston Churchill were ever to be captured outside Downing Street and hoisted into the air by Yeomen of the Guard dancing a jig,” Gunther imagines, “the scene would be equivalent.” Gunther then overhears an African onlooker, nearly weeping, who cried out, “The Prime Minister’s speech is the turning point of my life. All my life I have thought that the white man was my enemy. Now I know that he is my friend!” This was the quintessential charismatic moment.

Julius Nyerere of Tanzania Julius Nyerere (figure 1.3), the future leader of Tanzania, offered a somewhat more sedate appeal. He conceived of himself, and was regarded by the multitudes in Tanganyika (the name of the colony before the accession of Zanzibar), as both mwalimu (teacher) and baba wa taifa (father of his nation). He constantly admon-

Figure 1.3 Julius Nyerere

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ished his people as if he were their primary school teacher. Mwalimu scolded his countrymen for failing to match the world’s great powers: “Our friends are using their brains while our [people] sleep and grow fungus; they are sending rockets into outer space while we are eating wild roots!” Nyerere vigorously promoted Swahili as a common language: he spoke only Swahili in country, and even translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to demonstrate the language’s adaptability. Despite his commitment to Swahili, Nyerere was brilliantly articulate in English and was the first Tanganyikan to get a university degree overseas (in Scotland). He was also baptized Catholic at age twenty. Coming from a small tribe, he was not associated with any significant subgroup of Tanganyikans and faced almost no opposition in his election as president of the first nationalist party, the Tanganyikan African National Union (TANU). As president of independent Tanganyika, he refused to live in the state house and reported that was far more comfortable joking with peasants on the road than speaking with diplomats. Typical of the first generation of leaders, he was also trusted by the British (who administered Tanganyika as a trust territory after German defeat in World War I). As independence was foreseen by the trust arrangement, Nyerere never engaged in the kind of agitation that would get him arrested. It was several years later, after articulating a visionary statement for his country, that his fame reached charismatic proportions. He released his Arusha Declaration in 1967 (supplemented by his essay “Education for SelfReliance”), in which he articulated an ideology of Uhuru na Ujamaa (Freedom and Socialism). This was followed by the nationalization of banks, insurance companies, sisal estates, and other large establishments, and a code of conduct (moving them toward monastery rules) for all party officials. This announcement set off a spontaneous

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set of celebrations and marches across the country, with reports from the local press that an “entire village was seething with revolutionary enthusiasm emitted by the Spirit of Arusha.” Later on, during a long march led by Nyerere, The Standard reported that “Mwalimu’s brisk march into the town [of Mwanza] stunned the masses who on seeing him in sound health were driven wild with admiration and excitement to borders of near frenzy. The entire town was gripped with the revolutionary fervor of the Spirit of Arusha.” Nyerere’s vision for Tanzania — and indeed for Africa — was one that would build on native socialism and hard work to catch up with the great powers. That vision captured the imagination of his countrymen, many of whom believed his capabilities for transforming their society were extraordinary.

Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta (figure 1.4), Kenya’s first independence leader, may not have been credited with magical powers or adulation. Yet, during his long rule, few questioned that the presidency was his entitlement. He was seen not as a transitory political leader but rather as an embodiment of his country. An orphan, he was enrolled in a Scottish mission school near Nairobi. As a Kikuyu, he was a member of the plurality linguistic group in Kenya (representing about 21 percent of the population). The Kikuyu are not only Kenya’s largest group, but also centrally located and, thus, were the primary victims of land seizures by the colonists establishing plantations in Kenya’s central highlands. The group’s numbers and grievances facilitated their political mobilization. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Kenyatta (then known as “Johnstone,” the name given him by missionaries) became active in Kikuyu orga-

Figure 1.4 Jomo Kenyatta

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nizations and by 1928 was publishing a Kikuyu-language newspaper in Nairobi. A year later he emigrated to the United Kingdom and, while there, married an English woman. He studied anthropology at the London School of Economics (and later in Moscow) and worked under Bronisław Malinowski, considered one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century. While physically removed from Kenya, Kenyatta remained focused on the country and, specifically, Kikuyu history and culture, entitling his thesis Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (1938) — a collection of essays that described the social ruin brought on by colonial policy. Seeking to enhance his credibility among Kenyans, he dropped the surname “Johnstone” and became “Kenyatta.” Kenyatta returned to his homeland in 1946 and joined the Kikuyu Central Association to help recover the “White Highlands,” the area in central Kenya heavily settled by European farmers. Shortly, he became its secretary general. The Association was dissolved by the British government for its radicalism, but it reemerged as the Kenya African Union (KAU), seeking to expand beyond Kikuyu membership. Kenyatta became the KAU’s president. As he traveled throughout the country, his speeches attracted tens of thousands of people and gave subtle signals of his support for the Mau Mau, the insurgent group seeking to retake the highlands. When violence broke out between the Mau Mau and white settlers, Kenyatta was arrested. He refused to denounce the insurgency and, after a five-month trial, was convicted in 1953 and sentenced to seven years. In that same year, the KAU was banned. Kenyatta’s persecution as a spokesman for independence gave him a unifying appeal. His charisma now combined with widespread support. When Kenyatta was freed in 1961, he assumed control of the dominant independence movement (now called the Kenyan African

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National Union, or KANU). And with KANU’s victory in the independence election, he had an uncontested claim on the country’s presidency — a post he held until his death in 1978.

Léopold Senghor of Senegal With some 95 percent of Senegalese professing the Muslim faith, and with Wolof speakers constituting a majority of Senegalese, Léopold Senghor (figure 1.5) was a double minority: his father was a Serer Catholic, and his mother was a Muslim from the Peul-speaking community. As a child, he was sent to a Catholic boarding school. Later, he transferred to a secular French school, where he excelled in French literature and won a scholarship to study in France. He studied there through university and was honored with an appointment as a literature professor in Tours and in Paris. He took on French citizenship in 1932 and became the first African to be an elected member of the Académie Française. Senghor served in the French army in World War II. He was captured and interned in a German prison camp, and when he was released, he joined the French resistance. After the war, he won a seat in the French National Assembly as a member of the French Socialist Party. Senghor served as a state secretary and then an advisory minister in the Fourth Republic’s socialist governments. He was on the drafting committee for the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. Up until independence, he favored Senegal being an equal region within France but retained strong socialist ideals. Part of Senghor’s international prestige was built on his poetry (written in French) that gave beauty and substance to the glorification of blackness, in the philosophy of négritude. Here he connected his personality and his future to African culture and sensibility. Upon his return to Senegal, he lent his support for African workers when

Figure 1.5 Léopold Senghor

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conductors (bringing groundnuts to Dakar) went on strike against the French national railways. His combination of international prestige and a message combining culture and socialism earned him great honor. He became the first president of independent Senegal as a revered figure throughout the country.

Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea Sékou Touré (figure 1.6) earned his charismatic status quite differently from Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Senghor, all of whom combined overseas European education with an ability to connect with villagers. To be sure, he studied at a French technical school in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, but he was more a rebel than a prized student in the colonial system. He was expelled from school for leading a food riot. After landing a job in the postal service, he quickly became a labor organizer there and led the first successful labor union strike in French West Africa. Unlike Senghor and Nkrumah, Touré was not from a marginalized ethnic group. He was a Mandé, a group that made us some 48 percent of Guinea’s population. But he identified himself even more broadly. He portrayed himself as a descendant of Samory, one of the great anticolonial rebel fighters in the nineteenth century who had an appeal beyond today’s Guinea, including today’s Burkina Faso and Mali. He legitimated himself not by tribe but by a broader category of nation. Like Senghor, he got elected to the French National Assembly in 1951. But unlike Senghor, he was not permitted to take his seat. He was twice rebuffed to take his legislative seat in Paris. But after his election as mayor of Conakry, Guinea’s capital, French colonial authorities granted him permission to sit in 1956. His great fame and heroic status came two years later, when President de Gaulle offered French colonial territories the right to either demand immediate independence or

Figure 1.6 Ahmed Sékou Touré

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recognize their long-term interests as fellow members of the newly created French Community. Touré was the only leader who lobbied for the former, making Guinea the first independent French-speaking state in sub-Saharan Africa, with Touré as its elected president. This turned him into a national hero, the only client of the French who would stand for true independence. His revolutionary and anticolonial ardor continued throughout his presidency (Touré, 1973). His nationalist prestige allowed him to retain presidential power for twenty-six years, until 1984, when he died in office. After the vote of 1958, when Guinea voted to demand its independence from France, the French tore out every phone hookup, removed all their office equipment, and left the newly independent country with no infrastructure. Unfazed, Touré turned to the Soviet Union for support, a bold move during the height of the Cold War. Later, after Nkrumah was ousted from power by a coup d’état, he became an honored guest in Guinea. Touré continued to have an uncanny ability to marginalize competing elites (surviving numerous coup attempts and assassination plots) while basking in the adulation of the masses.

Patrice Lumumba of Congo (Kinshasa) Patrice Lumumba’s charisma was amplified by his martyrdom (figure 1.7). Unlike the British and French in their colonies, the Belgians did not educate or train a professional class of Africans. In the late 1950s, there were almost no Congolese with European university experience. This was true for Lumumba. His education by both Protestant and Catholic missionaries qualified him for a job as a postal clerk. He became active in the Belgian Liberal party, bringing him into some pan-African circles, and in 1958 he created a nationalist party, the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC). History suddenly moved all too quickly. In October

Figure 1.7 Patrice Lumumba

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1959, while leading a rally in Stanleyville (today’s Kisangani), Lumumba was arrested for fomenting a riot in which thirty people were killed. He was saddled with a sixty-nine-month prison sentence for his instigating role. But when his party won a decisive victory in the first local elections to be held in the Congo in January 1960, he was released to participate in a roundtable conference in Brussels to discuss Congo’s future. Belgium agreed to liberate Congo in six months’ time, with national elections to be held in May. Lumumba’s youth (he was then thirty-four years old) and radical vision made him wildly popular in electoral rallies. After the vote, he became the first prime minister of independent Congo. He differentiated himself from the president, Joseph Kasavubu, by his populist and ardent rhetoric on the day power was transferred, June 30, 1960. Lumumba (Lumumba, 1961, 44–47) railed against the atrocities unleashed on the population of the Congo Free State under Belgium’s King Leopold II: No Congolese will ever forget that independence was won in struggle, a persevering and inspired struggle carried on from day to day, a struggle, in which we were undaunted by privation or suffering and stinted neither strength nor blood.. . . The Republic of the Congo has been proclaimed and our beloved country’s future is now in the hands of its own people. Brothers, let us commence together a new struggle, a sublime struggle that will lead our country to peace, prosperity and greatness.. . . We shall show the world what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.

With the (Belgium-supported) secession of the Katanga province months later, the West did nothing to support the central government in Kinshasa. Lumumba

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went to the Soviet Union for support. Although the Soviets had limited resources to influence events in Congo, the resulting foreign accord led to a break with President Kasavubu, who arrested his own prime minister. Lumumba was brought to Katanga, where he was tortured and killed by a firing squad. Lumumba became a martyr, representing socialism, nationalism, and an African future freed from the colonial yoke and continued interference.

Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria Awolowo (Awo) and Azikiwe (Zik) were Nigeria’s preeminent “southern” nationalist leaders, creating allNigerian movements for independence. Awolowo (figure 1.8) was a Yoruba from the southwest, a language group representing about 20 percent of Nigerians. Azikiwe (figure 1.9) was an Igbo from the southeast, a language group representing some 17 percent of Nigerians. While both Yoruba and Igbo were plurality groups in two of Nigeria’s three regions, they were minorities compared with the Hausas (representing about 29 percent of the population), who constituted a plurality in the Northern region. In the late 1950s, as Awolowo and Azikiwe traveled through their respective regions, the massive crowds chanted “Awo” and “Zik,” nicknames that later became the titles of their treatises. (Awolowo, 1960; Azikiwe, 1961). They fostered an enormous optimism and hope for what the inevitable independence of Nigeria would yield. Awo got a law degree in London and came back to Nigeria as a journalist. In 1947, he founded the Egbe Omo Oduduwa (the Society for the Sons of Oduduwa, Oduduwa being the traditional Yoruba deity) and then the “Action Group,” the political party that in 1951 was demanding independence in a federal republic. Awo became western premier, and with great funding from the cocoa marketing boards, he was the first to bring universal

Figure 1.8 Obafemi Awolowo

Douglas Miller, Hulton Archive, Getty Images

Figure 1.9 Nnamdi Azikiwe

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primary education and free health care for all to a region anywhere in Africa. He was lionized for this progressive agenda. Zik was trained by Methodists in Lagos, and then went to the United States to attend Howard University and finally Lincoln University, where he received a university degree. He returned to Nigeria and founded the West African Pilot, the most influential nationalist newspaper on the continent. He was based then in Lagos, the country’s capital in the Yoruba-dominated southwest. This gave him a national vision, well beyond his home region. He founded his own political party, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon (NCNC), with a goal for a unified (i.e., non-federal) Nigeria. He became chief minister of the Eastern Region in the late colonial period and then governor-general (formal head of state) at independence. With the proclamation of Nigeria as a republic (1963), in an electoral alliance with the Northern party, he became Nigeria’s first independent president. Zik was celebrated in the east, but through his editorship of the Pilot and his vision for a free and independent Africa, was endowed with charisma throughout Nigeria.

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Conclusion

The late 1950s and early independence years were a sort of Jeffersonian moment in Africa. A generation of largely Western-educated nationalists took the helm of newly independent African states to overcome the oppressive, racist, and anti-developmental colonial states, envisioning independent Africa freed from the colonial yoke. In their constitutions, they fashioned new goals of educational and economic advancement as obligations of their states to their citizens (Spiro, 1960, 76). For example, the Somali constitution, written for one of the poorest countries of the world, promised all citizens free primary education and social security (Articles 35 and 37). Freed

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from colonial dictates, African states would serve the real needs of their citizens. Fast-forwarding, Nkrumah declared himself a demigod and was ignominiously overthrown by his own army. Lumumba was killed by regional warlords. Nyerere survived, but watched his country stagnate economically for a generation. Senghor left office with honor, but with his country in similar economic straits. Touré’s experiment in radical independence provided Guineans with little but poverty and stagnation. Awo and Zik survived, not without controversy, but both gave way to a succession of military rulers who were impervious to the more progressive visions of Nigeria’s charismatic founders. Clearly, charisma did not lead African states to a promised land. In chapters 2-4, we catalogue the economic, security, and democratic deficits that turned untamed hope into a gallows humor of disappointment, as many of the promises of the founding fathers went unfulfilled.

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2. Lag in Human Development

T H E D R E A M S O F I N D E P E N D E N C E were scintillating. The young and ambitious generation of founding fathers articulated visions of négritude, African socialism, and pan-Africanism, all of which pointed from an oppressed past to a glorious future. Alas, on dimensions of human development, security, and democracy, the postindependence era was fraught. In this chapter, focusing on income, education, and health — all components of human development — we chronicle African states’ struggles to fulfill expectations.

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Income

Since 1960, Africa has lagged other regions of the world in per capita income.1 As we see in figure 2.1, average per capita income in sub-Saharan states stagnates from 1960 (the year of independence for most sub-Saharan states) to 1990 — three decades that saw economic growth in most other regions. While growth has been more robust since 2000 (our subject in chapter 14), recent growth spurts have not dramatically narrowed the gap between African countries and other parts of the world.2 Some might argue that this is an unfair race, and that we should be comparing African states to other countries that were similarly impoverished in 1960. Yet, subSaharan states don’t fare better in this comparison. First,

1

The three-letter abbreviations used for regions and countries can be found on page xix.

2

As we discuss in chapter 14, Botswana is an outlier within sub-Saharan Africa, experiencing relatively consistent growth since the 1960s.

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NA

Average GDP per Capita (1000s USD)

20

15

10

ECA

●

●

5

● ●

EAP MENA LAC

● ● ●

SSA SA

0

1960

1970

1980

1990

we identify a group of thirty-six countries with an average per capita income similar to sub-Saharan African (SSA) states: in 1960, this comparison group had an average GDP per capita of 1,182 USD, 65 USD more than the SSA sample. By 1990, average GDP per capita in this comparison group had increased over 125 percent (i.e., more than doubled); in our SSA sample, the increase over that same period was only 34 percent. Second, we look at specific examples of countries within and beyond sub-Saharan Africa that began the 1960s at similar levels of economic underdevelopment. The poor performance of resource-rich countries like Angola, Kenya, and Nigeria is especially striking when compared with the development trajectories of an Asian “tiger,” South Korea, and the new colossus, China. As figure 2.2 illustrates, all five states languished in deep collective poverty in 1960. Books and articles on Korea and China pointed to the barriers preventing economic growth, and

Figure 2.1 GDP per Capita by Region, 1960-1990

L AG I N H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T

Average GDP per Capita (1000s USD)

South Korea

7.5

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Figure 2.2 GDP per Capita in Selected Cases, 1960-1990

5.0

2.5 China Nigeria Kenya Angola

1960

1970

1980

1990

these expositions were not much different from what was written about Africa’s poverty.3 But in the mid-1970s, Korea broke from the pack with rapid growth. By 1990, the average income in South Korea reached nearly $9,000 per year, roughly ten times the levels achieved by Nigeria, Kenya, and Angola. China broke from the pack a decade after Korea and by 1990 had a per capita income roughly two times larger than these African states — a divergence that continued to grow after 1990. This dismal economic performance among African states forced many economists to question earlier Nobel Prize–winning models of economic growth, which predicted that poorer countries would grow at a faster rate and, thus, uniformly converge to the higher income levels of more developed states (Sachs and Warner, 1995). These per capita figures are averages. Perhaps subSaharan countries are succeeding in raising the floor but simply are not producing exorbitantly wealthy citizens,

3

In her lead article for a symposium on “International Cooperation for Social Welfare,” Henderson (1960, 3) argues: “One half of the world’s population lives in monsoon Asia [including Korea]. Within this region, the concentration of population in countries already facing tremendous problems of poverty, illiteracy, and ill health, presents the most serious challenge to national and international economic and social policies and programs.”

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who occupy the long right tail of the income distribution in more developed states. In figure 2.3, we focus instead on whether those at the bottom are escaping dire poverty, and the numbers tell the same story. Using the available data from 2000 to 2010, we calculate the percentage of the population living on less than roughly 3 dollars per day (3.20 in 2011 dollars, to use the World Bank’s precise cutoff). In thirty-five (or 81 percent of) African countries, more than half of the population falls below this level of subsistence; only ten other countries in the world reach such alarming levels. Note that this figure looks more bleak if we exclude the small island countries of Mauritius (MUS), Seychelles (SYC), and Comoros (COM). While these less-impoverished islands constitute half of the countries with poverty rates below 40 percent, their combined population (2.9 million in 2010) is minuscule. EAP

ECA

LAC

MENA

SA

SSA

0 20 40 60 80 100

0 20 40 60 80 100

0 20 40 60 80 100

40 30

Number of Countries

20 10 0 40 30 20 10 0

Percentage of Population Living on Less than 3.20 USD (Average of Non-Missing Data from 2000−2010)

2

Education

Income is not the only way to measure development. Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has forcefully argued

Figure 2.3 Share of Population in Poverty

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that development involves enhancing individuals’ “capabilities” to lead lives that they value (Sen, 2001). From the individual perspective, education is a central capability that increases one’s ability to experience and produce “works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth” (Nussbaum, 2011). From the societal perspective, education creates “human capital,” which economists see as an essential driver of economic growth.

Average Years of Schooling (Ages 20−24)

A great deal of development aid to Africa has gone into the educational sector, but with only limited success. While citizens in other regions can expect to receive nine or more years of education by their mid-twenties, the average African student will not receive more than an elementary school education (see figure 2.4). As one might expect, this affects student achievement; children in many African countries are deprived a basic education and, thus, score below their peers on international exams.

NA

12

ECA

9 ●

●

EAP LAC MENA

●

6

SSA SA

●

0 1960

1970

1980

1990

Figure 2.4 Years of Schooling by Region, 1960-1990

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More fine-grained evidence comes from the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ), a consortium of education ministries, policymakers, and researchers that, in conjunction with UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning, collects primary school data from eleven African countries.4 From their surveys, we have standardized student achievement tests in reading and mathematics for students who were then in the sixth form. The data show that about 60 percent of the students do not reach what SACMEQ considers the minimum acceptable reading level, and 86 percent fail to reach what is classified as a desirable reading level. UWEZO, a nongovernmental organization operating in East Africa, reports similar findings from its household surveys in Kenya, (mainland) Tanzania, and Uganda (UWEZO, 2014). Between 2009 and 2012, the NGO collected data on 823,074 school-aged children from age six (seven in Tanzania) to sixteen and (in the final round) on 10,422 schools. Their results reveal that “less than a third of children enrolled in grade 3 have basic grade 2 level literacy and numeracy [and] a significant number. . . do not possess foundational grade 2 level skills even as they approach the end of the primary school cycle” (4). Moreover, and despite considerable efforts at reform, there were no positive trends over the three rounds of surveys. One plausible answer to the disappointing results comes from the school inspections, which found that at least 10 percent of the teachers were absent from school on any given day. Analysts have pointed to problems beyond the failure to monitor teacher absenteeism: leakage from education budgets (usually supplemented with generous foreign aid, both public and private), high levels of pupil absenteeism (with 34 percent of the students marked as “often absent”), and high dropout rates (24 percent of the schools report

4

SACMEQ’s Round II survey includes information on around 40,000 students, 5,300 teachers, and 2,000 headmasters from 2,000 primary schools.

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drop-outs occur often) (Devarajan and Fengler, 2013). The culprits are manifold — and we will discuss one candidate cause, the language of instruction, in greater detail in chapter 10— but here we report the outcome: a failure in independent African states to match other regions in the production of human capital.

3

Health

Health has been a bright spot in recent African development. Data from the World Health Organization indicate that germ-based diseases account for a declining share of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, due in large part to mass vaccination campaigns. Measles has been effectively eliminated, the percentage of deaths from malaria has been reduced by about 25 percent, and substantial progress has been made on HIV/AIDS and diarrheal diseases. Recognizing these trends, the Economist editorialized in 2012 that the decline in African child mortality is “the best story in development.” Yet, despite these recent improvements, mortality rates in Africa remain relatively high. Consider infant mortality, the indicator most often used to judge the quality of a nation’s health sector.5 As can be seen from figure 2.5, sub-Saharan African countries made progress in the thirty years after independence: from well over 100 deaths per 10,000 births, the mortality rate in Africa fell by 30 percent in a generation. But, that was the slowest improvement of all regions, and the rate in 1990 remained the worst in the world. Returning to our earlier cases, China and South Korea saw rates converging to European standards, while infant mortality rates remained stubbornly high in Angola and Nigeria. Africa has an even greater gap looking at maternal mortality (see table 2.1).6 This indicator is more indicative of government failures than infant mortality, as mothers’ deaths are typically due to poorly organized clinics and

5

Infant mortality is measured by the World Development Indicators (WDI) as the number of infants dying before reaching one year of age per 1,000 births.

6

According to the World Health Organization, maternal mortality is the number of women per 100,000 live births that die within forty-two days of the termination of pregnancy from any cause related to pregnancy or its management.

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180

Figure 2.5 Infant Mortality by Country, 1960-1990

●

Infant Mortality per 1,000 Live Births

●

● ● ● ●

●

Angola Nigeria

● ●

90

● ●

India

●

● ● ●

Kenya

● ●

●

China

● ●

0 1960

1970

1980

South Korea

1990

limited availability of urgent care (rather than the local disease burden). While data on maternal mortality does not extend as far back in time, even in 1990 the lag remained pronounced. By 1990, the rate in Africa was above 900 (per 100,000 live births); compare this to about 200 for other less developed countries and virtually zero for Europe. In the subsequent decade, African states made considerable progress. Yet, they continued to underperform all other regions. While maternal mortality in China declined to fifty-eight by 2000, rates in Angola, Kenya, and Nigeria remained between thirteen and twenty times higher. Poverty, minimal education, and poor health are not independent outcomes: it is difficult for unhealthy children to keep up in school and, thus, obtain the education that wins them a good job. To be more concrete, consider the effects of intestinal worms (e.g., hookworm, roundworm, whipworm, and schistosomiasis), parasites that

Table 2.1 Average Maternal Mortality Region 1990

2000 %∆

SSA SA EAP LAC MENA ECA NA

767 421 166 113 91 24 10.5

900 687 259 136 129 32 9.5

–15 –39 –36 –17 –29 –26 11

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infect about 1.3 billion people worldwide. A study in southern Busia, a farming region in Kenya close to Lake Victoria, found that 92 percent of students surveyed had at least one infection related to these diseases (Miguel and Kremer, 2004). (This could be an underestimate, as students absent on the day of the survey may have had even higher rates of infection.) The economists who conducted this study found that treating the intestinal worms reduced student absenteeism.7 Disease, then, can not only directly affect quality of life, but also have an indirect effect on educational outcomes.

Noncommunicable Health Threats If progress has been impressive in dealing with germbased diseases, a growing concern for African health comes from noncommunicable factors, such as nutrition, alcoholism, obesity, and road accidents. A tragic accident occurred in Cameroon in April 2016, where a lead car in a convoy transporting the US ambassador to the UN — driving at breakneck speed — ran over and killed a young boy celebrating the ambassador’s arrival (Hume, Halasz, and Tanku, 2016). This unsettling incident brought attention to a larger problem: road travel in much of sub-Saharan Africa entails considerable risk. In 2013, the Economist reported 26.9 fatalities for every 100,000 people (The Economist Data Team, 2015).8 Compare that with just 9.3 fatalities in Europe, despite per capita car ownership that is ten times higher than in Africa. Or compare this instead with countries that were similarly underdeveloped in the early 1960s: India has 16.6; Korea, 12.0 deaths by road accident per 100,000 people (World Health Organization). Moreover, eight of the ten worst countries in the world in terms of automobile death rates are in Africa. And pedestrians bear a good deal of the burden, accounting for 40 percent of Africa’s road deaths, compared with a world average of 22 percent.

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7

The magnitude of both the direct effects and existence of any positive spillovers have been the subjects of a heated debate. Humphreys (2015) offers a “nonpartisan’s” summary of the “worm wars.”

8

See also Mathers and Loncar (2006), who estimate that road accidents will be the fourth largest cause of death in lowincome countries in the coming years. Habyarimana and Jack (2009) suggest why African roads are dangerous and how this public health problem can be (partially) remediated.

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The AIDS Pandemic Africa’s AIDS epidemic is by far the worst in the world. To be sure, there has been notable progress in stemming its tide in sub-Saharan Africa. There were, according to UN data, 2.3 million new HIV infections detected in 2000; in 2014, that number was down to 1.4 million, a drop of 41 percent (UNAIDS, 2015). Still, in 2017, according to AVERT, 25.7 million people were HIV positive in Africa, which amounted to 70 percent of the global total, with 660,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2017 computed for Africa (AVERT, 2015).

A South Africa Case Study Given the scale of the epidemic, we dive deeper into the South African case, drawing on excellent qualitative work by Lieberman (2009). As it is challenging to summarize Lieberman’s statement of the problem without also previewing his explanation, this section briefly touches on some proposed causes of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic — a discussion we otherwise largely defer to parts II and III. Health data from South Africa again reveal that poverty can not fully explain mortality. After all, South Africa ranks among the top five richest countries in Africa. Yet, it is also the country that has had the largest HIV/AIDS epidemic, with an estimated 6.3 million people (19.1 percent of the general population) living HIV positive.9 In KwaZulu-Natal, a province east of Lesotho, for women between the ages of thirty and thirty-four, the infection rate exceeds 35 percent. At the beginning of the crisis in the early 1980s, nearly 90 percent of the diagnosed AIDS cases were among males, mostly homosexual and bisexual. But by 1989, heterosexual transmission became the principal means of transmission, and the epidemic grew extraordinarily

9

This comes from the CIA Factbook. In percentage terms, as of 2011, southern Africa is the region most affected by the virus. In Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and South Africa, the percentage of the population living HIV-positive ranges from 19.9 (South Africa) to 26.5 (Swaziland). Nearby Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Namibia have somewhat lower percentages, but all over ten percent. No other country in the world breaks ten percent.

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fast. By 2005, an estimated 320,000 South Africans had died of AIDS-related causes. Average life expectancy in South Africa was sixty-four in 1992; ten years later it fell to forty-six, a shocking decline due almost entirely to HIV/AIDS. Although South Africa has a democratically elected government, its response to the crisis was halting and slow; it was not until 2000 that AIDS programs appeared as a line item in the national budget. The health ministry, wracked with resignations by senior officials assigned to the AIDS program, was not only slow to respond but antagonistic to potential partners. The ministry was unwilling to support nongovernmental efforts to provide medical aid, leading civil society organizations to protest against and, ultimately, sue the government for nonfulfillment of the National AIDS Plan. The government also alienated the international medical community by promoting its own AIDS drug without any evidence of its effectiveness. The government seemed uninterested in solving the public health crisis, as it failed to target information to the gay community, the early victims of the epidemic, and even cut its AIDS-education budget in the mid-1990s, just as the percentage of cases was rising. It was not until 2007 that South Africa belatedly agreed to address this health catastrophe with reporting that met international standards. What distinguishes South Africa’s delayed response to this health crisis from similarly situated countries elsewhere in the world? In an ingenious comparison with Brazil’s more comprehensive and rapid response to AIDS, Lieberman is able to rule out standard explanations such as regime type (both South Africa and Brazil were thirdwave democracies), bureaucratic competence (both had moderately effective government services), and civil society (both had well-positioned activists demanding government action). Instead, Lieberman focuses attention

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on these countries’ different levels of electoral competition. He shows that opposition parties in South Africa, namely the Democratic Alliance and Inkatha Freedom Party, were unable to challenge the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) dominance in 2004. Facing little competition, the ANC could remain silent on the epidemic, despite the government’s glaring failure to address the public health crisis.10 Yet, the ANC’s unassailable electoral control cannot be the entire explanation. Autocrats, such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, also faced little political competition. However, they responded much more aggressively to HIV/AIDS. Sharp and reified racial boundaries provide another plausible explanation for South Africa’s delayed response to the epidemic (Lieberman, 2009, 143). The rigid categories of “black/African,” “Coloured,” “Indian,” and “white/European” date back to the apartheid era and remain highly relevant. For example, surveys from the 1990s suggest that nearly 25 percent of South Africans do not want a neighbor of a different race, and interracial marriage is almost nonexistent. Indeed, race almost perfectly predicts the language spoken in the home and the household’s media diet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, discussions about AIDS in South Africa have also been racialized, with blacks (blaming white gays) and whites (blaming black sex workers) each seeing the other as responsible. Conspiracy theories abound in the popular press about how the disease is being used by one group to decimate the other. This racialism reached embarrassing levels when the head of the South African National Blood Services proposed disposing of blood from black donors in fear of infecting the wider society. In the face of this racialization, a technical and unbiased approach to treating the epidemic was politically challenging. In office, Mandela was silent on the issue.

10

Unlike Brazil or even other African countries, the ANC’s leadership in ending apartheid earned them loyalty among a great majority and insulated them from cries for action in response to HIV/AIDS. Nelson Mandela, whose charismatic authority was unquestioned, did not use his bully pulpit to speak out on AIDS, as he feared it would hurt his electoral standing (Lieberman, 2009, 140). His successor Thabo Mbeki, despite his technocratic background, followed suit and had his health minister promote a healthy diet as the proper antidote. Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s successor, continued this despicable political tradition of denial, recommending a shower after sex with an HIV victim to reduce the risk of infection.

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Thabo Mbeki, his successor, argued publicly in 2001 that civil society groups had a hidden agenda; their demands for action were, in fact, proclamations that “our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust” (quoted in Lieberman, 2009, 158).11 Racial boundaries, a clear fact of life in many sub-Saharan states, but especially in South Africa, have reinforced a culture of blame and denial of responsibility that has not served citizens well in the face of a health catastrophe. One might ask, if Lieberman is correct, how do we explain the vigilant government response to the pandemic in Rwanda, a country in which ethnic boundaries dividing Tutsis and Hutus (reified under the Belgians) have been portrayed as racial? Indeed, since the 1994 genocide, there has been a “dramatic increase in [international] resources to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic. . . and a corresponding increase in the availability of services. . . . With these resources, the Government of Rwanda has rapidly launched and brought to scale national HIV/AIDS services” (Kayirangwa et al., 2006, i27). One explanation is that post-genocide, many Tutsi women were infected with AIDS due to the gender-based violence perpetrated during the genocide. Kagame’s Tutsi-led government was, even in the absence of political competition, especially concerned with addressing the needs of this constituency and invited international organizations to help. But this cannot be the full answer. Well before Kagame’s administration, “in 1986, Rwanda was the first country in the world to conduct and report on a nationally representative HIV seroprevalence survey. Also, in 1986, the Ministry of Health, the Red Cross, and the Norwegian Red Cross initiated an extensive AIDS education program using radio and public health educators. In 1987, the National AIDS Program was established in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO)”

11

43

Once out of office, Mandela changed course. At an international conference in Durban in 2001, he gave implicit support to the international response to AIDS. In January 2005, the cause became personal with his last surviving son, Makgatho, dying of AIDS-related complications. Politically, however, he walked a fine line, never criticizing Mbeki’s reluctance to endorse the international campaign to fight AIDS.

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(Kayirangwa et al., 2006, p. i27). Consistent with Lieberman’s argument, it could be that HIV/AIDS was never racialized in Rwanda, with one group blaming the other for the disease and using their alleged culpability as an excuse to deny public services. We do not have the data to support or refute that story. Whether sharp racial boundaries impede public health campaigns outside of South Africa, thus, remains an open question. In either case, South Africa’s failure to stem the AIDS pandemic certainly weakens the Economist’s sanguine evaluation of Africa’s health programs.

The Influence of PEPFAR on African Public Health Foreign assistance has been a popular approach for addressing Africa’s underdevelopment (see chapter 12 for our discussion of foreign aid’s effectiveness). The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was US president George W. Bush’s singular effort to address the international AIDS pandemic. From 2003 to 2013, $42 billion was allocated for prevention, treatment, and palliative care. There were fifteen focus countries in this program, twelve of them in Africa. PEPFAR is an exceptionally resourced example of aid targeted at a specific problem. Indeed, PEPFAR constituted an infusion of funds larger in many cases than the entire health budget of the recipient countries. At one point, PEPFAR equaled 118 percent of the government’s health budget in Ethiopia, 128 percent in Rwanda, 155 percent in Kenya, 234 percent in Mozambique, and 249 percent in Uganda. There is little question that PEPFAR has been consequential in reducing adult deaths due to HIV/AIDS. One study estimates that the program averted 2.9 million HIV infections from 2004 to 2013 and, by increasing the life span of those infected, reduced the number of orphans on the continent by nine million (Heaton et al., 2015). But the scope of the intervention’s effects has been

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limited. For example, there is no evidence that the heavy emphasis on abstinence as a preventive measure had any effect on sex behavior (Lo, Lowe, and Bendavid, 2016). Similarly, PEPFAR has not helped to reduce neonatal mortality rates, and if anything, evidence suggests a slight increase in such deaths after the PEPFAR intervention. Lee and Izama (2015) suggest this is due to low-quality primary health systems, which did not benefit from the infusion of PEPFAR funds. These authors argue that PEPFAR not only failed to improve local health services, but actually crowded out more effective domestic programs; the increased funding and salaries for those treating HIV/AIDS diverted qualified staff from other health care services.

Ebola Outbreak in 2014 The Ebola outbreak in 2014 provides additional perspective on the health lag in sub-Saharan Africa. As of early 2016, there were 11,315 deaths in Africa caused by Ebola since the most recent outbreak. In Liberia, the figure is 4,809; in Sierra Leone, 3,955; in Guinea, 2,536, and in Nigeria, 8 (BBC News, 2016). A new outbreak in the town of Beni in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018, despite the development of new vaccines, sadly reveals that this disease remains a threat in Africa. Fighting Ebola demands state capacity; tracking individuals who have come in contact with infected individuals requires extensive government surveillance and record keeping. A professionalized medical establishment with clear rules of engagement thus appears essential for containing and preventing Ebola. We see some indication of this among the affected West African countries. Christensen et al. (2018a) test this claim experimentally: roughly a year before the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, two interventions were randomly assigned to governmentrun health clinics. One focused on community monitoring

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of clinics and the other on status awards for nurses. The authors find that these programs increased the perceived quality of local health care, encouraged sick patients to seek care, and increased the reported number of Ebola cases. Nigeria quickly contained confirmed cases and stemmed the spread of the disease — a feat that Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone struggled with. Nigeria has about four physicians and eighteen trained nurses and midwives per 10,000 people, about four times that of the countries least successful in containing the outbreak. But trust in government also played a role. In dealing with this epidemic, public health officials in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea called upon communities to change deep-rooted behaviors, such as burial customs. These dramatic behavioral changes would be a tall order in any setting; following years of poor service provision and corruption scandals, many distrusting citizens defied such demands, with some health workers in Guinea being killed by a skeptical and fearful mob. Based on a unique survey in Monrovia, Liberia, Tsai, Blair, and Morse (2015) suggest that distrust in government contributed to the spread of the disease: dubious households were less likely to use preventive measures and exhibited lower support for containment policies. (In part 2, we discuss the slave trade as one historical explanation for this high level of distrust.) It is informative to compare the crisis response to Ebola in West Africa with the SARS epidemic in East Asia, affecting China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, with further isolated cases around the world. Its sudden outbreak in October 2002 at first was kept under cloak and veil by the Chinese government. But within months the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) were in full investigative mode, Hong Kong and Singapore established quarantines, and the Chinese premier shortly

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thereafter issued quarantine orders and threatened to punish local officials who did not report SARS cases in a timely and accurate manner. Within five months of the outbreak, the affected countries set up a joint ministerial task force to address the health pandemic, and in July 2003, nine months after outbreak, the WHO was able to announce that the disease had been contained (Timeline of the SARS outbreak, 2016). While there are of course many differences between SARS and Ebola — including the threat to African cultural practices from isolating victims from their kin — the ability of East Asian states (a region with average incomes just slightly above those of sub-Saharan African countries in 1960) to resolve their health problem without facing massive distrust from their own citizens reveals the special problem many African states face in addressing crises that challenge the health and safety of their own populations.

Health and Human Development in Africa Health is a crucial component of human development. There is much to applaud about recent improvements in post-independence Africa. But on several dimensions we see a persistent lag compared with the rest of the world. First, although communicable diseases now account for fewer deaths, the gap with the rest of the world remains. Second, there is a disturbing rise in Africa of deaths due to noncommunicable conditions, whether from obesity, alcoholism, or road safety. And, as shown with road safety, these death rates are greater than in other postcolonial countries that were underdeveloped a half-century ago. Third, in areas where government intervention is key to success, such as in AIDS treatment or responding to unanticipated public health epidemics (Ebola), many African governments lack the professionalism and trust to mount an effective response.

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4

Conclusion

Human development is a multifaceted concept, including income, education, and health. In this chapter we reviewed the record of African governments in advancing the human development of their citizens. On all three dimensions, we report progress since independence but not enough to close the gap with most other countries of the world. This is but one part of Africa’s lag that this book seeks to explain.

3. Lag in Democracy

I N T H E F I NA L Y E A R S O F C O L O N I A L RU L E , African leaders negotiated the transition to independence, haggling over the details of constitutions based largely on Western European traditions. Both colonial authorities and those inheriting the newly independent states hoped for democracies that would respect the rule of law. Yet, this hope was short-lived. In this chapter, we describe the collapse of democratic rule under a deluge of military coups and the rise of states built on selling offices rather than impartially administering law — what Max Weber called “prebendal,” but Africanists now dub “neopatrimonial” (Bratton and van de Walle, 1994).1

1

Turn to Authoritarian Rule

Charismatic founders were largely young men, schooled by missionaries, recipients of European university educations, and commoners. Peaceful anticolonial mobilization brought them to power, and they presided over constitutions derived from European democratic traditions. They had grand ambitions for their countries and for their continent and were revered by their fellow citizens. Yet, in a few short years, the optimism we describe in chapter 1 gave way to authoritarian tendencies. Zolberg (1966, 66) presciently observed the first generation of

1

In a patrimonial state, power flows directly from the leader. The “neo-” prefix indicates a mixed system, in which both traditional authority and bureaucratic agencies command resources.

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leaders transforming their political regimes using a variety of tactics: Co-optation, intimidation, exile, or detention of political opponents; modification of the electoral system to make competition impossible or at least unlikely; transformation of the constitution inherited from the European tradition to give wide discretionary authority to the executive and to restrict the activities of representative assemblies; the use of a criterion of political loyalty to select key administrators and division of the country into satrapies; administrative control over local government; reduction of the independence of the judiciary. . . ; transformation of major voluntary associations into ancillary organs of the party or their political neutralization; control over written and radio communications; reduction of consultation within the party and of accountability of the leadership to the members.

In sum, Zolberg distinguished two complementary projects of the charismatic generation after independence: “the attempt to achieve unanimity by erasing all traces of political opposition” and merging their political party and the government by creating what has become known as the “one-party state” (122-27). Despite their charisma and the excitement of independence, these early leaders faced real (if not subversive) opposition movements. Consider J. B. Danquah; he founded the United Gold Coast Convention in Ghana and helped elevate Nkrumah to the national political stage. He became a strong advocate of free speech and a powerful opponent of preventive detention. Similarly, Lamine Guèye of Senegal, although he remained a member of the Union Progressiste Sénégalaise, publicly criticized Senghor’s autocratic tendencies. Politicians of stature and integrity spoke out against the first generation of postindependence leaders. Fearing disintegration and eager to reclaim political and economic control from colonial in-

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terests, these leaders greeted this dissent with censorship and repression. Guinea’s charismatic founder, Sékou Touré, led the way in demonizing and repressing dissenters. As an apprentice in the French communist labor union, Touré had been schooled in authoritarian values. Upon assuming leadership of Guinea’s Parti démocratique de Guinée (PDG), he saw unity as the party’s principal goal. In speeches, he insisted that any opposition to the PDG represented saboteurs associated with the ancient colonial state. His political enemies languished in notorious dungeons. Alas, Touré’s ideas were not exceptional in the early independence period. In Ghana, documents from Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) rejected the notion that political opposition was important for democracy. In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere denied that the absence of a political opposition was tantamount to dictatorship (Sigmund, 1963, 193, 197). In Mali, Madeira Keita (1960, 19) published an article titled “Le Parti Unique en Afrique,” or “The Single Party in Africa.” In it he claims that “if the party is the true expression of the genuine aspirations of the people,” there is no need for civil society. Finally, in Senegal, Léopold Senghor (1961) wrote that opposition can only be “tempted to serve foreign powers. . . . Our duty is to prevent subversion.” While the elimination of competing parties undermined political accountability, the imposed unanimity did not facilitate the rapid expansion of public services or the adoption of growth-promoting policies. The independence parties were not unlike L. Frank Baum’s portayal of the Wizard of Oz: imposing in their awesome rhetoric, but pathetically weak in their ability to implement the wishes of their populations. When Bienen (1970) sought to find similarities between the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and the Communist Party of the

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Soviet Union (CPSU), he was shocked to find empty offices outside the then capital in Dar es Salaam with hardly any organizational structure.2 Nkrumah (1962) similarly noted that a year after independence, “the general staff [of the CPP] numbered less than thirty. The office was poorly equipped.” He ordered a rapid party-building campaign that eventually led to the declaration of Ghana as a oneparty state in 1964. A year later, in Côte d’Ivoire, at its first congress after independence, with its leading party having staved off several internal rebellions, the PDCI declared itself “a single party, for a single people, with a single leader” (Zolberg, 1966, 100). Nyerere could appeal to African roots of community to justify one-party rule, and Nkrumah could appeal to utopian goals. Others pointed out that since there were no ideological differences among factions, it would be best to resolve distributional issues in the context of a single party. But W. Arthur Lewis, a distinguished West Indian economist and adviser to Nkrumah, saw it for what it was. “The single-party,” he proclaimed, “fails in all its claims. It cannot represent all the people; or maintain free discussion; or give stable government; or above all, reconcile the differences between various regional groups. It is not natural to West African culture, except in the sense in which cancer is natural to West African culture. . . . It is partly the product of the hysteria of independence when some men found it possible to seize the state and suppress their opponents” (quoted in Tignor, 2006, 209). The descent into authoritarian rule — however cynical or noble the motivations — came shortly after independence.

2

Breakdown of Civilian Rule

For many countries, democracy was threatened through military takeover or coups d’état. Generals composed a first generation of coup leaders intent on stamping out the corruption and tribalism that infected young civil-

2

Bienen (1970, 470) concludes that the TANU “does not provide an institution which can transform the economy. . . it is too weak and too loose and has too few material and human resources to tackle development problems.”

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ian regimes. But noncommissioned officers led a second wave of coups, and these leaders relied heavily on the loyalty of ethnic kin rather than the support of the military or a broad political party. While coup leaders often promised to relinquish power to democratically elected successors, reforms were usually short-lived. As is apparent in figure 3.1, sub-Saharan states became more autocratic (on average) between 1960 and 1990 according to Polity, a common measure of regime type.3 While the region actually beats the Middle East and North Africa on this metric, that feat offers little consolation. The antidemocratic trend began all too quickly. In Comoros and what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, chaotic transitions provoked coups in the very year of independence. The trend continued in more stable countries just three years later. In 1963 Sylvanus Olympio, president of Togo, was overthrown and assassinated. He was deposed by an army of only 250 soldiers,

10

ECA

LAC

Average Polity Score

5 ●

EAP

●

0

SA

● ●

●

● ●

SSA

−5

MENA

−10 1960

1970 Democracy

1980 Anocracy

1990 Autocracy

3

53

Polity is an annualized country score ranging from −10 (a full autocracy) to +10 (a full democracy) The halfway house between democracy and autocracy, in the range from −5 to +5 on the Polity scale, has been dubbed “anocracy.”

Figure 3.1 Average Polity Score by Region, 1960-1990

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joined by Togolese veterans of France’s brutal war with Algeria. When France decommissioned its Togolese soldiers, these men expected to be honored and employed in Togo’s national army. Yet, Olympio sealed his fate by refusing, claiming that the veterans were “mercenaries who were killing our Algerian friends when we were fighting for independence” (First, 1970). The perpetrators of the coup replaced the president with his political rival, Nicholas Grunitsky. Under Grunitsky, the post-coup army expanded to 1,200 soldiers, accepting 700 veterans of the French forces (Grundy, 1968). Four years later, one of the coup leaders, Lt. Col. Gnassingbé Eyadéma, assumed power and ruled Togo for a generation. This stunning coup, which challenged the democratic future of a newly independent African state, was not an anomaly but rather a blueprint for soldiers in other African states. Indeed, Togo’s coup was only the start of a deluge of coups across much of the continent. Figure 3.2 illus-

Cumulative Number of Coups

120

SSA

LAC

90

60

30

MENA EAP ● ● ●

ECA SA

●

●

0 1960

1970

1980

(a) Total Number of Coups by Region

1990

BEN SDN COG GHA UGA SLE NGA ETH BDI TCD SOM BFA ZAR TGO NER MRT MLI GNQ COM CAF ZMB SYC SEN RWA MOZ MDG LBR GNB GAB AGO

63 66 63 66 66 67 66 60 65 75 61 66 60 63 74 78 68 69 75 66 80 77 62 73 75 74 80 80 64 77

65 66 66 67 71 67 66 61 66 76 69 74 65 67 76 80 78 79 78 79

65 69 68 72 74 68 75 74 66 77 78 80

67 71 68 78 74 71 76 77 76

69 75 69 79 80

72 76 70 79

72 77 72

75

2 4 6 8 Number of Coups and Year (1960−1980)

(b) African Coups, 1960-1980 (Black = Success) Figure 3.2 Deluge of Coups in Africa

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trates a sharp and sustained increase in coups beginning in the mid-1960s. Between 1960 and 1980, there were ninety-one coup attempts in Africa, of which fifty-one succeeded. In those two decades, twenty-six different African countries experienced a successful coup; seven states saw three or more successful challenges (Benin, six; Ghana, four; Burkina Faso, three; Burundi, three; Nigeria, three; Republic of Congo, three; Uganda, three). Even while challenges to civilian leadership declined sharply in Asia and the Americas in the 1980s (i.e., the total number of coups in figure 3.2(a) levels off for all other regions), African states have seen continued military interventions: between 1960 and 1990, there was only one year (1988) in which the continent was coup-free (Powell and Thyne, 2011).4 Corruption, economic crises, and ethnic tensions quickly undermined electoral democracies in the postcolonial period. The first-generation military leaders came into power presenting themselves as “caretakers,” seeking to restore integrity and nationalism and, ultimately, place democracy on a stronger footing. But instead of politically neutral officers bringing order as national saviors, these initial coups were followed by a second era of military rule, during which more junior officers transformed into personalist leaders. Figure 3.3 offers a simple but revealing timeline for the four cases we review below: elected leaders are replaced by military brass and, especially toward the end of the period, personalist dictators.

3

The Senior Officers Intercede

Nigeria Nigeria’s two coups in 1966 were perhaps the most dramatic failures of British-inspired democratic institutions in Africa. The country was not named by a charismatic founder, as was the case in Ghana. Rather, three sep-

4

55

Factors that predict coups include higher levels of democratic competition, rapid social change (e.g., urbanization), ethnic tensions, economic downturns, and decreasing military spending. Electoral support for the winning party in early elections and armies that are not constituted from anticolonial rebels or colonial armies are associated with reduced coups risk (Londregan and Poole, 1990; Jackman, 1978; McGowan and Johnson, 1984; Powell, 2012).

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Regime Type

DEMOCRACY

MILITARY

(PARTY−)PERSONAL

Benin Uganda Ghana Nigeria 1960

1970

1980

arate regions were imagined as a coherent state by the wife of the colonial governor, Lord Frederick Lugard, who called the combined territory “Nigeria.” Lugard established a colonial order through what he dubbed the “Dual Mandate” (1926) — a system that provided salaries to traditional leaders (chiefs, kings, emirs) in return for their loyalty (a strategy of indirect rule that we discuss at greater length in chapter 9). Lugard presumed that these traditional leaders enjoyed local legitimacy, making it easier for them to control their constituents. He ruled through emirs in the Hausa-dominated Northern region; through ancestral-city kings in the Yoruba-dominated West; and through “warrant chiefs” (a modern imposition on an acephalous society) in the Igbo-dominated East (Afigbo, 1972).5 These three regions — the North, West, and East — were quite heterogeneous, rife with minorities who bristled at the favored roles accorded to the dominant group in each region (figure 3.4). A constitution for Nigeria, negotiated in 1954 and serving as a prelude to independence, gave substantial powers to the three regional governments, much to the chagrin of the minority groups. These smaller

1990

Figure 3.3 Regime Change in Selected Cases, 1960-1990

5

An acephalous, or egalitarian, society lacks political hierarchy. Figure 3.4 Nigeria’s Largest Ethnic Groups

Hausa−Fulani

Yoruba Igbo

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groups appealed to the British-appointed Minorities Commission, but their claims were rejected in 1958. In addition to these internal conflicts, the regional governments disagreed about the allocation of power in an independent Nigeria. Emirs in the North feared southern dominance. Northern populations tended to have lower levels of education.6 Thus, the North preferred continued British administration to a prospective administration run by “southerners” (i.e., Yorubas and Igbos). Meanwhile, there were deep tensions within the South. Obafemi Awolowo, the Yoruba leader we discussed in chapter 1, invested revenues from the 1950s cocoa boom in free education and health care. Igbos, on the other hand, saw lower returns on their palm products and, thus, feared losing out on civil service positions to the economically ascendant Yoruba. Under these conditions, post-independence politics became a dangerous game. First, the key pre-independence elections deepened the rivalry between Awolowo and Nnambdi Azikiwe, the leading Igbo politician. The North seized upon this rivalry, allying with the East to form a government: Azikiwe assumed the presidency, while a Northern leader, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, became the prime minister. Second, battles broke out over the census. While a census may sound like a simple counting exercise, it is a political lightning rod in countries where the allocation of power or public spending depends on groups’ relative sizes.7 A first census tally in 1962 worked to the East’s advantage; a recount then inflated the numbers of the other two regions. Census politics turned into a life and death issue, as the results determined which ethnic group was most likely to assume and maintain political power. Third, an intra-Yoruba political rivalry led to electoral violence in the regional elections of 1964. Awolowo refused to accept the North-East compact and sought to build a leftist coalition by mobilizing Hausa

6

This educational gap was due in part to colonial authorities’ decision to discourage Christian missionaries from working in the North for fear they might cause unrest in a predominantly Muslim population.

7

Clifford Geertz, the preeminent American cultural anthropologist of his time, and part of the founding group of the University of Chicago’s Committee on New Nations, considered census-taking in new states a “pole. . . around which parapolitical vortices tend to form” (Geertz, 1973, p. 275).

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commoners (talakawa). His Yoruba rival, Samuel Ladoke Akintola, came from a different ancestral city, served as Western governor, and wanted to work in concert with elected federal authorities. Awolowo plotted a takeover in the Western region, and the federal army had to restore order. Amid this political uncertainty, rumors of a coup proliferated. And on January 15, 1966, in a poorly coordinated operation, military plotters murdered one Yoruba (Akintola) and two Hausas (Balewa and Sir Ahmadu Bello, the head of the Northern People’s Congress, the political party representing Hausa interests). The plotters missed Awolowo and did not detain or kill any Igbo politicians. This first coup quickly sparked a second overthrow. Igbo officials had escaped assassination during the initial coup; moreover, an Igbo officer, General Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi, assumed leadership following the unrest. To many, these two facts suggested an Igbo power play. Their fears were amplified when General Ironsi sought an end to regional governance, which was interpreted as a plot to establish Igbo hegemony throughout Nigeria. Elements in the military, whose officer corps was largely Hausa, quickly plotted a counter-coup. On July 29, 1966, only seven months after the first coup, Ironsi was assassinated. Yakubu “Jack” Dan-Yumma Gowon, a Christian from a minority group in the North, took the helm. Since January 1966, Nigeria has spent half of its existence under military rule.

Ghana The early coups became a deluge with the fall of Nkrumah — a coup that shocked even careful observers of African politics. In retrospect, it is more easily understood. Nkrumah was at his charismatic height when he demanded independence and could blame Britain for any policy failures (Apter, 2015). But once independent and

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in power in 1957, his monumental goals faced complex reality. He indulged himself by building useless monuments (including statues of himself) and portraying himself as the country’s redeemer (osagyefo). More hopeful, he invested in a massive electrical project that included a dam on the Volta River. This was to be paid for, in part, by taxes on farmers, who were forced to sell their product (cocoa most importantly) to marketing boards that continued the colonial practice of paying below-market prices. The marketing boards could buy low and sell high on world markets with the difference accruing to the state and its development projects. As we document in chapter 12, this economic doctrine had a number of problems. Principally, farmers learned that they could surreptitiously cross the border into Côte d’Ivoire, where they could get a much better price for their goods. This smuggling impoverished the Ghanaian treasury. Economic failure unleashed political opposition. Nkrumah responded by either imprisoning or forcibly exiling his political opponents. In a tense political environment, a military coup in February 1966 brought an end to democratic institutions. A “National Liberation Council,” a joint operation of the police and army with a clear army command structure under General Joseph Ankrah, took power. Political parties were banned, and the Council promised order, security, freedom, and a quick restoration of democracy. Indeed, they did return the country to democracy, but it was a short-lived civilian regime, succeeded by a generation of military regimes. Nkrumah became an exile in Guinea. He died in 1972, and, by then, his dreams for restored Ghanaian glory were long dead. The then president of Ghana, Ignatius Kutu Acheampong (who also came to power through a coup), graciously allowed Nkrumah to be buried in his homeland. There is now a mausoleum in his hometown serving as a

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tourist site. But his fall from grace marked an end to the optimistic vision of his charismatic cohort of founders.

Uganda Milton Obote received no mention in our discussion of Africa’s charismatic founders. Unlike Jomo Kenyatta in neighboring Kenya, Ugandans never united behind Obote, who constantly struggled to garner a legislative majority. Obote led the Ugandan People’s Congress (UPC) — an alliance of his ethnic group, the Langi (6 percent), the Acholi (5 percent), the Toro (3 percent), and the Banyoro (3 percent). As these population shares indicate, the party represented a small share of the country’s population. Obote’s rise to power, despite this small support base, had less to do with his leadership qualities and much more to do with internal conflicts within other, larger ethnic groups. Most importantly, the Baganda were split. The Baganda are Uganda’s largest linguistic group (∼16 percent). Its king (the Kabaka), a Protestant, never submitted to British rule; instead, by treaty, his kingdom became a British protectorate. But in preparation for independence, the British refused to accord his kingdom special status. His supporters therefore boycotted the final election before independence in 1961. This handed victory to the Democratic Party, which garnered the votes of the Catholic Baganda, who still participated in the election. Recognizing this error, in the first election after independence, the Kabaka led a monarchist party called the Kabaka Yekka or “king only” party. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this party didn’t enjoy much support outside of Baganda or among Catholics. Obote’s UPC, the Kabaka Yekka, and the Democratic Party all contested the 1962 election. The Democratic Party emerged with the most seats, though not a majority. Fearing that the Democratic Party might threaten the

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61

monarchy, the Kabaka struck a deal with Obote: Obote assumed the role of prime minister, granting the Kabaka assurances that his royal prerogatives would be maintained. At this pivotal moment, Obote demonstrated less charisma than political cunning. As was the case in Nigeria, politics became a highstakes game. Obote proposed a referendum that would transfer land from the Baganda to the Banyoro, which the latter believed the British had wrongly seized and redistributed to the Baganda. The Kabaka responded by leveling a corruption charge against Obote in the National Assembly. Obote quickly abrogated the colonially inspired constitution of 1962 and deposed the Kabaka, driving him into exile in London. Obote relied on his northern troops to crush Baganda militias comprising World War II veterans, and sought popularity by articulating a leftist program, called the “Common Man’s Charter.” This move to the left led to a rapid outflow of capital and ensuing unemployment and inflation. Urban gangsterism (kondoism) became rife. Obote needed the army, largely composed of the Acholis from Uganda’s far north, to confront the Baganda.8 A mutiny in 1964 was a warning that the military’s cooperation required accommodations. Obote gave virtual autonomy to the deputy commander, Idi Amin, who began recruiting soldiers from his Kakwa ethnic group. Many of the Kakwa troops were from neighboring southern Sudan, where they had honed their fighting skills against the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Amin’s army became an autonomous force of wealth and power throughout the country. Even Obote feared Amin and built a special presidential guard from his Langi coethnics. In April 1971, elections were imminent, and observers thought that Obote, through a proposed alliance with the

8

Andrew Brooks (dissertation in progress) estimates that, preindependence, the Acholi represented 70 percent of the soldiers; the Baganda, less than 2 percent.

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Baganda, would maintain power. But Amin intervened and, despite the presidential guard, displaced Obote before the elections. Unlike the coup in Ghana, this was not a peaceful replacement of civilians for soldiers. Amin brought a reign of terror, with large-scale imprisonments and an estimated 250,000 Ugandans killed in the bloodbath that ensued.

4

Junior Officer Coups and the Dominance of Personalist Rule

Junior officers, those commissioned officers ranking below colonels and generals, followed the examples provided by their superiors. While the first successful coups involving senior officers occurred in the same year of independence (Comoros; the Democratic Republic of the Congo), junior officers didn’t successfully overthrow a government until the fourth year of independence (in Burundi). The average number of years of independence before the first successful senior officer coup was 12.5 years; the average number of years for the first successful junior officer coup was 18.5 years (A. Brooks, 2016).9 These junior officers not only struck later, they also relied on different strategies for establishing and consolidating control. Unlike the generals, junior officers could not count on the support of the military hierarchy; they were, after all, ignoring the chain of command. Instead, these junior officers created populist parties (often with a leftist slant) and, more importantly, surrounded themselves with ethnic kin to protect against counter-coups. Their youth and energy gave them some of the charismatic appeal accorded to many of Africa’s founding fathers. These once junior officers who became personalist dictators include Samuel Doe (Liberia), Mathieu Kérékou (Benin), Jerry Rawlings (Ghana), and Thomas Sankara and Blaise Campaoré (Burkina Faso, formerly Upper Volta). Vignettes of

9

These statistics include some North African cases, including Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia.

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the coups in Benin and Ghana illustrate the progression from military rule to personalist dictatorship.

Benin Immediately after independence, Benin suffered from corruption, regionalism, and forced austerity. Per capita GDP fell by almost 5 percent between 1960 and 1962. The increasingly authoritarian rule of Hubert Maga brought popular discontent and then an outpouring of sympathy when Colonel Christophe Soglo led a coup in 1963. Soglo permitted a quick return to civilian rule, but power oscillated between military officers and civilian politicians. At one point the country was ruled by a three-member presidential council, whose members rotated power. Maga — the premier overthrown just seven years earlier — actually enjoyed a brief return to power under this system, chairing this presidential council from 1970 to 1972. Despite this frequent turnover (perhaps even because of it), political gridlock paralyzed the government. Junior officers then moved in, led by Mathieu Kérékou. He was a low-level officer who served as an aide-de-camp to Maga during his first presidency. Kérékou advanced in rank after his cousin, Maurice Kouandété, became military ruler in 1967. In October 1972, he took control of the country, replacing an ineffective civilian regime (Allen, 1989). Kérékou was a populist whose rule marked a break with the past. His first major speech to the population, the Discours-programme in November 1972, called for an end to foreign domination, which he blamed for the country’s woes. Kérékou promoted indigeneity, supporting the teaching of indigenous languages through mass literacy programs and in universities (Igue and N’Oueni, 1994). While initially skeptical of both capitalism and socialism, which he regarded as foreign ideologies, Kérékou

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embraced the latter and, in 1975, renamed Dahomey the People’s Republic of Benin. Although he had been promoted to major before staging the coup, his rule ignored the top brass: the initial coterie of officers he invited to join his revolutionary government were all under the age of forty (East and Thomas, 2003, 55). Despite his public commitment to socialism, Kérékou eschewed political equality, surrounding himself with his fellow northerners and marginalizing the Fon, Benin’s largest ethnic group, which is concentrated in the country’s south. Kérékou’s Parti de la Révolution Populaire du Bénin (People’s Revolutionary Party of Benin) dominated the parliamentary elections of 1979, 1984, and 1989 — perhaps unsurprisingly, as it was the only party allowed to compete. Kérékou was elected president in 1980, an event that portended not a return to democracy but rather a decade of personalist rule.

Ghana Coup leader General Joseph Ankrah passed the torch to fellow General A. A. Afrifa, who then transferred power peacefully to an elected civilian government led by professor Kofi Busia, an internationally respected sociologist. Economic stress compelled Busia to cut pay to judges and soldiers, but he quickly learned how counterproductive it would be to challenge the economic security of the officercorps. The military intervened again in 1972, in a coup led by General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong. Acheampong sought to institutionalize military rule in Ghana by providing officers a decisive political role and outlawing political parties. (This was dubbed a “no party” system in a “Unigov” constitution.) Acheampong’s reforms were hugely unpopular. He was also famously corrupt, as later audits showed 500 million pounds missing from the accounts of the Cocoa Marketing Board, and he had an alleged personal for-

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tune of $100 million (Young, 1982). General Frederick W. K. Akuffo led a counter-coup that promised national elections. Nearly all these officers — Ankrah, Afrifa, Acheampong, and Akuffo — were from the Ashanti ethnic group, and most were graduates of the UK’s prestigious military academy at Sandhurst.10 Junior officers observed this rotation of Sandhursteducated Ashantis with disdain. In May 1979, a thirtyfive-year old flight lieutenant, Jerry Rawlings, attempted a coup but was caught and jailed. However, fellow junior officers sprung him and, on June 4, a second attempt to grab power succeeded. In power, Rawlings instigated the assassination of Akuffo, Acheampong, and Afrifa. This was the kind of brutality championed by Machiavelli — celebrating Hannibal’s cruelty among “his other virtues” as a model for a ruler — in his advice to the Florentine prince. Rawlings was young, dynamic, and not from the “Akan cluster,” which included the Ashanti (with 44 percent of the population) and had dominated Ghanaian politics. Rawlings’s mother was Scottish and his father Ewe, a language community from the east that accounts for just over 10 percent of Ghana’s population. (Rawlings did marry an Ashanti, providing him a useful tie to powerful social networks.) After his coup, he called for immediate elections, and a career diplomat from the north of the country, Dr. Hilla Limann, was elected president. This lasted a mere two years before Rawlings returned to power through a coup on New Year’s Eve 1981, promising “nothing less than a revolution” for Ghana. His Provisional National Defense Council was not beholden to the military hierarchy that he helped decimate. After dominating the political scene in Ghana and providing a taste of political order, he instituted democratic elections and ran as a civilian, winning two successive elections as Ghana’s president.

10

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In 1972, an international Catholic news outlet wrote of the “Sandhurst Way,” observing that “given the economic problems facing the emergent nations of Africa, it is paradoxical that Sandhurst has provided more rulers there than the London School of Economics” (The Tablet, 1972).

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Rawlings was a mixed blessing for Ghana. Ultimately, he returned his country to a viable democracy. Yet, his twenty-two years of political dominance represented personalist rule by junior officers turned popular leaders who permitted no meaningful political competition.

5

A Retrospective on Democratic Failure

Democratic aspirations were quickly undermined in many independent African countries. Charismatic leaders turned into autocrats, purging opponents. Economic failure and fears of minority ethnic groups created social tensions in which intervention by the military initially appeared as a respite from chaos. Senior officers promised a return to democracy once order was restored. But Africa’s democratic deficit continued to grow in the first generation of independence. Instead of democratically elected prime ministers, and instead of politically neutral senior officers restoring order, the archetypal regime became one led by a junior officer turned personalist leader, who relied on ethnic kin rather than broad-based parties. The failure of young democracies to take root, while not unique to sub-Saharan Africa, has left it lagging most other regions in terms of political freedom and accountability (see figure 3.1 on page 53).

6

Corruption in the Prebendal State

Consider the Nigerian cartoon “Nigeria at 49” in figure 3.5. Its message is simple but powerful: governance failures are a shared quality of the country’s civil and military governments. As of 2018, Nigeria had an elected head of state from 1960 to 1966, 1979 to 1983, and 1999 to 2018; the remainder, unelected military rule. That is, twenty-seven of Nigeria’s fifty-eight years of independence have involved rule by elected leaders. But even when leaders have been elected, they have not been ac-

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Figure 3.5 “Nigeria at 49” Source: THISDAY Newspapers Limited.

countable; as the cartoon sardonically illustrates, theft and greed reign under either system of rule. While Nigeria has come to exemplify corruption (Smith, 2010), it is not unique among African states. The Worldwide Governance Indicators measure how effectively states control corruption, as well as whether they permit political voice and impartially enforce the law.11 By all of these metrics, sub-Saharan states (on average) lagged all other regions when the data were first compiled in 1996 (figure 3.6). Sadly, between 1996 and 2010, there is little indication that the region is closing this gap. To be sure, some countries are worse than others: in 2008, Botswana scored better than the average for all other regions. South Africa, Namibia, and Rwanda also scored reasonably well (as did smaller island nations, like Cape Verde, Mauritius, and Réunion). But most African states continue to struggle in their attempts to control corruption and remain toward the bottom in international rankings.

7

Systemic Corruption

Political scientists have developed powerful descriptions of this endemic corruption. Rather than focus on specific scandals, they unpack the methods and motives of leaders who use corruption not only to profit, but also to maintain control. There have been several terms proposed for this systemic corruption; many Africanists refer

11

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), an academic project developed by Daniel Kaufmann and Aart Kraay, reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for over two hundred countries and territories from 1996 to 2015.

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Figure 3.6 Average Governance Score in 1996

Strong NA

Average WGI Score (1996)

NA

NA

1

0

ECA EAP

ECA

LAC

EAP

LAC

LAC & MENA

MENA SA

SSA

ECA EAP

SA SA MENA

SSA

SSA

Voice

Rule of Law

Weak Corruption

to it as “neopatrimonialism.” As described by van de Walle (2001, ch. 3), many African leaders at the moment of independence found themselves at the helm of weak and insufficiently legitimate states. They had little choice but to rely on patronage and rents to assure their tenure against threats from a range of challengers. The result, van de Walle explains, was neopatrimonialism, combining a façade of rational-legal rule with the private appropriation of public resources by state elites. Here we review work describing this syndrome by three exemplary scholars, who help us understand the administrative systems (or lack thereof) that permit — or even facilitate — the defrauding of state revenues. These accounts suggest that the bureaucracies with whom diplomats, donors, and scholars regularly interact have been hollowed out by rulers who fear, rather than reward, competent administrators. What results are blocks of ministries in capital cities like Monrovia or Kinshasa that

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might be better described as Potemkin villages than centers of authority.

Prebendalism According to the seminal sociological work of Max Weber (Weber, Gerth, and Mills, 1946, 207), “prebends” are payments for the conferred right to the rents from land or other sources in return for “the fulfillment of actual or fictitious office duties; they are goods permanently set aside for the economic assurance of the office.” Tax farming is a quintessential prebend. In early modern times, a lord conferred on subordinates the right to tax, so long as they returned an agreed-upon amount to the lord. Tax farmers, if they demonstrated loyalty to the lord, could pass their right to tax on to their descendants. In many developing countries today, directing a customs house in a port is an obvious prebend. Traffic police in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are also exemplary. An ongoing study in the capital of Kinshasa measures the extortion capabilities of traffic policemen at key intersections (Sanchez de la Sierra and Titeca, in progress). Following the money, the authors compute how much of each bribe goes to the policemen and their superiors. They find that officers who refuse to extort motorists or don’t send the expected payments up the chain get reassigned to less profitable intersections. While readers may not be surprised to learn that police can extort bribes, directors of hospitals or educational establishments have similar opportunities to tax (or, better, extort) clients for admittance or services. One of Richard Joseph’s (1987) contributions is to identify the many opportunities for prebendalism in the dispensation of licenses, letters of credit, and other forms of bureaucratic access. How are these prebends allocated? In many African states, political leaders (our contemporary “lords”) and their subordinates tend to share a common ethnicity.12

12

These relationships are sometimes described as “clientelistic.” Leaders (patrons) dispense benefits to subordinates (clients) in return for political support.

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Like any boss, leaders need to monitor and occasionally prod their underlings. This is easier done when both parties share a common language and social network. What Joseph’s work demonstrates is that corruption is not an unexpected or deviant behavior; rather, prebendalism is a governing strategy.13 State power is used to establish a private market for public goods (e.g., safe roads or emergency medical services). This benefits leaders in two ways: first, leaders share in whatever revenues the prebend collects; second, leaders assure the electoral loyalty of prebend holders, who want to retain their lucrative positions.

The Shadow State Prebendalism depends on state power; if the importers simply disregard the customs officer, then the value of controlling the port diminishes. Yet, William Reno argues that leaders who take office with a tenuous grasp on power do not want to build powerful states: An actuarial calculation showed that as of 1991 the 485 postcolonial African rulers faced a 59.4 percent chance of dying, being imprisoned, or being exiled as a consequence of holding office. Rulers of weak states risk having strongmen appropriate bureaucracies that are effective at accumulating resources. . . . Rulers who face threatening internal behavior intentionally cripple the arms of the state. (Reno, 1999, 19; emphasis added)

Several sub-Saharan states are, as a result, evanescent and unable to maintain a monopoly on legitimate violence, the defining characteristic of modern states, according to Weber. Always fearing their imminent demise, Reno’s “warlord politicians” — such as Doe and Taylor in Liberia, Mobutu in Congo, Momoh in Sierra Leone, Dos Santos in Angola — do not allocate prebends to officials, who might later become rivals. Rather, these leaders create a “shadow

13

Writing more recently, Joseph (2013) notes that eliminating prebendalism is difficult precisely because citizens in states like Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda expect their leaders to use political office to benefit supporters. Politicians can actually be punished at the polls for failing to engage in corruption.

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state” that relies on foreign corporations and governments to supply revenues in exchange for access to natural resources or, in Liberia’s case, a dollar-denominated banking system that facilitates money laundering.14 To guard against insurgents without risking a coup, these rulers do not build a cohesive officer-corps, but instead depend on mercenaries (many of whom are South African exmilitary, who found gainful employment post-apartheid providing private security to mining companies and heads of state) (Reno, 1999, 63). Reno’s cases illustrate how traditional state functions are farmed out to private, often foreign, firms (see table 3.1 for estimates of the size of shadow economies). Consider the role of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Liberia, which established its Liberian concession in 1926 when it leased a million acres for ninety-nine years for just over a nickel per acre (Reno, 1999, 84). Successive rulers in Liberia were only too happy to allow Firestone to take on roles typically reserved to the state: Samuel Doe and previous presidents “had brought in foreign firms and aid organizations. . . to fill in for missing bureaucratic capacity and a local revenue base. . . . [Firestone] had long assessed and collected taxes, provided housing for employees, managed local chiefs, and enforced local laws.” As Doe’s eventual successor, Charles Taylor, attempted to seize power in a brutal civil war, he deployed Firestone’s communications technology (e.g., their satellite phones) to plan attacks on international ECOMOG forces in the capital — another instance of private infrastructure serving elites’ needs (100). In Zaire (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo), private businessmen paid the army’s salaries to protect their businesses; those who did not pay were attacked (Reno, 1995, 19). In other words, the army was not a national army (protection by the state in return for taxes) but rather a private enterprise running a protection racket.

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14

Reno (1999) notes that (oblivious) international donors were all too happy to see state bureaucracies contract, as they regarded these ministries as hopelessly corrupt.

Table 3.1 The Shadow Economy Region

Average % GDP (1999-2007)

SSA LAC SA ECA EAP MENA NA

42 41.7 34.5 30.5 27.5 27 12.5

Cases

Shadow Economy (2000)

D.R. Congo Sierra Leone Liberia

48 40.2 43.2

Source: Dreher and Schneider, 2009

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Why did Mobutu refuse to pay his soldiers from state coffers? “He could use his security forces to disorganize rivals, but that risked bolstering military units that could remove him in his weakened state” (Reno, 1999, 158). Mobutu preferred an unruly and fractious military that, while offering little protection, also posed no real threat to his incumbency. It may not be surprising that shadow states offered little to citizens in the form of public services. Where rulers receive revenues and security from foreign sources, they often see no need to serve domestic constituencies. In 1990 Mobutu allocated just 2.1 percent of government spending to health and education; compare that to 17.5 percent in 1972. As export revenues contracted, he “safely abandoned expensive health care facilities, schools, and public works — all of which served citizens but contributed little to his stock of political resources” (Reno, 1999, 153).

The Political Marketplace Alex de Waal has been an analyst of, and participant in, several peacemaking operations in the Horn of Africa (a region that includes Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia) and neighboring Sudan. To set up his most recent book (de Waal, 2015), he reports on the machinations of Abdel Wahid, the representative of Darfur in negotiations with the Sudanese state. Parties to the genocide then in progress were negotiating a settlement in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. Wahid did not devote his attention to negotiating with the mediators or with the perpetrators of the genocide. Rather, he spent his time on a mobile phone with leaders of factions in Darfur determining how much cash they would need to not defect from any deal Wahid might sign. De Waal infers from this story (and many others) that human allegiance can be rented, and African

L AG I N D E M O C R AC Y

leaders (whether of countries or rebel movements) need a “political budget” to pay that rent. While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank may pay attention to the public budget, that’s not as consequential as the “political budget,” the funds available to rulers for discretionary spending to retain political support. This pot is garnered from state rents, funds provided by businesses, and loyalty payments from foreign sponsors. The political budget is the fuel of what de Waal calls “the political marketplace system,” and its supply is a key indicator of regime survival or crisis. Maximizing the political budget, that is, sustaining cash flow and ensuring that claimants are paid, at minimum cost, is the route to continued rule. There are several rules for success. First, leaders (or political business managers [PBMs], in de Waal’s terms) seek to reduce the costs of coercion by building up ties of ethnicity, nationalism, or religion. The more PBMs succeed in building an ethnic base, the more they can save to spend on renting loyalty from non-coethnics. Second, leaders can provide tax breaks for transnational corporations (on crude oil exports or on their acquisition of land) in return for regular deposits in the PBM’s account in a tax haven. The PBM can then “round trip” those funds into his political budget back home. Cash flow rather than public service is the coin of the realm. But African PBMs face challenges, especially from the entrepreneurs of peripheral rebellions. De Waal sees these rebellions as “rent seeking” in that their leaders attempt to stage mutinies or rebellions in order to advertise their intent and determination. To the extent that any rebel leader mobilizes militias that can cause damage and death, he will be able to induce a round of bargaining, done through both violent escapades and peace talks. If quite successful, according to de Waal, the rebel leader could induce the United Nations Security Council to establish a

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peace-keeping operation (PKO). The goal of the rebel is to win a “payroll peace,” where he is given a promotion and his fighters are put on the army payroll, with arrears. The result of this continued quest for an adequate “political budget” is a syndrome de Waal calls “turbulence.” And we saw this turbulence reflected in the coups and counter-coups where founders were toppled by generals and junior officers. Figure 3.2(a) shows that the first halfcentury of independence involved over 150 coup attempts. Yet, keen observers will note that these coups, peripheral rebellions, alliance shifts, and tentative peace pacts, while dizzying, have not altered the status quo. As de Waal notes, while every day may seem different for those observing the corridors of power, those who return to the presidential palace after a hiatus of several years will note that everything looks precisely the same (de Waal, 2015, 17). The only differences are the names of the PBMs and perhaps the increasing costs to rent loyalty.

8

The Costs of Prebendalism

Prebendalism, shadow states, and the turbulent political marketplace are three characterizations of the failure of many postcolonial African countries to build modern bureaucratic states based on public law and funded with public budgets. The syndromes were delineated through what might be thought of as clinical observations, but the implications of these syndromes for the health of the body politic remain to be shown. In this section, we examine the systematic failures of African states in the fair distribution of public goods, in the sharing of power across ethnic groups, in election administration, and in the accountability of elected representatives to their constituents.

L AG I N D E M O C R AC Y

Public Goods Prebendalism predicts systematic bias in the distribution of state benefits. What are called “public goods” in theory (i.e., available to all; excludable to none) are in practice biased toward those favored by the country’s leader. Evidence of such a bias has been hard to come by. An important paper by Kasara (2007), in fact, reveals the opposite. She finds that the taxes are higher on agricultural products from the leader’s region, and when a new leader comes from a different region, the higher (on average) tax burden moves to the region of the now-current leader. Similarly, Kudamatsu (2007) reports that changes in the ethnicity of the Guinean leader had no effects on levels of infant mortality among various ethnic groups. In a follow-up paper, Kramon and Posner (2013) show that the degree of ethnic favoritism for public goods depends in good part on the country and the type of public good (education, water, electricity, and infant survival). Education in Kenya and Malawi, electricity in Zambia and Senegal, water in Zambia, and infant survival in Benin all show significant payoffs for populations who share an ethnicity with the current president. But education in Senegal and Mali, electricity in Mali, and infant survival in Senegal show significant advantages to non-coethnics of the president. In the four types of public goods in six countries, eleven of the cases (out of twenty-four) show no ethnic advantage. Yet, other recent work provides more compelling (and distressing) evidence of ethnic bias in the distribution of public goods. Franck and Rainer (2012) study the demographic and health surveys conducted in eighteen African countries over the past fifty years. Combined, these surveys amount to more than a million African respondents. Each respondent was assigned an ethnic cluster, and for

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the year of the survey, it was noted whether the president of the country was from the same ethnic cluster. This allowed the researchers to compare improvements among coethnics of the president to changes observed among other groups in the same state — a research design commonly referred to as a difference-in-difference.15 The authors find that coethnics are more likely to receive and complete primary education and have lower rates of infant mortality. This is the strongest evidence we have of ethnic bias in the dispensing of public goods in Africa.

Ethnic Power Sharing In allocating cabinet positions, political business managers need to build a robust coalition without running a deficit on their political budget. To that end, they often need to incorporate some non-coethnic ministers (especially when their own group is relatively small) to ensure that their minimum winning coalition (i.e., the cheapest team capable of retaining power) does not face an insurgent challenge. Testing this notion, Cederman, Wimmer, and Min (2010) embark on an ambitious data collection effort, coding for every ethnic group, in every year, whether they were included in the ruling coalition (and, if so, as a junior or senior partner). Those out of the inner circle are classified as excluded, powerless, or facing discrimination. Their “Ethnic Power Relations” data set has nearly 30,000 observations, an observation for every ethnic group in every year. The authors’ analysis reveals that the constraints on the political budget are substantial: over half of the groups are classified as excluded from power in an average year (table 3.2). And the consequences are equally powerful: excluded groups are more than twice as likely in any given year (5.1 percent vs. 2.3 percent) to initiate a violent conflict against the state. The probability that groups initiate violent conflicts goes down

15

This research design exploits over time changes within the same ethnic group, comparing, for example, (1) the change in infant mortality among the Temne in Sierra Leone before and after their coethnic Koroma assumed power in 2007 to (2) the change in infant mortality among other groups in Sierra Leone. This analysis accounts for any static differences between groups (e.g., geographic or climactic features of northern Sierra Leone that affect Temne health outcomes) that might otherwise confound our ability to isolate the effects of coethnicity.

Table 3.2 Ethnic Power Relations in Africa, 1960-1990 Status

Freq. %

Monopoly Dominant Senior Partner Junior Partner Separatist Autonomy Regional Autonomy Irrelevant Discriminated Powerless

117 2 253 5 722 14 1,563 30 6 500 km) from their countries’ capital cities are most likely to rebel (in the figure, close ≤ 500 km). The probability of rebellion is much lower in favorable or neutral countries; moreover, it does not appear that more peripheral groups are more likely to rebel in the states with favorable or neutral political ge-

Pr(Rebellion)

0.6

Table 5.2 Probability of Civil War by Geography Geography

Pr(Civil War)

Difficult Hinterland Favorable Neutral

0.39 0.26 0.10 0.05

3

Data collected by Luke Condra provides information on both whether an ethnic group has rebelled and how far that group’s homeland is from its national capital. In figure 5.8, we simply compute the probability of rebellion by geography and distance.

Far

Far

0.4

0.2

123

Close

Close Close

0.0

Far

Figure 5.8 Probability of Rebellion by Distance from Country’s Capital City

Close

Far

Difficult

Hinterland

Favorable

Neutral

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ographies. In sum, the great majority of African citizens live in countries with difficult and hinterland countries; and these countries, by dint of their geography, have been most susceptible to violent civil war.4 Of course, it is true that far richer countries outside of sub-Saharan Africa also have difficult geographies — Thailand, for example, with dispersed population centers and a sparsely populated northern region, would likely be coded difficult, yet it has seen rapid economic growth. However, Herbst (2000) argues that the absence of external threats allowed African leaders to avoid investing in protecting borders from invasions by neighboring states. In comparison, Thailand has been challenged by hostile neighbors (Lee, 2018). With difficult political geographies and little incentive to proactively invest in power projection, these African states became vulnerable to internal challenges, a source of the disorder we documented in chapter 4.

Latitude and Ethnic Diversity Africa straddles the equator, a geographic feature that scholars have linked to development challenges. Biologists have found that areas closer to the equator host greater plant and animal diversity. Recent research from Michalopoulos (2012) relates this biodiversity to greater ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity — a variable that many have argued complicates the provision of public goods and services that support economic development. We can measure ethnic and linguistic diversity with a fractionalization measure that calculates the probability that any two randomly selected individuals from a population belong to different ethnic groups. We call this measure ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF). The formula for calculating ELF is K

ELF = 1 −

∑ p2k ,

k =1

4

Roessler (2016) shows why countries with favorable political geographies, while less susceptible to civil wars, are more likely to suffer from military coups.

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where pk is the share of the population that belongs to group k. Data from the 1960 Soviet Atlas of the Peoples of the World allows us to compute an ELF measure for each African country, and we observe a sharp negative correlation between the distance from a country’s capital to the equator and that country’s ELF score (figure 5.9). That is, countries (with capitals) closer to the equator have higher levels of ethnic and linguistic diversity.

TZA ZAR CMR LBR TGO KEN GHA MWI SOM NGA GNB CAF CIV TCD MLI

Figure 5.9 Ethnic Fractionalization and Distance to the Equator

UGA

●

●

0.75

MOZ

●

● ● ●

NAM

● ●

BFA GIN

SDN

NERERI MRT MUS

ELF

BEN

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0.50

ZWE BDI

BWA SWZ

0.25

LSO

RWA

0

1000 2000 3000 Distance from Capital to Equator (km)

Why does ELF matter for our outcomes of interest? Cross-national and sub-national (i.e., comparing units, such as cities, within the same country) research finds a negative correlation between high levels of ELF and public goods provision or economic growth (Easterly and Levine, 1997). Alesina and La Ferrara (2005, 763) summarize: “Fragmented societies are often more prone to poor policy management and pose more politicoeconomic challenges than homogenous ones; it is easy to find rather voluminous evidence on this point.”5 Consistent with this claim, we see that sub-Saharan countries

5

See Putnam (2007) as well for a broader picture of the downside of ethnic diversity.

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closer to the equator have been more prone to civil war, than states located closer to the poles (table 5.3). Finally, not only do these more tropical countries contain a larger number of groups competing for state resources (and, thus, often disagreeing over policy or over the share of cabinet positions), they also face additional development challenges. Dell, Jones, and Olken (2012) find that high temperatures, a common characteristic of equatorial countries, tend to retard growth in poor countries by reducing agricultural and industrial output and inducing political instability. Moreover, countries closer to the equator shoulder a greater disease burden; figure 5.10 illustrates the higher prevalence of malaria deaths in countries closer to the equator. The disease burden contributes to lower life expectancy. And facing higher rates of infant mortality (especially historically), families tend to have larger numbers of children. This creates bottom-heavy age distributions, with lots of young, dependent children —

KEN

10.0

TZA ●●

Log(Malaria Deaths) (2010)

CMR GHA

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ZMB MOZ

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0

Distance to Equator (km)

Pr(Civil War)

[0, 1050] (1050, 2060] (2060, 3080] (3080, 4090]

0.17 0.18 0.14 0.09

Figure 5.10 Correlation Between Malaria Deaths and Distance to the Equator

ZAR

UGA

Table 5.3 Latitude and Probability of Civil War

BWA

●

1000 2000 3000 Distance from Capital to Equator (km)

GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHY

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a demographic profile that does not facilitate rapid growth in per capita incomes (Bloom and Sachs, 1998). As we discuss in the next chapter, the disease burden can also have indirect effects on economic development by having affected where Europeans settled and the types of political institutions they established (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2001).

Natural Resources An abundance of natural resources may initially sound like an attractive endowment. According to the US Geological Society, Africa has the largest or second-largest reserves of many mineral resources, including bauxite (used in aluminum), cobalt, industrial diamonds, and platinum group metals. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa counseled that: “If well managed, Africa’s mineral endowments can lift the continent out of poverty and catapult it to growth, development and prosperity for all.” Yet, in a cruel irony, Africa’s greatest geographic asset may have exacerbated Africa’s lag. Its mineral wealth, particularly its oil assets, may have been more of a “curse” than a blessing.6 How could natural resource wealth harm economic growth? One route — often dubbed “Dutch Disease” — is by raising the value of a country’s currency.7 For exporters in other sectors, such as cash crops and manufacturing, an increased exchange rate makes their wares more expensive to foreign consumers, reducing their competitiveness and, ultimately, the diversity of the economy (see Sachs and Warner, 2001; Ploeg, 2011; but see Sala-iMartin and Subramanian, 2003, for an exception). Natural resource wealth not only retards manufacturing growth, but also impedes political development and engenders conflict. In his 2015 review, Michael Ross (2015, 240) argues that “there is strong evidence that one type of resource wealth — petroleum — has at least three

6

For a fuller discussion of the resource curse, see M. Ross (2012). 7

The phrase “Dutch Disease” was coined amid fears in the Netherlands that manufacturing would be devastated by the discovery of large natural gas deposits in 1959.

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important effects: It tends to make authoritarian regimes more durable; it leads to corruption; and it helps trigger violent conflict in low- and middle-income countries, particularly when it is located in the territory of marginalized ethnic groups.” While this research often includes cases outside of Africa, Jensen and Wantchekon (2004) find that resource-dependent African governments are more authoritarian, spend more, have worse governance, and struggle to consolidate democratic transitions.8 In more recent work, Christensen (forthcoming) finds that large-scale mining projects in Africa more than double the probability of protest in the communities hosting these projects; however, he does not find that these mines increase the likelihood of rebel activity. While past research finds a positive correlation between small-scale or illicit mining and conflict (e.g., Collier and Hoeffler, 2004; Lujala, Gleditsch, and Gilmore, 2005), Christensen’s research suggests that larger, primarily foreign-financed mines provoke protest but do not inflame armed conflicts. These results from the resource curse literature mask some variation in economic and political development among Africa’s resource-rich countries. In particular, sub-Saharan Africa’s greatest success story, Botswana, has used its abundant diamond wealth to foster development. So while GDP per capita in oil-rich Nigeria was only $1,700 in 2008, it was nearly $5,000 in diamondrich Botswana. Similarly, while Denis Sassou Nguesso’s regime in Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) used oil wealth to buy or coerce loyalty (Clark, 1997), Botswana invested diamond royalties in infrastructure and education. Botswana’s growth and political stability, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2003) argue, results from political institutions (especially popular constraints on political elites) that encourage officials to invest earnings from diamond sales, rather than pay off political allies who stash the money in offshore accounts.

8 See Haber and Menaldo (2011) for a more skeptical take, which finds limited evidence that changes in oil dependence (within countries, over time) impede democratization.

GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHY

Absent political institutions that encourage investments in roads or schools, many African countries have struggled to translate their mineral assets into inclusive and robust growth. (In chapter 14, we’ll discuss the recent boom and collapse in commodity prices and the implications for economic development in Africa’s resource-rich states.) Weak institutions — the subject of our next chapter — have turned a potential benefit into a development hazard.

3

Conclusion

A number of scholars — most prominently, Jeffrey Sachs — have argued that African countries are cursed by poor geography (i.e., Sachs and Warner, 2001). The affliction is multifaceted: landlocked populations, enduring a tropical climate, attempting to sow inhospitable soils. While many sub-Saharan countries are rich in minerals, relying heavily on these resources crowds out manufacturing (so-called Dutch Disease) and undermines political accountability. This physical geography is exacerbated by the region’s challenging demographics. Vast swaths of underpopulated territory separate pockets of population density in Herbst’s difficult countries. Noncontiguous population centers often comprise ethnically distinct populations, given high levels of ethnic diversity, especially in countries straddling the equator. Figure 5.11, taking us back to the model we offered in this book’s introductory chapter, summarizes the implications of Africa’s geography on governance. Sachs argues that these geographic endowments exert a direct effect on present-day development (i.e., Sachs and Warner, 2001). It seems difficult to deny the economic burden imposed by HIV, malaria, or sleeping sickness, on the one hand, and unproductive soils, on the other. We include these direct effects in our diagram summarizing this chapter. To be sure, many scholars emphasize that the effects

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Direct Effects • High Disease Burden (PE) Geography

• Low Agricultural Productivity (PSQ)

• Proximity to the Equator (PE) • Poor Soil Quality (PSQ) • Abundant Mineral Resources (AMR)

Constraints • High Ethnic Heterogeneity (PE) • Costly to Project Power (PSQ; VS)

Demography • Vast Spaces Separating Population Centers (VS)

• “Dutch Disease” and the Political Resource Curse (AMR)

Figure 5.11 Conceptual Framework: Geography & Demography

of geography and demography are mediated by politics. Boone (2003), for example, shows that state penetration varies within countries, depending on whether the central government can recruit capable clients in peripheral regions. As a test, she shows how the Senegalese government penetrated the Groundnut Basin (just north of The Gambia) but failed to extend control to Casamance, where among the Joola ethnic group (an acephalous society) there were no local elites that could trade loyalty and votes to the center in return for state benefits. Even with this variation, geography and demography constrained policy. Consider Herbst’s (2000) argument: leaders make choices about whether to invest in state capacity and project power into the periphery. Where populations are sparse, terrain rugged, and land unproductive, the costs of projecting power often exceed the benefits; hence, leaders forego investments in infrastructure (e.g., roads) that could help consolidate control. Similarly, scholars argue that ethnic heterogeneity and mineral wealth affect politics, determining the interest groups that must be assembled into a winning coalition and the revenues that exist to buy or coerce those groups’ loyalties. While geography and demography cannot tell the whole

GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHY

story of Africa’s unfulfilled promise, they presented unwelcome challenges to the post-independence inheritors of African states.

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6. Extractive Institutions

A S B OT S WA NA ’ S E C O N O M I C S U C C E S S I N D I C AT E S , geography does not seal a country’s fate; despite its disease burden and diamond resources, the country has experienced dramatic growth since the early 1970s. Botswana was the fourth poorest country in 1950; over the next half-century, its income increased by a factor of thirteen (Easterly, 2002). How can we explain this divergence? Prominent development economists once believed that the absence of physical capital (i.e., the financing gap that we will discuss in chapter 12) was the primary impediment to growth. But there has been a sea change in their thinking, now with an emphasis on how domestic institutions can promote (or deter) private and public investment. Douglass North helped to initiate this shift in thinking. In 1993, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work arguing that “institutions form the incentive structure of a society and the political and economic institutions, in consequence, are the underlying determinant of economic performance” (North, 1993). North was not alone: the field of neo-institutional economics has made great progress identifying the (persistent) causal effect of institutions on economic development. In this chapter we highlight findings from several studies showing that the historical absence of secure property rights and political freedom has impeded growth and governance in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Institutions and Economic Development

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, two prominent (political) economists in this field, offer a binary classification of economic institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2013). Institutions can be inclusive, encouraging individuals to participate in economic activity and freely allocate their effort. Inclusive institutions feature secure private property, the rule of law, low barriers to entering the labor market or starting a business, and basic public goods such as infrastructure. Acemoglu and Robinson argue that inclusive economic institutions encourage private investments in education and new technologies and thereby promote prosperity. Where these features are absent, extractive institutions prevail: property is subject to expropriation, labor is coerced, the legal system is rigged, and education is not provided or focuses on loyalty to the state instead of employable skills (70). Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) provide historical evidence showing that extractive institutions have a negative causal effect on economic growth.1 To identify the effect of extractive institutions, the authors argue that, unlike in North America or Australia, European settlement in colonial Africa was limited (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2001). Due to disease, mortality rates for settlers were simply much higher in Africa: for example, “in the first year of the Sierra Leone Company (1792-1793), 72 percent of European settlers died.” Because Europeans never established large and lasting settlements in much of Africa, they also never bothered to import the inclusive institutions that prevailed in their countries of origin. While private ownership was established in the North American colonies by white farmers who wanted to protect their new holdings, Europeans in Africa tended to be confined to the coast or plantations in temperate climates. They focused on extracting slaves,

1

This claim may initially strike the reader as obvious. Yet, there are prominent economists who argue that institutions are secondary; rather, it is geography (Engerman and Sokoloff, 2002) or initial human capital (Glaeser et al., 2004) that determine institutions and, thus, cause growth. For a critique of the evidence employed by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001), see Albouy (2008).

E X T R AC T I V E I N S T I T U T I O N S

gold, and other commodities or managing their estates. The authors argue that extractive institutions have been tenacious and, thus, have a persistent effect on economic development: countries with high historic rates of settler mortality (many of which were in Africa) had lower per capita incomes at the turn of the twenty-first century (figure 6.1).2

AUS NZL

USA CAN

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Log(GDP per Capita in 1995)

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Despite this empirical relationship, astute fictional (Thiong’o, 1967) and historical works (Bender, 1978, 147-149) note that property rights in settler colonies were not widely enjoyed or inviolable in the colonial state. Figure 6.1 Settler Mortality and Economic Development

●

10

135

4 6 Log(Settler Mortality)

8

Institutionalized Brutality in the Congo Extractive institutions reached their modern nadir in King Leopold’s Congo, and from this case we can see why a focus on historical practices yields considerable insight into contemporary political challenges. The current development failures are clear. In 2015, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) ranked 176 of 188 countries on the Human Development Index: life expectancy at birth is less than sixty and per capita income is below 700 USD, or less than two dollars per

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day. The country spent nearly half of the years between 1960 and 2010 mired in civil war. Despite a short respite from violence and a period of fiscal responsibility after General Mobutu seized power in 1965, by 1973 the country continued its downward spiral, with Mobutu seizing immigrant-owned enterprises and transforming himself into a brutal megalomaniac. Violence and irregularities called into question the legitimacy of the 2011 presidential election; in the run-up to the scheduled 2016 elections, president Joseph Kabila sought to defy a constitutional mandate to step down after two terms fueling violent riots in Kinshasa; the country remains “not free” according to Freedom House. While Botswana is the oft-cited success story in sub-Saharan Africa, the DRC is frequently treated as the archetypal failed state. Writing in Foreign Policy, Herbst and Mills (2013) conclude simply: “If there is a prize for the worst place on Earth, Congo has a strong claim.” Herbst and Mills (2013) argue that we need to dispense with the fiction that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is even a state: “The Democratic Republic of the Congo,” they assert, “does not exist.” There is an irony here. The DRC is a failed state that hardly can claim a monopoly on legitimate violence (to borrow Weber’s definition for the state); yet this sorry state may well be the result of a historical legacy of brutal tyranny. In Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson (2013) trace the country’s condition back to the Kingdom of Kongo, an absolutist, precolonial government that included tracts of the contemporary DRC, as well as parts of present-day Angola, Republic of Congo, and Gabon. The Kingdom of Kongo (a state owing to the machinations of Portuguese slave traders) relied on expropriation: people were denied their freedom and enslaved on plantations, long-distance trade was controlled by the king, and taxes were levied to funnel income to the capital in Mbanza.

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As a consequence, Acemoglu and Robinson (2013, 82) observe that “instead of investing to increase their productivity and selling their products in markets, the Kongolese moved their villages away from the market; they were trying to be as far away from the roads as possible, in order to reduce the incidence of plunder and to escape the reach of slave traders.” Even prior to and under colonialism the region was desperately poor, largely illiterate, and failing to implement more productive technologies, such as the plow. Despite its name, the establishment of the “Congo Free State” in 1885 by Belgium’s King Leopold II did not usher in more inclusive political institutions. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost synthesizes a large body of historical work that documents colonial pillaging of the Congo, ultimately concluding that (based on the best available evidence) roughly half the population — 10 million people — perished during the roughly twenty-fiveyear existence of the Congo Free State (Hochschild, 1999). While Leopold never visited his colony, he plundered it mercilessly, extracting an estimated $1.1 billion (in present US dollars). To expropriate such a vast sum and, thereby, recover the personal expenditures he made to establish the colony, he relied on a brutal forced labor regime that required men to collect a monthly quota of rubber or risk death (Hochschild, 2005).3 To assure that the king’s troops had killed men who failed to meet their quota, they were required to submit severed limbs as proof. Rather than killing those that fell short, the Force Publique simply collected severed hands, accepting these in lieu of the required amount of rubber. As a consequence, the local population was terrorized and mutilated to enrich the Belgian king. The title of Hochschild’s book alludes to a 1914 poem by Vachel Lindsay about the appalling use of amputation as punishment: Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost,

3

Demand for inflatable tires and, thus, rubber soared with the rise of the automobile.

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Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell, Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

This coercive system displaced people and, in doing so, led to the spread of diseases: “The greatest toll,” Hochschild (2005) writes, “came as soldiers, as well as caravans of porters and large numbers of desperate refugees, moved throughout the country, bringing new diseases to people with no resistance to them. Many illnesses, particularly sleeping sickness, became far more lethal for people weakened by trauma and hunger. All these caused the death of millions.” The coercion of labor and decimation of the population — both under the Kingdom of Kongo and, to an even greater extreme, under Leopold — generated tremendous human suffering. It also discouraged, or outright prevented, individuals from pursuing gainful economic activity (i.e., there was no free labor market) or investing in their land or selves. Yet, as Acemoglu and Robinson (2013) point out, these disastrous policies had a clear political logic: while Kongo’s and Leopold’s systems of rule ravaged the population and deterred future growth, they enriched those in control. Leopold reinvested some of his revenues from the Congo in a string of villas on the French Riviera. In the absence of inclusive political institutions, unconstrained rulers can expropriate at will, leaving their vulnerable constituents wary about creating value only to see it snatched away by a rapacious state. Despite modest administrative reforms under Belgian state authority — the Belgian parliament assumed control over the territory in 1908 in the face of international opprobrium — the ghosts of Leopold’s legacy reappeared at independence: the war among the independence leaders and Mobutu’s transformation into a kleptocrat squashed hopes that selfrule would involve more inclusive institutions and growth.

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2

The Slave Trade

Slavery is a quintessential extractive institution: “markets in slaves were in fact one part of the economic institutions systematically coercing the majority of the population and robbing them of the ability to choose their occupations and how they should utilize their talents” (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2013, 70). Moreover, as we will see below, the slave trade eroded trust and retarded development in sub-Saharan Africa. The horrors of the African slave trade are well known: inhumanely crowded and disease-ridden ships made the trip across the Atlantic. An estimated 13 percent of slaves bought on the coast were lost in what was called the Middle Passage. And this doesn’t count the untold (perhaps) millions who died in the raids and wars waged to capture slaves. Despite the tremendous loss of human life involved in the capture and transport of slaves, plantation owners in the Americas paid relatively little at port and, thus, did not even bother to maintain the health of their slaves; one estimate suggests that the descendants of a newly arrived slave were all dead within twenty years (on average) of the slave’s arrival (Davidson, 1961, 59). In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, Germans, French, and British had small merchant houses on the West African coast. They sought alliances with local merchants to marginalize their European competitors and built “an intricate system of business habits, taxes, currencies, and trading jargon” (Davidson, 1961, 55). Coastal chiefs traded for horses, firearms, alcohol, and later European manufactured goods in return for slaves. European merchants profited immensely, leading to an expansion of the slave trade. The numbers are eyepopping. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Africa lost 15 million people to slavers. Some 1.31

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Total Slave Exports (Millions)

million were sent across the Red Sea as slaves in the Arab Gulf; 940,000 crossed the Indian Ocean; and another 3.12 million were sold in the trans-Saharan trade. But these numbers pale in comparison to the 10.31 million slaves sold to European merchants for the trans-Atlantic voyage to the New World. Figure 6.2 shows the volume and the sources of the slave trade.

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In this section, examine about the long-term effects of the slave trade on Africa’s contemporary development. Estimating these impacts requires knowing what areas were most affected by the slave trade (i.e., where were the population losses concentrated). Until relatively recently, this information had not been systematically collected. Nathan Nunn (along with co-authors) has now mapped the historical intensity of the slave trade, and he uses this mapping to estimate the long-term consequences of this inhuman institution (Nunn, 2008; Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011). Nunn’s first task was to compile data on the number of slaves transported from each coastal country in Africa. However, he knew that slaves transported from presentday Ghana might have been captured further inland in,

Figure 6.2 Cumulative Slave Exports by Country

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for example, present-day Burkina Faso. To address this concern, Nunn relied on archival records that documented the ethnicity of slaves. Knowing where different ethnic homelands were located, he could then determine what contemporary countries (or even parts of countries) lost the largest number of people to the slave trade. The estimates produced by this method imply that some countries lost millions, while others lost no one, in the slave trade. For example, from what is today Angola, some 3.6 million slaves were exported; from Nigeria, it was 2.02 million; from Ghana, 1.61 million; and from Ethiopia, 1.45 million. Compare this to Botswana, Lesotho, Rwanda, and Swaziland, which have no recorded exports of slaves. Knowing how many of their inhabitants today’s countries lost during the slave trade (assuming that ethnic groups remained stationary) allows Nunn to estimate the long-run economic effects of losing population due to slavery. Figure 6.3 suggests that slavery created a “reversal of fortunes”: the richest countries during the fifteenth century (measured by population density) exported the largest numbers of slaves. If we fast-forward through history, we then see that the countries with the greatest

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numbers of slave exports (normalized by country area) tended to have lower GDP per capita in 2000. The data also suggest that the effects of slavery were not immediate and have actually increased with time. To illustrate Nunn’s findings in a more concrete manner, and taking into consideration the size of each country, we divide African countries into thirds based on their slave exports. We then plot the average per capita income for these three groups of countries between 1960 and 2010 (figure 6.4). We can now observe that at independence, the three sets of countries were performing poorly, with per capita income hovering around 1,000 USD. But once Africans became self-governing, a clear divergence emerged, with those countries least exposed to the slave trade significantly outperforming those that were most exposed (though this gap appears to narrow late in the period). Nunn and co-authors (Nunn, 2008; Nunn and

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Wantchekon, 2011) suggest some pathways that could explain slavery’s long-run economic effects. First, as we develop in chapter 9 on the colonial state, the slave trade rewarded West Africa’s emperors for waging war to capture and transport slaves. The great empires — Oyo, Ashanti, Dahomey, and Kongo — grew in wealth and stature with the expansion of the slave trade. But once the interdiction began in the early nineteenth century, these empires lost their revenue base and faced internal rebellions as well as direct attacks by imperial armies, leading ultimately to state failure. We can see the political consequences of economic dependence on the slave trade in figure 6.5: countries that exported more slaves had lower levels of state development in the precolonial period.4 Research by Gennaioli and Rainer (2007) finds that low levels of state development are associated with subsequent lower education, greater disease, and poorer infrastructure.

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The second mechanism has to do with the degree that citizens in today’s Africa feel that they can, in general, trust co-nationals they have never met. To understand how the African slave trade undermined trust, consider how slaves were captured. As demand skyrocketed in the late seventeenth century, local leaders in Africa fought wars to capture slaves, raiding neighboring villages; courts punished convicted criminals with enslavement; communities accused their own of witchcraft, condemning the “witches” to slavery (Manning, 1990, 131). These practices, according to Manning (1990, 133), made Africans suspicious of one another and political authorities; they lacked, in social science jargon, “generalized trust.” Research has demonstrated that individuals with generalized trust are more willing to trade with strangers, an activity that facilitates exchange and, thus, enables economic development. Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) report a negative relationship between slave exports and contemporary indicators of trust in neighbors, relatives, or local officials. They find evidence that the slave trade’s persistent effect on mistrust operates through two channels: “The first is that over the 400 years of insecurity generated by the slave trade, general beliefs that others cannot be trusted evolved. . . . The second is that the slave trade resulted in a deterioration in legal institutions and the rule of law in general. . . . Individuals therefore exhibit low levels of trust because the legal environment does not cause individuals to be trustworthy” (42). Manning (1990, 24-25) suggests a third mechanism that links the slave trade to weak economic growth: persistent uncertainty. Investment is a forward-looking behavior, requiring faith that you will earn and enjoy an economic return. Living in societies torn apart by raids and economies premised on plunder, the future looked bleak, leading one “to take a short-range view of economic conditions. . . . Wars, displacement, and changing

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politics made it difficult to plan construction, open new fields.” If African merchants underinvest or “lack an entrepreneurial spirit” — a charge sometimes leveled by outsiders — it could relate to a persistent belief in a dark future. Beyond its effects on growth, the slave trade may have also contributed to contemporary conflicts in Africa. Recall our discussion in chapter 5 of Herbst (2000), who argued that vast empty spaces between population centers made it difficult for leaders to project power and maintain order. Consider the effects of the slave trade on states’ populations. Manning (1990, 85) estimates that if the slave trade had never taken place, the population of sub-Saharan African in 1850 would have been double its actual size — nearly 100 million people.5 The slave trade, we can speculate, had a large effect on population density, especially in West Africa. While the shortage of labor has had a direct economic effect, here we see the indirect effect on future conflict. One might ask whether rapid population growth in Africa (with a projected population of two billion between 2050 and 2100) will restore populations hollowed out by the slave trade. Alas, most of this population growth is in cities and does little to increase density in the periphery.6 In sum, the slave trade — a quintessential extractive institution — helps explain why the promise of independence proved so elusive for the inheritors of the colonial states.

3

The Institutions of Forced Labor

Many of the Africans not enslaved and deported were subjected to “forced or compulsory labour” practices that the League of Nations feared were “developing into conditions analogous to slavery” (Cooper, 1996, 28). Two related forms of coercive labor practices were ubiquitous in colonial Africa. First there was the corvée, a system

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Gollin, Jedwab, and Vollrath (2016) argue that this urbanization may not bode well for economic development either. They classify many cities in resource-rich countries as “consumption cities” — urban areas with poor public goods provision where residents work in service sectors, not industry.

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going back to Roman times that demanded a set number of workdays for building public infrastructure, such as roads or railways. Second, coercive practices required African peasants to plant particular crops for European markets. These systems of forced labor rested on a colonial-era belief that Africans are lazy and not moved by positive incentives. The British colonial office even presented this racism as social science, asserting that labor markets operated differently in Africa: high wages did not attract more labor, they argued, but rather allowed workers to put in fewer hours before returning to their leisure (Berman and Lonsdale, 1980, 63). This backward-bending labor supply curve conveniently argued against raising wages or benefits to motivate more (or more productive) labor. The French were less analytic. Their Economic Service attached a note to a circular by the Governor General of Côte d’Ivoire asserting that: truly free wage workers, those who come to the European plantation of their own will, who have not submitted to the influence of traditional or administrative authority, are only recruited easily in seasons of agricultural unemployment. . . . One deals in Africa with backward races, deprived of judgment and morality as soon as they are removed from their ancient patriarchal armature. Become a wage worker for a European, the native peasant hardly waits to degrade himself. . . . His familial and religious respect disappears. His own family disintegrates. Thus thrown out of orbit, the honest and satisfied black of the day before is nothing more than a malcontent given over to his freed inclinations toward nonchalance and rapine. (Cooper, 1996, 33)

This racism even pervaded the European left. France’s Popular Front government did not consider extending to Africans the protections provided to European workers. The Popular Front’s governors agreed that “Africans were not in general ready for the forty-hour week, paid holi-

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days, and especially trade union rights. It was up to the administration, not trade unions, ‘to protect the native masses”’ (92). Summing up colonial views, Cooper dryly observes that the notion of an “African worker” seemed oxymoronic to colonials (56). And these beliefs rationalized the use of coercion, rather than wages or benefits, to motivate labor. Coercion took several forms (see Zegeye and Ishemo, 1989). First, peasant families who could not afford head taxes faced conscription, the seizure of their crops, physical punishment, and imprisonment.7 Similarly, migrant labor was recruited to serve in labor reserve colonies. These workers were taxed for the camps’ maintenance, and their accumulated debts often served as a barrier to freely exiting. Second, colonial authorities contracted with chiefs, who supplied labor from their communities in return for salaries and political recognition. Finally, colonial authorities exploited prison labor. The case of Côte d’Ivoire in the 1930s illustrates the role of chiefs in this exploitative system. According to official accounts, the colonial government supposedly lobbied the highest Mossi chief in Upper Volta, the Moro Naba, to become an “apostle” of work and convince his constituents to join the labor force. And the chief assured the governor that he could count on “a relatively large number of workers.” But we learn from a European merchant that Mossi chiefs received direct orders to deliver men and willingly complied. The president of the Chambre d’Agriculture et d’Industrie de la Côte d’Ivoire wrote in 1937 that “at present, we have returned to slavery. The employers buy men from the chief who ‘sells’ them as dearly as possible, without caring if they have sleeping sickness, leprosy, syphilis, tuberculosis or other diseases” (Cooper, 1996, 82-83). Colonial authorities, as signatories of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) conventions against forced

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Taxation in colonial Africa was not part of a fiscal contract, in which citizens traded a share of their income for public services; rather, it was a system designed to compel peasants to enter the cash economy.

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labor, struggled (with considerable success) to sustain these brutal tactics. Repulsed by the systematic flouting of their country’s international obligations, progressive elements in the metropole challenged prevailing practices. For example, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, as a parliamentarian in the French National Assembly representing Côte d’Ivoire, sponsored legislation in 1946 abolishing forced labor in French colonies. Yet, colonial governors cited strategic needs of the state (or of their European estate owners) and won exceptions to this new rule. Indeed, examples abound of forced labor regimes persisting until independence. In Sudan, the British constructed the massive Gezira Dam on the Blue Nile, intending to irrigate thousands of hectares for cotton production. Yet, squatters had little interest in planting cotton, forcing the British to pass the Gezira Land Ordinance (1921), which reallocated land exclusively for cotton and made continued tenancy contingent on growing cotton on a set percentage of each farm. Meanwhile, the Standard Conditions of Tenancy agreement (1936) prohibited commercial sale of food products from Gezira (Bernal, 1995), which would have decreased cotton production. In the Belgian Congo, each African cotton cultivator had a regular assessment in the Fiche de contrôle et surveillance and was subject to corporal punishment (i.e., whipping) for not reaching production quotas. Cotton monitors were typically ex-soldiers of the Force Publique who knew nothing about cotton production, but sent cultivators to prison for not meeting targets (Likaka, 1997, 201-202). In Côte d’Ivoire, the French responded to labor shortages by collaborating with chiefs and permitting the “brutality of circle guards” to enforce what Basset (1995, 249) refers to as the “cotton corvée.” In Kenya, European estate owners needed cheap and secure labor, as their debts and a sharp dropoff in demand during the Great Depression squeezed profit margins. But

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given the brutal labor conditions on the estates, Africans quickly quit these positions. Rather than improving conditions, settlers lobbied colonial authorities to pass legislation that would punish “deserters,” that is, workers that left without permission. Under the Masters and Servants Ordinances of 1906, 1910, and 1916, labor “offenses,” including quitting, were met with harsh sentences — a maximum of six months’ imprisonment or a five-pound fine. With the Registration of Natives Ordinance (passed in 1920, but not seriously enforced for several years), all African males had to register and keep a kipande, or work record. Police could then stop any male African to see if he had “deserted”; in its first year of operation, 2,364 of 2,790 reported deserters were traced and prosecuted. In Tanganyika, German settlers could not survive economically without cheap African labor. To compel laborers to accept poorly compensated work, settlers created camps (labor reserves) and taxed inhabitants. To pay the tax, individuals had little choice but to work on the settlers’ estates (Lwoga in Zegeye and Ishemo, 1989). Latifundarios in Mozambique producing sugar and copra similarly were able to tax local peasants as a mechanism to compel young males to work on their estates in order to cover their tax (mussoco) burden. The latifundarios recruited their own armies (with support of the Portuguese governors) to seize food reserves and then to conscript men for public works at peasant households that failed to pay their tax burden (Zegeye and Ishemo, 1989). Do these coercive labor practices matter for contemporary development? Recent work by Lowes and Montero (2016) shows that individuals living within the boundaries of former rubber concessions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have lower levels of education, health, and wealth today. These authors argue that the co-optation of chiefs, which we described above, undermined political accountability and, thus, the provision of public services

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in former concession areas. Evidence from other regions, notably that from Dell (2010) on forced labor practices in Peru, also suggests that labor coercion can have pernicious and lasting effects on household welfare and local public goods, such as roads. While the historiography suggests that labor-repressive institutions were both pervasive and pernicious, we await more rigorous empirical analysis of the long-run effects of extractive institutions, such as the “cotton corvée.” The case studies we have suggest that brutal labor repression alienated rural farmers, sowing a distrust of central authority that governments have struggled to overcome since independence (Munro, 1996, 128).

Insecure Tenure and Underinvestment in Land As summarized by Ensminger (1997, 167), “A common characteristic in almost all African customary systems is for use rights to be assigned at the household level, whereas transfer rights are assigned at a higher level such as the lineage, clan, or chiefdom.” Where households fear that their land could be seized and reallocated by a higher authority when the land is not cultivated, economists expect them to underinvest. Why invest in long-run increases in agricultural productivity if you worry that the land may not be yours come next harvest? Consistent with this claim, Goldstein and Udry (2008) find that Ghanaian farmers lacking strong ties to their chief are less likely to fallow land — an important form of investment that requires leaving land idle, so that soils recuperate. Evidence from a more recent randomized controlled trial in rural Benin also suggests that demarcating and securing tenure rights increases long-term investment (Goldstein et al., 2015). A systematic review finds general agreement that improving tenure security increases individual consumption or income, likely by sparking greater investment (Lawry et al., 2014, 9). Backed by

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this evidence, past and ongoing policy efforts across subSaharan Africa promote the mapping and registration of individual land titles with the hopes of activating a land market, boosting productivity-enhancing investments, and sparking rural development. While insecure tenure represents a persistent and extractive institution, its origins can not be cleanly attributed to an abusive central or colonial government. In fact, Chanock (1991, 172) documents ambivalence among British colonial authorities as to whether to promote individualized land holdings: “the notable confidence in the benefits of individualization, which had marked the British approach in the early colonial period, was in the process of being replaced by a communalist caution.” This inconsistency may reflect competing economic and political pressures: on the one hand, more private property could boost productivity; on the other hand, leaving the administration of land in the hands of chiefs enabled “indirect rule” by traditional authorities, a strategy we discuss in detail in chapter 9. Christensen et al. (2018b) provide evidence that private property promotes external investment relative to customary systems. They exploit a natural experiment in Liberia, which was arbitrarily divided into two zones: a coastal area with private property rights, and the hinterland where land is governed by customary authorities. Comparing otherwise similar land held under these parallel property rights systems, the authors find a larger increase in land investment (e.g., new concessions and clearing) where private property rights prevail. Even where a central state made a concerted land reform effort, its goals were largely unfulfilled. Indeed, postcolonial leaders were frequently subverted in their attempts to privatize landholdings. Some attribute this failure to a risky farming environment (and the absence of insurance markets): where the probability of crop fail-

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ure due to drought or pests is high, farmers may prefer communal systems that help share risks across an entire village. While private property means you realize the full upside of investments, it also means that you face the full downside of failure. Ensminger (1997, 167) reports that “there is increasing evidence from anthropologists and Africanists that even the longest running national privatization efforts [by both colonial and postcolonial governments] are unraveling, reverting to customary rights.” Tenure insecurity may not be a consequence of coercion, but rather the product of individuals hedging against a poor harvest.

4

Conclusion

A new research paradigm in political economy emphasizes how institutions affect economic growth. Inclusive political institutions that protect private property, impartially enforce contracts, and invest in basic public goods enable development; extractive institutions that expropriate wealth or fail to maintain a semblance of order foster uncertainty deterring forward-looking investments. Sadly, several extractive institutions were imposed in sub-Saharan Africa — institutions that denied Africans their freedom, mobility, and property. The slave trade is perhaps the best-known example. From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, some 15 million people were sold into slavery — a number that, however staggering, fails to capture the untold numbers that died in the wars waged to capture slaves. Yet, slavery was not the only form of forced labor. Across the region, colonialists used different schemes to conscript individuals into accepting meager pay and brutal working conditions. Extractive institutions existed beyond the reaches of the colonial state and economy; within their villages, peasants in most customary systems rely on capricious chiefs to allocate and maintain their land rights. Absent a firm title, many

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households underinvest in their land, fearing that it might be transferred next season. Some of these extractive institutions have direct effects on contemporary development. Slave raids, for example, sowed distrust among groups, creating a barrier to trade; if individuals expect to be cheated, they are often reticent to make deals. The mass death and displacement associated with the slave trades also removed millions, those who would have been productive citizens in African countries rather than chattel labor in the Americas. This decimation of the labor force could have had a direct effect on later economic growth. It also helps account for the demographic challenge (as discussed in chapter 5) of countries that have vast empty spaces between population centers, raising the costs of providing political order in peripheral zones. Yet, these extractive institutions often exert a lasting effect on order and development, because the economic and political inequality they generate is encoded in, and perpetuated by, more contemporary political institutions. Much of the research we reviewed in this chapter argues that extractive institutions persist — that checks and balances and political accountability are weaker in those places where colonial powers and chiefs wielded unchecked power. This is not surprising; the incumbents that benefit from the old system (e.g., chiefs and other economic elites) are reluctant to endorse reforms that diminish their status or control. Returning to the diagram from our introduction, we can now summarize (in figure 6.6) some important ideas from this chapter. Newly installed leaders in the 1960s faced the legacies of the slave trade, labor repression, and insecure land tenure. Despite independence, the inequality generated by these extractive institutions often persisted. Citizens outside of capitals had little voice and, thus, struggled to influence leaders or hold them ac-

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Direct Effects • Low Interpersonal Trust (ST)

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Constraints • Low Political Accountability (ST, UC)

• Labor Repression (LR) • Protected Chiefs (UC)

• Insecure Property Rights (ST, LR, UC)

countable. Even within their own villages, individuals found themselves without rights to challenge the chiefs who controlled their access to land. Low levels of political accountability and disaffection from politics did not hamstring leaders; if anything, it freed them to pursue policies contrary to voters’ interests. Yet, in the absence of checks on executive power at local and national levels, policy in the post-independence period often reflected elites’ demands or advanced the narrow financial interests of leaders. Land reform and investments in public services that served rural majorities were not prioritized, with unfortunate consequences for future development and order.

Figure 6.6 Conceptual Framework: Extractive Institutions

7. The Missionaries

C H I N UA A C H E B E ’ S Things Fall Apart — “Africa’s best-loved novel” according to NYU’s Kwame Anthony Appiah — tells the rise and fall of Okonkwo, whose “solid personal achievements” (especially relative to his lackluster father) brought him and his family higher status in Igbo villages in Eastern Nigeria. As a great wrestler, Okonkwo is known among his clansmen as “Roaring Flame.” Okonkwo is exiled to his mother’s village for inadvertently killing a clansman, and while he’s away, a missionary arrives in a village neighboring his hometown. Okonkwo’s closest friend visits him in exile and reports that this missionary was murdered following the Oracle’s pronouncement that this “strange man would break their clan and spread destruction among them.” Shortly thereafter a larger group of these strange (white) men reappear and, as revenge, kill nearly all the residents of that neighboring village on a market day. Later, missionaries arrive in the village where Okonkwo is exiled, telling locals that theirs were “gods of deceit. . . pieces of wood and stone.” Missionaries’ songs and calm presence attract Okonkwo’s son, who had been deeply troubled by clan practices, especially the one that sacrificed his beloved adopted brother. Okonkwo’s son travels to his father’s home village and joins the Christians in their church, enraging his father. Okonkwo derisively compares the missionary activity to the man who “comes

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into my hut and defecates on the floor.” He argues that such behavior would demand direct action, “to take a stick and break his head.” But the missionaries, backed by the new colonial state, divide the clan and limit its ability to repel this foreign threat. In recognition of his failure, Okonkwo acknowledges that “the white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” But rather than meet his fate at the hands of the new authorities, Okonkwo commits the most egregious sin of his clan and hangs himself. The center indeed did not hold. In this chapter, we review recent research into the role of missionaries in Africa’s economic and political development. The preponderance of evidence suggests that the long-run effect of missionaries was more positive than what Okonkwo’s story portends.

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A Digression on the Sociology of Religion

Max Weber based his now-famous, century-old study of religion and the economy on the observation that parts of Europe dominated by Protestants were far wealthier than those dominated by Catholics.1 He attributed this difference to the “Protestant ethic” and its “elective affinity” with “the capitalist spirit.” For Weber, the Protestant ethic was articulated by Calvin’s writing on the doctrine of the elect. In this doctrine, thriftiness, hard work, and a scrupulously modest lifestyle are signals of salvation. Seeking to exhibit those signals, Calvinists adopted a new economic spirit, one in which regular factory hours, careful double-entry bookkeeping, and limited consumption of luxury goods (thereby maximizing saving) would be the best evidence of being a member of the elect. This advice, peculiar to Protestants, exemplified the capitalist

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First published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and then revised (with extensive reflections on the critical reception the original articles received) in 1920-21 as Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, this latter version was translated by Talcott Parsons and published by Scribner’s Sons in New York in 1958 as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

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spirit, an orientation toward life that lifted the economic fortunes for one half of Europe in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Modern economists largely ignore Weber’s essay, focusing on the importance of political institutions to explain cross-country differences in wealth (North and Weingast, 1989; Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2005). But recent studies have brought religion back to the fore. A paper by Woodberry (2012) analyzes data on the activities of Protestant missionaries around the world in the early twentieth century. Woodberry reports that these Protestant missionaries were instrumental in promoting mass education, literacy, civil society organizations, and colonial reforms — all presaging higher levels of postcolonial democracy. This positive relationship between Protestant missionaries and contemporary democracy does not appear to be confounded by countries’ colonial affiliation (e.g., British, Dutch), latitude, or literacy prior to missionary contact. In complementary work, Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2006) explore the relationship between religious doctrine and economic activity. First, relying on crossnational survey data from the World Values Survey, they find that generalized trust, a predictor of entrepreneurship and economic growth, is significantly higher for religious respondents. And when asked their own religious affiliation, it is Protestants who exhibit the highest levels of generalized trust. The authors then take advantage of a change in religious doctrine at the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that made the practice of Catholicism more participatory, an important feature of Protestantism. Their data show that children brought up in the era after the Council were more trusting than Catholics raised during earlier peirods, suggesting a causal effect of religious doctrine. What about Islam? Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales

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(2006) show that generalized trust for self-described Muslims is not higher than for respondents who express no religious affiliation. More interestingly, Campante and Yanagizawa-Drott (2015) exploit variation in the length of fasting (due to the rotating Islamic calendar and countries’ latitudes) to estimate the economic effects of religious observance. These authors find that longer fasts lower economic output but increase subjective well-being. That is, extended religious rituals impede growth and, yet, leave ritual observers happier. These social scientific reports are consistent with Achebe’s portrayal of religion and religious change having important effects on society and social cohesion, but not fully in accord with the notion (more associated with Okonkwo than Achebe) that due to the missionary impact, things fell apart.

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Missionaries’ Effects on Development

Measuring the effect of religion poses a methodological problem. Consider the difficulty of determining the causal effects of Protestant missionaries. Maybe, as Weber suggests, the doctrine had a direct effect on the capitalist spirit even if those who converted had no inkling of capitalism. But there could be other lines of causation. Perhaps it was the people who had inklings of thrift, of generalized trust, and of entrepreneurship who were most attracted to the Protestants; or maybe it was the missionaries who decided to settle in villages where people were more trusting, more thrifty, or more entrepreneurial. In these alternative scenarios, findings linking Protestantism to trust would reflect what social scientists call “selection bias” — that is, Protestantism does not cause people to become more trusting; rather, more trusting people become Protestant. A study by Michalopoulos, Naghavi, and Prarolo (2012) discovers evidence that religious conversion,

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namely the spread of Islam, depended on certain socioeconomic and geographic conditions. Muslim settlers did not randomly choose where they proselytized; rather, they selected into new areas that were poor economically and diverse geographically (e.g., desert nomads with nearby riverine agriculturalists). Islam flourished in these settings, the authors argue, because its broadly applicable and strict moral code prevented conflict and enabled exchange between pastoralists and farmers. Muslim farmers and herders could specialize in their respective occupations and trade knowing that any duplicitous behavior would, by virtue of their shared religious community, be met with social exclusion and damnation. This tendency of Islam to take hold in certain social and economic environments makes it challenging to determine the religion’s long-run effects: we struggle to separate the consequences of poverty or geographic diversity (which both predict the success of Islam and could also directly affect economic development or political institutions) from the impacts of the religion. Yet, in sub-Saharan Africa, the historical record does not suggest that Islam took hold only in societies already predisposed to autocracy or other extractive institutions (see chapter 6). Laitin (1986a) in Nigeria and Adida, Laitin, and Valfort (2016) in Senegal challenge the notion that certain types of individuals or communities systematically selected into different religions. In two places where Christian missionaries met head-on with Muslim jihadists in early nineteenth-century Africa, each group earned converts in the same towns. What each offered the townspeople were similar — opportunities for a more modern lifestyle and international trading links. In southwestern Senegal, for example, among the Joolas and Serers, Muslim jihadists offered links to the lucrative groundnut trade; meanwhile, the Christians were offering locals opportunities to trade in palm products. As we know from the

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historical work of Nock (1933), the first generation of converts rarely has theological preferences; rather it is the second generation, brought up in mosque or church, that gets culturally assimilated. Therefore, we can say with greater confidence that Africans did not choose Protestantism, Catholicism, or Islam based on the differential expected returns to democracy or wealth. As for where the missionaries decided to settle in subSaharan Africa, the Catholics and Protestants coming from Europe were largely ignorant of local customs and different groups’ receptivity to new ideas. (As we shall see in chapter 8, at the turn of the nineteenth century, even colonial powers knew next to nothing about the people and territories they claimed to govern.) It is thus unlikely that missionaries deployed based on beliefs about where their conversion efforts would be most successful. If we discover that these Christian religions had different effects across African states, this is likely due to differences in their presence and respective religious doctrines or practices. What, then, are the observed differences? Protestants brought far more than religion with their missionary activities. They brought with them schools and printing presses, perhaps with the goal of using these public goods to win converts. The effects were stunning: figure 7.1 indicates a strong positive relationship — both in and beyond sub-Saharan Africa — between the number of Protestant missionaries in 1923 and average levels of secondary school enrollment from 1960 to 1985. Catholic priests had a positive effect on future educational attainment among sub-Saharan countries, but the global relationship between Catholic missionaries and contemporary educational outcomes is more muted (i.e., the slope of the dashed bivariate regression line in figure 7.1 is less steep for Catholic missionaries). As with education, mission-

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ary activity also increased literacy, as indicated by higher newspaper circulation in 1995 (Woodberry, 2012). Missionaries not only affected education, but may also have impacted health. While credible causal evidence has not yet been provided, Good (1991, 1) reports that “Protestant and Roman Catholic missions pioneered Western medicine. . . in much of Africa decades in advance of health services provided by colonial governments. A century later church-based hospitals and health care programs continue to account for 25 percent to 50 percent of available services in most African countries.” In this case, there was no Protestant advantage. The earliest missionary health stations were Portuguese Catholic Missions in Mozambique established in the early sixteenth century. Protestants, by contrast, were initially wary of providing health services, as doctrine held that salvation held the key to the good life. But influenced by the writings of Dr. David Livingstone calling for a more humane treatment of Africans that included modern health care, and facing catastrophic health issues of their own missionaries, Protestant missionary societies adjusted to realities on the ground. In 1893 Dr. C. F. Harford-Battersby of

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Figure 7.1 Christian Missionary Activity and Contemporary School Enrollment

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the Church Missionary Society (CMS) spearheaded the Livingstone Medical College in London, which offered a three-term course in tropical medicine, and health clinics became a standard offering in CMS missions (Good, 1991, p. 4).2 Finally, the missionary experience has had a profound impact on future democracy. Woodberry (2012) finds that greater exposure to Protestant missionaries increases the likelihood that stable democracy prevails (figure 7.2). He attributes this effect to higher levels of literacy, as well as Protestant theology that insisted on individual interpretation of the gospel. Protestants, he argues, created the informed individualists that representative, limited government requires. Also crucial, Woodberry insists, was Protestant missionaries’ political confrontations with colonial governments regarding human rights abuses; Protestant missionaries helped to publicize internationally the horrors of the Congo Free State, which we described in

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Figure 7.2 Protestant Missionaries and Democracy

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chapter 6 (Hochschild, 2005). Political accountability requires that citizens be similarly willing to question authority.

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African countries are divided across two of the world religions, Christianity and Islam. On percentage of Muslims, several countries have virtually 100 percent of the population: Somalia, Mauritania, and Mali. Others are nearly all Christian: Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Lesotho, and Namibia. But most are mixed: Nigeria, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and many others. Figure 7.3 illustrates the wide variation in religious composition across African countries.

The question, then, is if we know the percentage of Muslims in a country’s population, would that help explain its political or economic development? Despite Huntington’s infamous claim of Islam’s “bloody borders” (Huntington, 1997), there is no evidence that African countries with a larger Muslim population are more susceptible to civil or interstate wars (figure 7.4). And there is no discernible relationship in sub-Saharan Africa between the prevalence of Islam and the level of democracy: as but one example, Senegal and The Gambia have a similar religious composition (both are over 90 percent Muslim)

Figure 7.3 Contemporary Religious Composition in African States

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and yet (at least until the political transition in 2017 in Gambia) very different levels of political openness. Countries with larger Muslim populations, however, perform somewhat worse on other development indicators. In sub-Saharan Africa, naive cross-country comparisons indicate that GDP per capita and educational attainment are lower — while infant mortality is higher — in countries with larger Muslim populations. (As is apparent in figure 7.4, the negative relationship between percent Muslim and GDP per capita is largely driven by three predominantly Christian countries in southern Africa: South Africa, Botswana, and Mauritius.) This negative association between Muslim adherence and economic development likely reflects two dynamics described above: first, the Christian missionaries that converted populations also

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provided education and health services;3 second, Islam in sub-Saharan Africa is concentrated in the Sahel, a terrain and climate that may independently impede development or service provision. Providing public services to nomadic or sparse populations living at the southern reaches of the Saharan desert poses obvious logistical challenges.

4

Conclusion

Over the long term, we find limited evidence that Protestant missionaries made “things fall apart.” Rather, Protestant missionaries had long-term positive effects on democracy, health, and human capital. If anything, recent research implies that not enough Protestant missionaries came to Africa. Indeed, the average Protestant missionary presence in sub-Saharan countries in 1923 (0.65 per 10,000) was roughly half the world average. While Catholic and Muslim missionaries had somewhat less of a positive impact, in no sense did they forestall economic or political development post-independence. Achebe’s novel is far too subtle to attribute only negative results to the missionaries’ arrival. The Igbo traditions he recounts also have their dark side. Okonkwo achieved local status in part due to the brutality he exhibited, especially to his wives. The community, following its time-honored norms, selected Okonkwo’s adopted son, perhaps the gentlest soul in the novel, for human sacrifice. And the Christians insisted on respect for all community members, even those who were designated by tradition as slaves, or osu, the outcasts, or the efulefu considered to be the “excrement of the clan.” The missionaries brought literacy, provided jobs in the colonial service, distributed medicines, and lobbied to end the slave trade. The Protestants, as Achebe portrays them, refused to accept social stigmas among Africans, something that Igbo traditions upheld. In sum, we cannot link missionary activities launched

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3 Even within religiously divided countries, Izama (2016) observes that Muslims typically have worse education and health than Christians. These gaps are due to the investments Christian missionaries made in public goods. Fearing a backlash and accommodating the wishes of Muslim leaders, colonial authorities discouraged missionaries from evangelizing among Muslim populations, resulting in fewer schools and clinics in Muslim-dominant areas.

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in the nineteenth century to African countries’ postindependence lag. In fact, as figure 7.5 indicates, the constraints facing leaders due to the missionary impact, if anything, worked against leaders acting as traditional “big men” in defiance of their populations (McCauley, 2013). As we saw in this chapter, the exposure to Christianity had, if anything, a positive effect on interpersonal trust, a key ingredient for economic growth. Moreover, those people brought up in missionary environments have been more active in promoting democracy and human rights. Direct Effects • Interpersonal Trust (EP) • Population Health (HC) Missionaries Constraints • Exposure to Protestantism (EP) • Education and Literacy (EL) • Health Clinics (HC)

• Discredited Local Traditions and Traditional Leaders (EL, IE) • Citizens Demanding Democratic Rights (EL, IE)

• Ideology of Equality (IE)

Figure 7.5 Conceptual Framework: The Missionaries

8. The Partition of Africa

F I R S T O N H I S L I S T O F W H AT I S D I S T I N C T I V E about the sub-Saharan African colonial project, Crawford Young (1994, 278) points to the nature of partition. The number of imperial claimants to territory (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Belgian monarchy, and Portugal) was greater than in Latin America or Asia; moreover, the bargained boundaries had no connection to existing political groups or colonial states’ capacity to project power. Providing an African perspective, historian A. I. Asiwaju (1985, 1-2) describes partition as “political surgery” that frequently split polities “into two or more colonies and, later, independent African successor states.” Leaders constantly feared that these cuts would become the sites of disputes: “Since the attainment of political independence,” Asiwaju asserts, “there is hardly one [modern African state] that has not had to worry about the position of its boundaries vis-à-vis its neighbors.” This imperial competition over and ignorance of their own dominions has, as both Young and Asiwaju emphasize, pernicious effects that outlast the colonial state. The story begins in Berlin in the late nineteenth century.

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The Berlin Conference

The Intent: Preventing Imperial Wars in Africa The infamous Berlin Conference of 1884-85 set administrative boundaries in Africa and granted vast territories

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to the leading European powers (figure 8.1). It would be historically inaccurate to claim that the diplomats at the Conference were rapacious imperialists, attempting to maximize their holdings. Rather, the leading European powers agreed that, since these territories were not worth fighting over, the best course of action was to collectively agree on boundaries to prevent future disputes. In fact, the stated purpose of the Berlin Conference was to determine the boundaries of the Congo Free State (then a private domain of the Belgian king) in order to prevent violent conflict among Europeans. Figure 8.1 The Berlin Conference, 1884-85

This attitude was indicative of a common principle governing European relations with sub-Saharan Africa, summarized as “trade if you can; rule if you must” by the revisionist historians Robinson and Gallagher (1966). If a series of agreements with African chiefs could facilitate access to groundnuts, palm oil, and cocoa, there would be little economic reason for political interference. Africa’s borders were not drawn to enable exploitation, nor were they drawn to create viable states; rather, they were drawn to keep Europeans from fighting one another. The Fashoda incident exemplifies European powers’

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reluctance to engage in violent conflict over African territory. In 1898, a French expedition was charged with establishing authority over the upper Nile basin, which would allow the French to wrestle control of Sudan from the British. The two imperial armies met at the Fashoda outpost and, despite heated rhetoric back home in Europe, no shots were ever fired. The French backed down, not wanting a war in the African interior to derail their valuable alliance with the British against an upstart Germany. The Entente Cordiale, which linked the fates of France and Britain (and granted them freedom from interference in their suzerainty over Morocco and Egypt, respectively), would surely have failed had the two fought in the Sudan. For our purposes the Fashoda incident demonstrates that Europe’s great powers had larger interests that could not be jeopardized battling for control over territory in Africa.

The Consequences: Artificial African Borders If the Berlin accords were of trivial importance to the austere diplomats who attended the Conference, the implications of their border decisions were monumental for independent Africa. These diplomats were totally ignorant of the cultural zones of Africa; only a single African (Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia) was consulted. As recounted by British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, “We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s feet have ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were” (quoted in Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2011, 6). The boundary lines they drew combined diverse cultural zones into single countries and partitioned many other cultural groups. To be sure, taking into account the cultural zones of Africa and turning them into proto nation-states would

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have been a challenge. According to the anthropologist George Murdock, there were (as of 1959) nearly 1,000 ethnic groups in Africa. Figure 8.2 shows the boundaries of these different ethnic homelands, as well as the boundaries of contemporary states (which largely reflect the borders drawn in Berlin). This map conveys the diplomats’ disregard for the spatial distribution of precolonial African societies. Numerous ethnic groups are nearly evenly split between multiple countries: the Egbas, a Yoruba subgroup, are divided across Nigeria, Benin, and Togo; the Somali subgroup of the Issas are divided across Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Somalia; the Chewa in southeastern Africa are divided across Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia; and the Kpelle are divided between Liberia and Guinea.1

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Economic Development Alesina, Easterly, and Matuszeski (2011, 247) argue that artificial states, like those created by the Berlin Con-

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Some have argued that Murdock’s map does not provide an accurate accounting of precolonial ethnic groups: group boundaries likely changed between Europeans’ arrival and Murdock’s research; moreover, colonial policies may have led to the disintegration or formation of groups. Others object to the use of the phrase “homeland,” which might imply a lasting and proper claim on certain territory. These are legitimate criticisms; yet, they bear more on the interpretation than the validity of the research we discuss below.

Figure 8.2 Murdock’s 1959 Map of Ethnic Homelands

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ference, impede economic development: “When states represent people put together by outsiders, these peoples may find it more difficult to reach consensus on public goods delivery and the creation of institutions that facilitate economic development, compared with states that emerged in a homegrown way.” The authors offer correlational evidence consistent with this claim, finding that GDP per capita is lower in countries where much of the population belongs to an ethnic group that is partitioned by a national border. As is apparent in figure 8.3, African states tend to have large partitioned populations and low average incomes and, thus, contribute to this negative correlation.

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Why does partition undermine economic development in Africa? Alesina et al. (2011) offer the Kakwa — an ethnic group split between Sudan and Uganda — as an ex-

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ample: this divided group has been active in civil conflicts and cross-border arms trafficking, which have hampered the political and economic development of both states. Recent empirical research suggests that the Kakwa are not outliers: Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2011) find that “the incidence, severity and duration of violence are higher in the historical homelands of partitioned groups.” To illustrate these authors’ core findings, we first count the number of conflicts according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) that occurred in each ethnic homeland between 1997 and 2014. We then plot the distributions of these counts for ethnic groups that are and are not partitioned by a national boundary. As can be seen in figure 8.4, a larger proportion of partitioned groups experience (multiple) conflicts within their homelands. The median number of conflicts in partitioned groups is over twenty-five, while it is only seven in unified groups.

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Given the arbitrariness — statisticians would say as-if randomness — with which borders were drawn in Berlin (which Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2011 demonstrate in their thorough empirical work), there is no reason to suspect that more conflict-prone groups were more likely to be partitioned. Thus, the authors are confident that these differences capture the average causal effect of ethnic partitioning on the likelihood of conflict. In short, the divisions drawn in Berlin are responsible for exacerbated violence in post-independent Africa. Furthermore, as partition is especially common in sub-Saharan Africa, this can help account for at least some of the regional lag in maintaining order we highlighted in chapter 4. Given that Berlin both divided cultural groups and combined distinct cultures, two types of conflict have bedeviled independent Africa: irredentism and separatism.2 In the data set of Fearon and Laitin (2003), eleven civil wars had separatist agendas (see table 8.1 for the list of these wars).3 Let us now look more concretely at violent examples of both separatism and irredentism.

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Separatist Group(s) Katanga, Kasai South, Anya Nya Igbos, Biafra Eritrea, Tigray, Somali Southern Peoples Tuaregs Casamance Isaaq, Somaliland Cabinda Southern Peoples Afars, Oromos, Eritreans, Somalis

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Irredentism is any political or popular movement intended to reclaim and reoccupy a lost homeland; separatism is the advocacy or practice of separation of a certain group of people from a large body on the basis of ethnicity or religion. 3

Recall that Fearon and Laitin (2003) define a civil war as violent conflicts internal to a country with at least 1,000 deaths.

Table 8.1 Separatist Conflicts in Africa

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The Logic of Civil Conflict Berlin set the colonial boundaries and determined, in large stretches, the borders of contemporary African states. Those decisions started a causal chain that had lasting effects on order in the post-independence period: 1. In Berlin, borders were drawn in ignorance and, thus, lumped together and partitioned Africa’s ethnic groups. 2. New states are by definition relatively weak, as institutions need time to develop governing capacity. This weakness offers minority ethnic groups a chance to challenge the state and enjoy the advantages of selfrule, or an opportunity to capture the center and the large resources available to the group that controls the internationally recognized capital. 3. Central rulers cannot credibly promise to treat minorities with dignity and resources in the future. Thus, fearful or politically ambitious groups have an incentive to act before the center develops the coercive capacity to crush any challenges. More likely, such promises are never made, and central leaders push their coethnics to settle in minority groups’ homelands. This process angers the so-called sons of the soil and intensifies the incentive to rebel. 4. Alas, given its weak military institutions, the new state’s campaigns against rebels in peripheral regions are likely to employ indiscriminate violence, with the killing of innocent civilians, thereby helping rebels to recruit.

Katanga (1960) While providing almost no institutions for self-rule and induced by riots taking place in Léopoldville, Belgium

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began roundtable talks on independence in January 1960. The newly independent Republic of the Congo emerged on June 30, 1960, unprepared for rule. A showcase of the Berlin Conference’s willingness to combine diverse ethnic groups in an expansive new colony, the independent state had a difficult political geography (Herbst, 2000). Patrice Lumumba was installed as prime minister, and Joseph Kasavubu as president. Lumumba and Kasavubu drew from different sources of support: Lumumba led the Mouvement National Congolais, a front of scattered Western-educated elites with a solid regional base in Orientale Province; Kasavubu led the Alliance des Bakongo or ABAKO, a party linked to the Kongo ethnic group that claimed ties to the famous precolonial kingdom (discussed in chapter 6). These men shared power in an ambiguous constitutional setup called bicephalisme (translation: two-headed). They inherited an army in mutiny, as Belgian officers refused to decommission themselves; other state institutions were similarly incapable of governing. Meanwhile, in the copper-rich Katanga Province, a regional party called the Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga (CONAKAT) was formed. CONAKAT’s head, Moïshe Tshombe, seized upon the army mutiny and declared that Katanga was seceding. He called on Belgian troops for support and, to win European favor, framed the conflict as “capitalists” battling Lumumba’s “communists.” Tshombe was able to procure local support for secession from the majority Lunda ethnic group, now sons of the soil, whose members felt economically threatened by Lubas migrating from Kasai Province. But to get international support for his secessionist movement, Tshombe portrayed the conflict as an ideological struggle. This allowed both CONAKAT and its Belgian allies to mask their own economic motives. The leading employer in Katanga, the Union Minière

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du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), was owned by the Société Générale de Belgique — a major industrial enterprise in Belgium. A deal was struck that Belgium would provide protection and order in Katanga, and Katanga would recognize the property rights of the UMHK. The legacy of Berlin — the conjoining of the Lundas and Lubas and their competition for resources — escalated a dispute about control of foreign mines into a war that undermined security for citizens throughout the Congo. The central government in Léopoldville, today’s Kinshasa, asked for the removal of all Belgian troops and military assistance from the United Nations. The UN deployed troops in the Congo but, to Lumumba’s consternation, initially refused to act against Tshombe in Katanga (see figure 8.5 for rough mapping of the competing factions). A frustrated Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for assistance and used its weaponry to launch a failed assault on the separatists. Lumumba was

Figure 8.5 The Congo Crisis

Government of Gizenga Government of Kasavubu/Mobutu Leopoldville

Government of Tshombe

Elisabethville

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then dismissed as prime minister by Kasavubu, a move he protested by appealing directly to the senate for a vote of confidence. General Joseph Mobutu (soon to become Mobutu Sese Seko) ended this political infighting in a 1960 coup d’état that deposed both Lumumba and Kasavubu. Lumumba’s deputy prime minister, Antoine Gizenga, returned to his home region, and in Stanleyville (today’s Kisangani) he declared the formation of the Free Republic of the Congo, an entity that survived less than a year. In 1961, following Lumumba’s execution and the death of the UN secretary-general in a plane crash, the UN intervened forcefully against Tshombe, ending the Katangese secession by early 1963. In the course of this war, the UN secretary-general, Patrice Lumumba, and some 100,000 Congolese were killed. The eventual peace, which brought Mobutu to power, hardly provided a long-term solution. Mobutu’s grip on the state, after a modest recovery, became what is perhaps the most corrupt state in all of Africa, and one where regional differences, in Katanga, Kasai, and in Kivu, continue to threaten the country’s security.

Casamance Léopold Senghor, Senegal’s founding father, was a child of a mixed Wolof-Serer marriage, groups that represented 38 and 19 percent of Senegalese, respectively. Although he was baptized into the minority Catholic faith (only about 5 percent of the Senegalese), he governed in alliance with the Mourides (the leading tariqa or Sufi brotherhood in Senegal and the directors of the groundnut trade), and his vice president was a Muslim. There was, thus, considerable ethno-religious harmony at independence. However, due to European diplomacy for the division of Africa that was agreed to in Berlin, France and Britain divided the spoils around the Gambia and Senegal rivers

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by creating a tiny country (The Gambia) that effectively split off a region of Senegal (the Casamance) from the rest of the country (see figure 8.6). The major ethnic group in Casamance is the Joola, constituting about 7 percent of the Senegalese population. Figure 8.6 The Casamance Region of Senegal

Dakar

Senegal

The Gambia

Casamance

The Joolas were the last ethnic group to be dominated by the French, and were therefore least skilled in French and even Wolof, the lingua franca for much of the country. As a result, most administrative jobs in the Casamance region went to outsiders. The civil servants and other Wolof settlers moving to Casamance posed a threat to the cultural integrity of the region, turning the Joolas into sons of the soil. As Fall (2010, 14) observed, “Casamance’s elites suspected that an influx of migrants from the northern part of Senegal was stimulated by the authorities in Dakar and aimed at the future quantitative domination of the indigenous population by the immigrants from the north.” Further feeding Joola fears was the nationalization of all land without a legal deed in 1964. This eliminated communal customary land holdings and, with that, traditions that previously governed the transfer of land. Political resentment led to the organization of a regional political party, the Mouvement des Forces Démocratique de

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Casamance (MFDC), which demanded independence in 1982. Economic crisis, structural adjustment, student protests, government repression, and the killing of a gendarme followed by large-scale counterattacks by the state army all worked together to induce the MFDC to invest in a military wing. The newly formed militia worked to procure weapons (helped by ethnic kin across the border in Guinea-Bissau, where weapons were widely available due to their independence war against Portugal) and a slow escalation to civil war ensued. Casamance remains a region of Senegal, but it also remains a secessionist threat.

Sudan What is today Sudan was governed by Ottoman, Egyptian, and British rulers over the course of the nineteenth century. With the completion of the Suez Canal, however, today’s South Sudan suddenly had strategic value, and in 1877 the North and South were united under the administration of Sir Charles Gordon. Gordon worked assiduously to close the lucrative slave market operating in the South. To protect the South, he isolated it from nearly all foreign interference. Civil servants and workers from the north, Islamic missionaries, and Arabic teachers were not permitted to work in the South. In conferences planning for future governance, the Northern governors, perceived by the British as Arabs, met as a group; meanwhile, the Southern governors, perceived by the British as Africans, convened with East African peers. Events in the run-up to independence in 1956 pointed to the continued marginalization of the South. At a conference held in Juba (today’s capital of South Sudan) in 1947, the South was forced to accept plans for a unified Legislative Assembly, in which they would be a minority. A subsequent conference in Cairo in 1953 found the Southerners without a regional party, and their leaders

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were incorporated in Northern parties in which their concerns received little weight. A constitutional commission formed in Cairo included but a single Southern representative. Southern nationalist leaders favored a federal government and autonomy; however, the North and the British rejected this model. Independence only exacerbated North-South tensions. As many Southerners feared, Northerners occupied positions formerly held by the British civil servants. However, while the British isolated the South, Sudan’s Northerndominated leadership embarked on a program of “nationbuilding,” consisting of Arabization in language and Islamization in religion. Some in the South resisted Northern control. A labor strike in the South was repressed by Northern troops. And following the appointment of Northern officers in the South, a mutiny by Southern enlisted men in 1955 in Equatoria Province — in which Southern soldiers shot their officers and their officers’ families — foreshadowed secessionist activity down the road. In response to the mutiny, the British Royal Air Force airlifted 8,000 Northern troops to the South. This induced a cascade of fleeing Southern soldiers into Uganda and Congo, the leaders of future cross-border insurgent actions. Joined by many Christian Sudanese educated abroad, and later by refugees fearing detention due to the cruel “State of Emergency Regulation and Defense of Sudan Act” of 1958, these insurgent militias called themselves anya nya (a local term for snake venom). The Anya Nya insurgency, linking itself as the military wing of the Sudan African National Union, ambushed Sudanese army convoys that were delivering foreign aid to the Congolese government fighting its own insurgency. By 1963 the Anya Nya insurgents were able to procure sufficient weaponry and began terrorizing Sudan central government officials in Southern districts, beginning a

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nine-year civil war that killed about half a million people by the late 1960s. Although peace was restored for a decade, a second war against a Southern insurgency began in 1983. A peace accord eventually led to independence for South Sudan in 2011. But this new state was as arbitrary in terms of boundaries as was the united Sudan of 1956, and civil war broke out almost immediately. From these specific cases, a more general point can be made: many of the newly independent African states were incapable of overcoming the burden bestowed by Berlin — boundaries that ignored social and political realities on the ground and invited rebellion by peripheral militias.

Somalia: An Irredentist War Irredentism is the reverse problem of separatism; it occurs when a state wants to expand its borders to incorporate ethnic kin from neighboring states. Somalia is a classic case. The Somali national population was divided into five colonial polities: 1. French Somaliland, later called the French Territory of Afars and Issas, and today’s Djibouti; 2. Kenya’s former North Eastern Province (today’s Counties of Wajir, Mandera, and Garissa); 3. The Ogaadeen Region of Ethiopia; 4. British Somaliland; and 5. The Italian Trust Territory of Somalia. At independence in 1960, the British colony and the Italian Trust Territory merged into the independent Somali Republic. Its national flag had a star with five points, signifying the irredentist goal of uniting the five zones into a single state (figure 8.7).

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Dir Isaaq

Darood

Hawiye Rahanwayn

(a) Flag

(b) Map

This unfortunate division of peoples was not a direct result of the haggling in Berlin; rather, it was the consequence of imperial machinations. It began with the opening of steamer service from India to Suez, and the need for a coaling station off of the Red Sea to support that new trade route. The British captured Aden, a nice harbor with a rather uninviting hinterland constituting today’s Yemen. They found an excellent source of food through trade with Somali clans across the Red Sea from the port of Berbera. Through war and trade, the British developed effective rule in the interior, well into the Somali-populated zone in today’s Kenya. Meanwhile, France needed a Red Sea port to support its Indochina and Madagascar trade, and they acquired the small port in today’s Djibouti. The Italians occupied today’s Eritrea and sought to enhance their territorial claims by accepting the British invitation to make treaties with chiefs on Somali’s Indian Ocean coast, eventually asserting sovereignty over Italian Somalia. The final imperialist was Ethiopia. In the late nineteenth century, Emperor Menelik II quadrupled the size of the Ethiopian empire, capturing the great Somali city of Harar in 1887 as a prelude to the occupation of

Figure 8.7 Somalia’s Ethnic Territories

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the Ogaadeen, the desert that bordered Italian Somalia. His reputation throughout Europe was lionized after his 1896 defeat of the Italians in their attempt to colonize Ethiopia. After World War II, when his successor Haile Selassie, then in exile due to defeat by Italy, sought to regain Ethiopia’s imperial stature, the United Nations accepted his sovereignty over both Eritrea and the Somalipopulated Ogaadeen. Despite a clan structure that works against attempts to unify Somalis, the colonial period induced a strong sense of Somali nationalism. A Somali poet and freedom fighter, Maxamad Cabdille Xasan, waged a twenty-oneyear war against the British. He combined appeals to clan, to nation, and to Islam and, in so doing, instilled a sense of pride and ownership in Somalis, even among his clan enemies that benefited from trade with the British port of Aden. A political party, the Somali Youth League, mostly represented southern clans but worked in alliance with the northern-based Somali National League to press for a unified independence constitution. Independence was declared on July 1, 1960, and at that time clan divisions were a subtext — a “united Somalia” was the common vision. Somalia became “a nation in search of a state” (Laitin and Samatar, 1987, 129). Conflict, at times latent and other times openly violent, ensued. In Kenya, the British ignored their own informal plebiscite and granted the Kenyans control over the Somali-populated North Eastern Province. Seeking unity with their Somali brethren, Kenyan Somalis staged riots, and participants were dubbed shifta (bandits) by the Kenyan government. The Kenyan army, well trained in counterinsurgency due to its history dousing the Mau Mau insurgency, captured the livestock of Somali guerillas and quickly contained the incipient rebellion (despite provocative incitements from Somali state radio). But for Somalis, the Ethiopian Ogaadeen was the big-

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ger prize, as the Ogaadeen and Isaaq clans in this region are central to the Somali clan structure. Shortly after independence, the Somali government helped organize an insurgent group in the Ogaadeen, known as the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF). This insurgent group made periodic moves against Selassie’s powerful army. Opportunity arose with imperial collapse in 1974 (Selassie was defeated by a Marxist insurgency) and with Somalia well equipped for warfare due to its alliance with the Soviet Union. Somali president Siyaad Barre authorized his troops to slip under the noses of Soviet advisers (who discouraged Somali irredentist claims) to join up with the WSLF. A major war ensued, and the Somalis scored early victories in key Ogaadeen towns. But then the Soviets pulled out of Somalia, joined forces with Ethiopia, and roundly defeated the Somalis. In this irredentist war some 8,000 Somali troops were killed, and an estimated 750,000 refugees were torn from their herds and their communities. These conflicts in Africa, whether separatist, irredentist, or center-seeking, were in part legacies of the European parceling of the African continent, with unbearable human consequences.

4

Were Bad Borders Inevitable?

This chapter highlights research suggesting that the arbitrary boundaries drawn at Berlin had long-run effects on economic and security outcomes in Africa. An implication of this argument is that the borders could have been drawn “better.” But skeptics are right to ask “how?” (Fearon, 2011). We can imagine different scenarios: suppose diplomats at Berlin (or elsewhere) had access to maps of ethnic groups and topography; suppose borders had emerged through conflict between kingdoms and, eventually, states (as in Europe); or suppose that partition had occurred later, after the nascent military revolution that we discuss in

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chapter 9. While these processes differ sharply from what took place in Berlin, what remains unclear is whether any of these hypotheticals would have resulted in higher growth or less violence. A second look at figure 8.2 illustrates the challenge of drawing a map without creating hundreds, or even thousands, of tiny states. Skeptics also rightly point out that Africa has not been uniquely afflicted by separatist conflicts. In fact, Englebert and Hummel (2005, 399) observe that “in about 40 years of independence, only ten of sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 states have experienced a secessionist conflict, and most of these have been short-lived, quite minor in scope, and unsuccessful.” Of civil conflicts in Africa, only 27 percent have been separatist, compared with nearly 50 percent in Asia and 84 percent in Europe (310). If the bad borders drawn at Berlin encouraged disintegration, why have we not seen more separatist conflicts in Africa? The civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (discussed at greater length in chapter 15) is illustrative. Laurent Désiré Kabila, who would eventually overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, originated in the resource-abundant and culturally distinct Kivu Province. Kabila could easily have consolidated power in Kivu and ruled over a relatively homogeneous state. Nonetheless, he marched his forces more than a thousand miles west to overtake the capital. Englebert and Hummel (2005, 400, 412) suggest that African insurgents anticipate benefits from the international recognition that comes with control of their country’s capital. Even if this implies years of living in the bush, these benefits often exceed what can be won by fighting for regional autonomy. To be sure, there are exceptions. The Igbos of Nigeria sought separation as the country of Biafra; the Joolas of Senegal’s Casamance have sought separation; and the Azawad People’s Movement for Tuareg separatism has been active in both Mali and Niger. Indeed, as we ear-

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lier showed (table 8.1 on page 173), there have been eleven separatist wars in Africa since independence. Yet, African rebels have more frequently sought control over weak, heterogeneous states, rather than independence for a peripheral region. This center-seeking tendency among insurgents represents an important stylized fact. Yet, it does not imply that the partition agreed to in Berlin had no effect on contemporary conflict. Working within borders that ignored topography and cultural realities, leaders struggled to consolidate control. Ungoverned regions foster peripheral rebellions that can then challenge the center or attempt to secede. Fearon (2011) observes: “In Africa ambitious individuals from a small minority group can sometimes reasonably hope to get power at the center by using force. This is because the states are so weak, and also because there is usually no majority ethnic group that dominates the capital and its politics.” If the borders drawn at Berlin contributed to state weakness or ethnic heterogeneity, then partition could actually help explain both conflict and a center-seeking tendency among insurgent groups. The Berlin Conference subverted the indigenous statebuilding process. It is, of course, impossible to know what course that might have taken. However, if this hypothetical partition had recognized geographic and cultural boundaries or followed the development of local military capacity, we can also imagine that it would have created states better capable of maintaining social order.

5

Conclusion

Borders are, quite literally, constraints on the state’s authority, defining the limits of its authority. That fact is true across the world. Yet, in Africa, the drawing of borders created additional problems for its post-independence leaders. Boundaries were not based on the projection of military and administrative power. Rather, Africa’s

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borders were drawn with little regard for governments’ capacity, geography, or the distribution of cultural groups. From the point of view of African leaders, the boundaries they inherited from colonial rule were neither defensible nor alterable. The UN and OAU, as we will discuss in chapter 11, prevented any redrawing of the lines. Resigned to a sad reality, president Julius Nyerere of Tanzania told an audience in the UK that the borders of African countries were so absurd that they must be considered sacrosanct (Nyerere, 1976). Nyerere’s resignation reflects the additional constraints imposed by borders drawn with disregard for underlying demographics. Borders partitioned some ethnic groups and amalgamated others with little shared language or history. This created ethnically and linguistically diverse states, with minority groups that often had coethnics that lived just to the other side of a border. When these minority groups feel excluded or threatened, they can count on refuge or support from their technically foreign ethnic kin. This made it difficult for newly independent states in the early 1960s to either assimilate minorities, forestall smuggling, or suppress insurgencies. Africa’s lag in security can therefore be partially attributed to the casual and callous way the imperial powers divided the continent — an approach exemplified by the Berlin Congress. Going back to our conceptual model (figure 8.8), we see that the partition of Africa that was introduced in Berlin (and subsequently reinforced in European diplomacy) divided ethnic groups and assured high levels of ethnic diversity inside the boundaries of the colonial states. The division of groups across boundaries increased the probability of communal conflicts and weakened states due to the ease of cross-border smuggling. In addition to these direct effects, diverse and divided groups constrained African leaders, who had to please powerful

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Direct Effects • Civil Conflicts (ED, DEG) • Permits Smuggling (DEG)

Partition • Ethnic Diversity (ED) • Divided Ethnic Groups (DEG)

Constraints • Lack of Policy Consensus (ED) • Asymmetries Among Ethnic Groups Create Commitment Problems (ED)

groups without provoking separatist movements among minorities fearing repression.

Figure 8.8 Conceptual Framework: The Partition of Africa

9. The Colonial State

T H E C O L O N I A L E R A is often cited as a turning point in African history for its brutality, its reliance on forced labor, its paternalism, and its denial of freedom. In the leitmotif of M. Crawford Young’s seminal work, the African colonial state is reimagined in the Kikongo language as bula matari, the crusher of stones (Young, 1994).1 This chapter offers a different take. For all its brutality — and we highlighted examples of it in chapter 6 with regard to forced labor — the colonial state did not establish effective or durable governing institutions. To minimize expenditure in the colonies, European powers skimped; as a result, Africa’s charismatic founders inherited states incapable of sustaining order or providing public services — what Callaghy (1987) dubs “lame leviathans.” To develop this account, we begin with the colonial destruction and reconstruction of the Oyo Empire of West Africa. We then move to a more general discussion, drawing on Reid (2012), of how and why the colonial state built weak governing institutions oriented mostly to provide basic order. We next examine the implications of the formidable yet limited colonial apparatus for governing the postcolonial state. While we will illustrate some variation in the inheritance left by different colonial states, we emphasize that these differences pale in comparison to the overall failure of the colonial period to build authoritative governing apparatuses.

1

Ours is a revisionist view of the colonial state. Most historians emphasize the long-term effects of its brutality, its racism, and its resistance to initiative by the local populations. Readers should consult Young (2012, chapter 3) for a more conventional but powerful description of the colonial legacy.

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The Oyo Empire

The Oyo Empire, from its inception in 1300 through its defeat in 1895, was one of five great West African kingdoms preceding European expansion. The others were Kongo (1390-1665), Benin (1200-1897), Ashanti (1650-1895), and Dahomey (1620-1894). Understanding their rise and especially their fall yields important insights into how the colonial state exerted a lasting influence on Africa’s post-independence future. Here we look at Oyo, but similar narratives can be drawn from the other empires (Orogun, 1987). Centered among the Yoruba-speaking kingdoms of Western Nigeria and Eastern Benin, Oyo was a constitutional monarchy founded in the late fourteenth century. Its origin stories build on a rich theological and divination tradition centered in the holy city of Ile-Ife. But over the centuries the empire expanded, with its capital in the city of Old Oyo. Lying between Africa’s forest and savannah, Oyo took advantage of its trading opportunities to expand its territorial reach in the late seventeenth century, eventually encompassing six major provinces and commanding a bureaucracy that numbered more than 10,000 royal personnel. Trade included kola, indigo, gourds, calabashes, parrots, and leather goods. Revenues to the central government, headed by the Alafin of Oyo, came from taxation of trade routes and tributes from the provincial kingdoms for which Oyo provided security against external threats. In its glory years, beginning around 1640, a lucrative triangular trade emerged. Oyo traders imported horses from Arab traders across the savannah, Oyo cavalry units captured slaves, and slaves were traded on the coast for guns. This trade had countervailing effects on the power of the empire. On the one hand, the trade supported the Oyo military machine; European traders demanded slaves and needed partners that could capture prisoners

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far from coastal outposts. On the other hand, this trade required continuous warfare and attacks on neighboring kingdoms, which undermined imperial legitimacy. Indeed, the nineteenth century brought successful revolts from vassal states, forcing the Alafin to attack his own provincial kingdoms in order to maintain the flow of income from the slave trade. Thus began the Yoruba civil wars. The British abrogation of the slave trade had vast repercussions for Oyo. For one, it cut off a major revenue stream to the Alafin. Second, instead of the slave trade, the British introduced a new era of “legitimate trade” in agricultural products, such as palm oil, cotton, rubber, and groundnuts. European merchants that were once willing to pay Oyo militias to serve as middlemen in the slave trade now preferred to contract directly with growers. This cut off a second revenue stream to Oyo authorities. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Oyo progressively lost control of its provinces. Third, with the decline of Oyo center, a new army formed in the city of Ibadan. Unlike the African imperial armies of its time, Ibadan was a congeries of soldiers from different provinces, all operating in a modern merit system of promotion; it dominated in battles throughout Oyo imperial lands. The waning of Oyo hegemony generated instability and upset commerce. In 1851, to restore stability and lucrative trade, the British bombarded Lagos (technically in the Benin Empire, but embedded in the Oyo trading system); a decade later — illustrating the dictum “trade if you can; rule if you must” (Robinson and Gallagher, 1966) — it was declared a British colony. Controlling this coastal city was not enough to permit interior trade. By 1895, the British had fought several wars throughout the region, eventually establishing a protectorate over all of Yorubaland. But the British had no interest in administering this

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entire territory; they wanted African proxies to govern. They rejected any alliance with Ibadan, the only army that had the power to restore Oyo’s greatness. Instead, the British governor presented the Alafin of Oyo with a treaty that would give British subjects free access to all of Yorubaland and, in return, provide the Alafin a salary for serving as the representative of the British Crown. In the formulation of Laitin (1986b), the British granted authority to an emperor who retained only legitimacy. This treaty bought the British peace and trade. It also began a tradition of propping up weak local rulers, rather than promoting capable (but potentially autonomous) leaders.

2

War and State-Building in Nineteenth-Century Africa

The story of Ibadan’s rise and marginalization tells a larger story about the colonial project. As recorded by the historian Richard Reid, Ibadan exemplified a military revolution in progress throughout Africa in the nineteenth century. “The key features of the revolution,” according to Reid (2012, 108), “included the professionalization of the military, new modes of command and organization and the increasing adoption of firearms, attended by tactical innovations.” Colonial occupation cut short this revolution. By often aligning itself with “legitimate” traditional rulers, the colonial state undermined emerging proto-states capable of independently projecting power. In this important instance, the colonial state did not upend tradition; rather, it impeded modernization. Reid offers several examples of these “entrepreneurs of violence” (119), who were beginning to govern using new military technologies and merit-based advancement. Menelik of Ethiopia and Shaka of the Zulu are the most renowned. Menilik was a Christian nationalist, rebuilding the Solomonic state through the introduction of modern firearms, military discipline, and an army that was up

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to 50,000 strong. The Zulus were a small clan when Shaka came to the fore, but his deployment of male youth who both fought and tended cattle broke down older clan loyalties and built up an esprit de corps based on rigid discipline. With the mfecane (violent upheaval) that his soldiers induced, Shaka built an impressive Zulu kingdom. Similar processes were taking place throughout the continent. Beyond Ibadan, elsewhere in West Africa reconstructed armies in Dahomey and in Ashanti territory (financed through continuing internal trade in slaves) were developing new approaches to the projection of power. In the African savannah, Islam was making advances throughout the nineteenth century. Uthman dan Fodio’s jihad with Fulani troops destroyed the Hausa states in today’s Northern Nigeria in the early 1800s, founding the militarized Sokoto Caliphate. In 1852, the Tukulor jihad of al-Hajj Umar Tal began. He was able to acquire firearms with which to battle the French and governed vast territory on the upper Senegal River. Several years later, Samori Turi, a Mandinke leader, combined horses and guns (he was one of the first military leaders in Africa to acquire and deploy breech loading rifles) to carve out a proto-state in a zone bordering today’s Liberia. In eastern Africa, in today’s Uganda, the armies of the Bunyoro and Baganda states were advancing. In Bunyoro, new regiments of riflemen (the barusura) won decisive regional victories from the 1860s through the 1880s. Under the reigns of Ssuuna II and Mutesa I, spanning 1832-84, Buganda merchants were selling slaves and ivory for guns that sustained a powerful military establishment that included canoe fleets that dominated Lake Victoria. In what is today Tanzania, an innovative military leader from Nyamwezi, Mirambo, dominated most of the interior in the 1870s and 1880s. Later, Tippu Tip, an Arab-Nyamwezi trader in ivory, built a powerful slave

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army protecting the bulky trade in elephants. In Africa’s south, in the shadow of Shaka’s Zulu state, the Ngoni introduced tactics of total war, involving the brutal massacre of women and children. Typically in these cases, traditional patterns of leadership and deployment were supplanted. Most Ngoni warriors, for example, had no Ngoni ancestors; rather, they were displaced people who had been absorbed into the expanding armies. In the face of European expansion, many of these militarized proto-states were examples of what Reid calls “defensive modernization” (2012, 131). We underline our use of the term proto-state. These revolutionary armies for the most part did not institutionalize political rule by, for example, establishing rules of succession. Nor did these military visionaries provide conquered areas with the public goods that would afford long-term peace and prosperity. War was predatory — in the terms of Olson (1993), these leaders were not stationary but rather roving bandits without a long-term interest in cultivating economic growth or a reliable tax base. However, the European pax that undermined these proto-states forestalled a probable transition from protostates to more encompassing state forms. European rule did not work with these modernizing groups and their leaders. Rather, as with Oyo, colonial powers employed traditional leaders to serve as proxies.

3

The Key to Colonial Rule: Pacification on the Cheap

As the Fashoda incident indicates and Robinson and Gallagher (1966) argue (see chapter 8), European powers did not want to pay the costs of fighting wars and building states in Africa. Colonial powers deployed few officials in their African colonies, and those who were assigned to African posts had only blunt tools to build fiscal capacity.

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Income Tax as a Percentage of GDP (1980−2013)

To raise revenues, governors relied on forced labor, levied head taxes (mostly on road, mine, and other construction workers), and used marketing boards to tax farm exports. They did not build a bureaucracy that could assess and enforce individual payroll or income taxes (figure 9.1).

DNK

Figure 9.1 Income Tax (% GDP) by Region

25% NZL

20%

SWE AUS

15% ZAF

CAN

ISR

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Regional Mean & 95% CI

USA

10%

ZWE NAM LSO SWZ SYC

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SSA MENA LAC EAP ECA NA

Especially in British colonies where “indirect rule” was standard, revenues were largely used to pay salaries to chiefs, who could provide order at relatively low cost. While this strategy required little upfront investment, it assured that rising social classes — those, for instance, with capitalist energies — would be marginalized by chiefs that felt threatened. It is in this sense that the colonial state could be envisioned as bula matari; but stone-crushing is not the same activity as state-building. To be sure, there was variation in the amount of statebuilding undertaken by major European colonial states — Britain, Belgium, and France (figure 9.2). We consider three indicators of the colonial legacy: human capital, infrastructure, and political institutions. Overall, Belgian colonies fare worst, with lower levels of university educa-

195

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tion, professionals (e.g., physicians), and infrastructure. Finally, Britain introduced legislative institutions to their colonies and native representation earlier than France and much earlier than Belgium or Portugal (figure 9.3).

France

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The implications of early preparation for self-rule in British colonies appear significant. Two of Belgium’s three colonies fell into civil war within three years of independence; two of Portugal’s five colonies had a similar fate. In contrast, only one of France’s twenty colonies and none of Britain’s twenty colonies faced civil wars in their first years of independence. While this is partially due to the continued neocolonial support that Britain and France provided after independence, it also likely reflects the early incorporation of domestic elites in governing. Despite these differences, the bigger picture is one of state weakness and poor governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Many former French and British colonies (e.g., Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria) fell into disastrous civil wars once the neocolonial support subsided. As we can see in figure 9.4 on page 198, any democratic advantage conferred to British colonies by their earlier experiences with legislative institutions is not apparent in their post-

2 4 Telephones per 1,000 People

6

Figure 9.2 Human Capital and Infrastructure by Colonizer, 1961-65

T H E C O L O N I A L S TAT E

Legislative Council

Native Representation

Belgium

15

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15

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−100

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Years Since Independence

independence Polity scores. The median Belgian, British, and French colonies would be considered an anocracy (i.e., in the range [−5, +5] and too weak to be a fullblown autocracy). Thus, an emphasis on the differences among colonial states obscures the similarity — African leaders inherited states that were poorly organized to establish legitimate authority.

4

0

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0

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Ethnicity and the Colonial State

Ethnicity is not a fixed concept, and the colonial state affected the definition and spatial distribution of ethnic groups in sub-Saharan states. Early on, the colonial state employed anthropologists to catalog ethnic groups. British anthropologist E. E.

0

−50

0

Years Since Independence

Figure 9.3 Political Institutions Prior to Independence

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Figure 9.4 Convergence in Average Polity Scores

10 8

Average Polity Score

6 4 GBR BEL

2 0

FRA FRA GBR FRA GBR

−2 −4 −6

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BEL FRA

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FRA BEL

1970s

1980s

−10 1960s

Democracy

1990s

Anocracy

2000s

2010s

Autocracy

Evans-Pritchard became known for his work on witchcraft among the Azande peoples of Sudan. However, in 1930 he received an urgent request (and a generous grant) from the Anglo-Egyptian colonial government. The government wanted him to study the livelihood and political institutions of the Nuer, hoping that understanding how Nuer society was organized might reveal how it could be controlled (Evans-Pritchard, 1940, vii, 152).2 Similarly, the doyen of Somali studies, I. M. Lewis, received a contract from the British colonial state to identify the clan structure of British Somaliland. The administrators hoped this would enable them to inflict punishments on clans for any crimes by their members. In both cases, the British colonial governments hoped to reconstruct the clan structure and, in so doing, discover an existing social hierarchy that could be used to maintain order. The European colonial state relied on anthropologists to chart tribal structures. They then drew boundaries

2

Evans-Pritchard described the Nuer and neighboring Dinka as linguistically and culturally similar with “much miscegenation and cultural borrowing. Both peoples recognize their common origins” (1940, 3-4). The boundaries between these groups hardened under colonial rule. And as this book is being written, the Dinka and Nuer are in near genocidal war for control over the new South Sudan state.

T H E C O L O N I A L S TAT E

between clans, races, and tribes for purposes of social control. Thus emerged a cultural map of Africa that appeared precise and, with time, eternal. (We discuss one such map by George Murdock in chapter 8.) While proximity to the equator also helps explain ethnic diversity (as we discussed in chapter 5), here we suggest that the colonial state hardened boundaries between groups that were once fluid and intermixed. As the perceived differences between members of different tribes, clans, or races increase, so too does the salience of ethnolinguistic fractionalization. When membership in a particular group confers access to resources or political power, ethnic cleavages can become sites of conflict. Scholars of colonial history provide several striking examples of the colonial state shaping ethnic identities. First, Young (1965, 242-247) tracks the emergence of the Bangala in the Equateur region of Congo. This group was invented by a creative colonial administrator; yet, it became a preferred local identity when its members qualified for jobs in the Force Publique. Rather than acknowledging the group’s recent vintage, Belgian anthropologists created a mythology around the Bangala as an ancient tribe with their own language (Lingala, a local lingua franca). Employment discrimination by the colonial administration generated resentment among the Bakongo and may have contributed to subsequent land conflicts between the groups. Young (1965, 234) reports that many Congolese held strong attachments to their group regardless of “whether it had any real existence in the pre-colonial epoch.” Vail and White (1989) reconstruct the creation of the Tumbuka “tribe.” The marauding Ngoni army enslaved different Tumbuka-speaking clans in present-day Malawi. The Ngonis feared that missionaries would object to their slave practices and their militarized culture. To avoid condemnation, the Ngonis sent their wives and slaves

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to missionary schools. Impressed with their assiduous manner, missionaries and eventually colonial authorities embraced the Tumbuka speakers, appointing a graduate of the Livingstone Mission’s School as a local police officer in 1907. From this followed the recognition of a welldefined ethnic group and the construction of a triumphant history — an ancient Tumbuka “empire.” The Tumbuka are now an influential ethnic bloc in Malawian politics. Beyond the specifics of the Malawian case, Vail (1989) argues that missionaries, in their efforts to spread the gospel, published Bibles and taught courses in welldefined local languages. This had the effect of standardizing and, thus, consolidating language groups previously characterized by many dialects. Colonial authorities also reified ethnic identities by relying on “traditional authorities” to maintain order. Chiefs were happy to accept this elevated status; they retained support by protecting the property and wives of men who migrated to cities, mines, and plantations for work in the colonial economy. As Vail (1989, 15) explains, “Ethnicity. . . a mechanism of social control, may be interpreted. . . as a form of popular male resistance [especially by migrants] to the forces that were reshaping African lives.” Laitin (1986a) demonstrates the persistence of colonial policies that empowered traditional authorities among the Yoruba in southwestern Nigeria. Frederick Lugard, the brilliant mind behind indirect rule, provided budgets to legitimate but weakened chiefs of Yoruba city-states, and these chiefs served as judges and informants for the colonial state. Individuals identified with these “ancestral cities.” Although many Yorubas have not lived in their ancestral cities for generations, these affiliations remain salient. The most egregious example comes from Mamdani (2001) and his study of post-genocide Rwanda. Historical studies reveal that the Hutus and Tutsis were once

T H E C O L O N I A L S TAT E

fluid social categories; Mamdani insists that it was “the Belgian reform of the colonial state in the decade from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s that constructed Hutu as indigenous Bantu and Tutsi as alien Hamites” (16). Rather than allowing Hutu chiefs to rule over Hutu communities, the Belgians instead empowered the “alien” and “racially superior” Tutsis. This racial differentiation, Mamdani argues, enabled genocidal violence, as Hutus saw themselves as “sons of the soil” who were justified in eliminating “foreign” elements (14). In sum, colonial strategies of investing power in local authorities initially maintained social order, but with the longer-term consequences of creating hardened ethnic — and in the case of Rwanda, racial — boundaries that undermined integration into multicultural states.

5

Conclusion

In the era of African nationalism, capturing the colonial state, with its symbols of European power, was deemed the key to dignity and advance. But that colonial state was closer to a Potemkin village than a modern bureaucracy. The imposition of the colonial state forestalled the autonomous development of militarized proto-states throughout the African continent. Instead, colonial powers re-authorized the rule of weak traditional leaders as colonial proxies. Wresting power from the colonial state, the new generation of leaders inherited weak bureaucracies that were unable and unwilling to collect taxes and deliver highquality and widely accessible public services. Indeed, elite civil service positions were passed on to Africans who enjoyed their predecessors’ elite lifestyle and also shared their disinterest in promoting inclusive development (especially where such development threatened their own job security). Estimates by Abernethy (1988, 189) reveal how remunerative these civil service positions were.

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As of 1963-64, the ratio of salaries at the top of the civil service (not including perquisites such as subsidized housing, medical care, and vacation leave) to per capita GDP was an estimated 73:1 in Malawi, 82:1 in Kenya, 96:1 in Tanzania, 118:1 in Nigeria, and 130:1 in Uganda.3 Rather than building effective or representative political institutions, colonial powers preferred pacification on the cheap. They empowered traditional leaders to coerce compliance with taxes and forced labor regimes. The first generation of post-independence leaders — including our founders from chapter 1 — constructed parties and nationalist movements to displace these traditional authorities empowered by indirect rule. Yet, traditional leaders continued to exercise influence; as leaders of tribal constituencies, these authorities could allocate public funds and offices to their constituents. This patronage won them loyalty and, thus, continued influence in post-independence states. Newly elected presidents faced weak bureaucrats and powerful traditional authorities. Both placed limits on their power. Leaders could continue to brutalize their populations, but could not build roads or schools. Stonecrushing did not help to build the edifice of an effective state.

3

Ekeh (1975, 107) portrays these civil servants as serving two publics: the primordial (or tribal) and the civic (or bureaucratic). He argues that civil servants feel moral obligations to the former but not the latter. That is, they do not identify with the state and, thus, face fewer psychological or social costs for misusing government funds. Corruption, extortion, irresponsibility, and laziness are consequently rife in Africa’s civic realm. Ekeh attributes these attitudes toward the state to Africa’s specific colonial experience, which inculcated a view of the cornucopian state, requiring no contributions from citizens.

Back to our conceptual model, and as illustrated in figure 9.5, the colonial powers created low-capacity bureau-

Direct Effects • Low Identification with State (WRI)

Colonial State • Low-Capacity Bureaucracies (LCB) • Weak Republican Institutions (WRI)

Constraints • Low State Capacity (LCB) • Powerful Local Authorities (WRI, STA)

• Strong Traditional Authorities (STA)

Figure 9.5 Conceptual Framework: The Colonial State

T H E C O L O N I A L S TAT E

cracies, instituted weak republican institutions, and relied heavily on legitimate (if enfeebled) traditional leaders. Whatever leaders’ intentions, ineffectual civil servants made it difficult for African heads of state to quickly expand access to high-quality public education or health care. Assuming control of government agencies did not relieve capacity constraints. Moreover, both bureaucrats and citizens continued to view the state as foreign, undeserving of their loyalty or good stewardship.

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Part III. Post-Independence Policies

In part III, we focus on the policies — cultural, economic, and foreign — of the founding generation of leaders that had consequences for development. In retrospect, many of the political choices of the early independence years appear irrational. The case material will show, however, that the charismatic generation was constrained by its own promises and visions as well as the political realities of rule. While visions of négritude and African personality were inspiring, new leaders had to work with an Africanized civil service, whose new incumbents sought the same high salaries and benefits as their colonial predecessors. Their facility in the colonial language gave them special power; the promotion of national languages would have been a threat to that power, as exposure to European culture would no longer have such high value. In economic affairs, new leaders’ ideological commitments to reject the capitalist path of the countries that colonized them led them to socialist programs that they were ill equipped to administer. Furthermore, their worry that urban riots could undermine their incumbencies led them to manipulate exchange rates in favor of imports, thereby impoverishing their own peasant populations. In foreign relations, fear of their own minority populations led them to support a charter protecting them from secessionist movements even if this pact compromised earlier ideals of self-determination and reduced incentives to build ca-

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pable states. While the consequences of these policies are at least in part responsible for Africa’s lag, the realm of choice that the charismatic generation faced to fulfill anticolonial dreams was, as we explain in part II, far narrower than they envisioned. In this part of our book, we focus on policy decisions of the African leaders — on growth, on democracy, and on social order — and seek to understand not only the consequences of their policies but also the political logic behind them.

10. Cultural Policy

A F R I C A N S TAT E S ’ C H A R I S M AT I C F O U N D E R S tied their calls for independence to a cultural project highlighting indigeneity. Négritude, African personality, and African socialism represented attempts to root newly independent states in local cultures and traditions. This chapter highlights the aims of these cultural projects, but also reveals their shortcomings. We also suggest that the failure to seriously implement the project — particularly in the reliance on colonial languages in schools — has hampered human development.

1

Postcolonial Cultural Projects

Let us begin with the concept of négritude, coined by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in 1935, and elaborated on in his classic Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939). As noted in chapter 1, this notion of négritude was adopted by Senegal’s charismatic founder, Léopold Senghor. The imagery is that of “white” reflecting the cold and impersonal; “black” representing warmth and life. In Paris in the Snow, the poet suffers from the “white cold that burns worse than salt” and accuses “the white hands that felled the high forest that dominated Africa.” And he asks in To New York to “let black blood flow into your blood that it may rub the rust from your steel joints.” Only the warmth of April, the poet advises, will allow you, as with God, “who out of the laugh of a saxophone

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created heaven and earth in six days,” to sleep “the great sleep of the Negro” (Moore and Beier, 1963). Other leaders advanced this cultural project, albeit less poetically than Senghor. Kwame Nkrumah (Gold Coast to Ghana) and Modibo Keïta (Soudan to Mali) renamed their countries after historic empires. Julius Nyerere linked Tanzania to the Swahili language, a lingua franca that spread with ancient Arab trading networks and was, therefore, understood by nearly all Tanzanians (though it was the mother tongue of a mere 5 percent of the population). Joseph-Desiré Mobutu, the officer whose coup d’état brought a nightmarish stability to Congo, renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga and dubbed his country Zaire (though this name had mixed Kongolese and Portuguese roots). Thomas Sankara came to power in 1983 and shortly thereafter renamed Upper Volta using (multicultural) African roots: the country’s new name, Burkina Faso, is derived from the Mossi word burkina (signaling honest or upright) and faso (the Diola word for homeland). Citizens were designated as burkinabé (with nabé the Peul word for inhabitant). Maxamad Siyaad Barre, the general who took control of Somalia in a 1969 coup, decreed a script for the national language spoken by virtually all citizens and declared it the primary language of education and administration. Throughout the continent, national dress, street names, and national symbols were Africanized in the name of a postcolonial cultural project.

2

The Neocolonial Reality

Despite the hopes and dreams of building on local cultural foundations, the power of European models was overwhelming. Indeed, in the early independence years, states barely altered laws and bureaucracies created during the colonial period.1 In this chapter we focus on one example of neocolonial persistence: states’ continued

1

To take one example, land in Sierra Leone is still partially governed by old British laws that have long since been reformed in the UK.

C U LT U R A L P O L I C Y

reliance on European languages. These language choices help determine who is educated and thereby employed in the formal and public sectors. While Africanization programs in the aftermath of independence promoted local civil servants, these newly empowered bureaucrats, and the teachers they oversaw, did not want to conduct state business or courses in indigenous languages. These elites recognized that their fluency in English or French enabled them to win and retain lucrative government positions. They, thus, had no interest in a cultural project that diluted the value of their hard-won language skills by promoting the official use of more widely spoken indigenous languages. The result is that, with few exceptions, African languages are ignored in the writing of constitutions or laws and, thus, have only limited official status. In no subSaharan African country is an indigenous language the principal medium of instruction for secondary school education. A recent estimate reckons that, on average, less than 20 percent of Africans have the ability to speak their country’s official language, and far fewer can write in it (Albaugh, 2014). To a great extent, these citizens are linguistically foreigners in their own countries. This disconnect between the language of official life and that of African society is most poignantly demonstrated in the corpus of the Kenyan author Ng˜ug˜i wa Thiong’o. His acclaimed early novels were written under the name of his Christian baptism, James Ngugi. He announced his abandonment of that persona in his subsequent Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). Ngugi’s later works, including a polemic against the authoritarian rule of Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi — M˜urogi wa Kagogo, penned on scraps of toilet paper from his prison cell and later translated into English as Wizard of the Crow (2004) — were written in his native Kikuyu. His efforts have served to highlight governments’

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embarrassing disregard for their populations’ rich cultural heritages. In their disregard for the languages spoken by their citizens, African countries are outliers compared with other regions. To illustrate this, Laitin and Ramachandran (2016) construct a measure of the average distance of a country’s population from the official language (ADOL). For each linguistic group, the authors multiply its share of the total population and its distance from the official language of the state, using Ethnologue’s language trees.2 They then sum across all of the linguistic groups within each country. In Africa, as no indigenous languages are derived from Indo-European (the language family of the colonial states), the distance between all indigenous and official languages is the maximum. It is, thus, no surprise that the ADOL scores for African states are much higher than states from all other regions (table 10.1). This quantitative measure reveals the staying power of neocolonialism in sub-Saharan Africa.

3

The Implications of Linguistic Neocolonialism

The implications of linguistic neocolonialism are hardly neutral, and they are thus more easily connected to Africa’s lag than other examples of persistent colonial practices. The argument about why linguistic distance impedes development follows from two assumptions. The first assumption is the greater the distance of an individual from the official language, the higher the cost of getting educated (thereby constraining participation in the formal economy). This implies that, all else equal, a native Kikuyu speaker pays a lower cost for learning (in) Swahili than a native Somali speaker, as Kikuyu and Swahili are structurally closer (both Bantu languages) than is Somali (a Cushitic language) to Kikuyu. Hence, a native Kikuyu speaker would struggle less in school if the language of

2

Ethnologue categorizes and provides geographic distribution of the world’s 7,099 known living languages.

Table 10.1 Average Distance from the Official Language by Region Region

Average ADOL

Median ADOL

SSA SA MENA NA LAC EAP ECA

0.83 0.34 0.33 0.20 0.18 0.17 0.11

1.00 0.38 0.30 0.20 0.08 0.13 0.07

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instruction were Swahili rather than Somali. The second assumption states that exposure to the official language lowers the costs of obtaining human capital and participating in the economy, regardless of one’s mother tongue. That is, Akan speakers living in the United States rather than Ghana would have greater exposure to English and, thus, be less hindered by the use of English as an official language than Akan speakers in Ghana. The ADOL measure captures both the linguistic distance and exposure effects in a single measure. The implications of linguistic neocolonialism can be enumerated along five dimensions: socioeconomic, health, cognitive, cultural, and social.

Socioeconomic Implications Comparing countries across the world, we see a negative relationship between ADOL and several indicators of economic development: average income levels, output per worker, internationally comparable test scores, and life expectancy (for example, see figure 10.1). Using the Human Development Index (a composite measure of development), Laitin and Ramachandran (2016) show that this negative relationship is not confounded by other variables that might affect both ADOL and economic development, such as ethnic fractionalization, governance, or the level of wealth when a country became independent, a moment when countries had an opportunity to change their official languages. Even within Africa, they find that countries that adopted an official language that most citizens spoke as a mother tongue, such as Mauritius, have achieved higher levels of development than countries that adopted Indo-European official languages.3 To illustrate the size of the effect, if Ghana switched from English to a standardized Akan (the largest linguistic cluster in the country), that would reduce the ADOL score from 1 to 0.18. The authors’ results suggest that this would move

3

In the meticulous econometric analyses of African development in the two-volume study of the African Economic Research Consortium, the authors cannot identify an economic return to education and the resultant human capital. In their study of Congo Brazzaville, Tsassa and Yamb (2008, 209) attribute this non-finding on education to be the result of poor economic policies. They do not consider the possibility that education through the French medium to students who barely speak French might be the culprit.

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Rest of World

●

●

SSA

Figure 10.1 Linguistic Distance and Economic Development

11 ●

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Log(GDP) in 2005

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6 0.00

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Average Distance to Official Language (ADOL)

Ghana up thirteen and eleven spots in terms of their world ranking on test scores and life expectancy, respectively, and twenty-one ranks up in the case of log output per worker.

Health Implications Why do language policies affect life expectancy? First, language can limit health care access or patients’ understanding of pertinent health information (Underwood, Serlemitsos, and Macwangi, 2007; Higgins and Norton, 2009; Bowen, 2001). For example, Translators without Borders conducted a study in Kenya after the Ebola outbreak in 2014 (Translators without Borders, 2015). Study participants knew very little about Ebola transmission. Indeed, the average participant answered only 8 percent of questions correctly during the baseline survey.4 Half of the group was then provided information using posters written in Swahili, and the other half was given the same

4

When evaluating an intervention, researchers often conduct a baseline survey before the program is implemented and an endline survey sometime after the program has started.

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information using English posters. After these sessions, members of the Swahili-treatment group averaged 92 percent on the quiz; members of the English-treatment group mustered only an average of 16 percent. While many governments rely on multilingual messaging to transmit health information, Translators without Borders reports that in much of Africa even primary health care information is often available only in the official language.

Cognitive Implications African students taught in a colonial language are translating across a great linguistic divide. But these students face a second cognitive hurdle due to their low exposure to the official language of their country. As few of their peers and neighbors speak the official language, and it is rarely used outside of official contexts, students have little reason to hear or use their language of instruction outside of the schoolroom. We can assess the effects of low exposure by examining data provided by the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) program.5 SACMEQ collects data on standardized student achievement tests in reading and mathematics across thirteen countries for pupils currently in the sixth grade. Standardized scores are provided for essential reading and math tests, as well as for a comprehensive math and reading test. The data set also provides a categorical indicator that captures whether students meet SACMEQ’s minimum and desirable reading levels. The data set also provides extensive information on each student’s socioeconomic background and school quality. First, these data allow us to observe the gravity of the problem facing the educational sector in Africa. As we have noted in chapter 2, about 60 percent of students do not reach the minimum reading level, and about 86 percent of the students do not reach the desirable reading

5

SACMEQ is an international organization comprising sixteen ministries of education in southern and eastern Africa.

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level. This educational failure persists despite vast foreign aid expenditures over the previous decade directed at the education sector (Devarajan and Fengler, 2013). To be sure, educational failure in Africa springs from many sources — teacher absenteeism, weak ministerial oversight — but student exposure to the medium of instruction merits its own analysis. Second, to assess whether exposure improves learning outcomes, the authors look at whether pupils use English in the home (a variable included in SACMEQ’s surveys) and use this as an indicator of greater exposure.6 The data reveal that students with greater exposure to English in the home also score significantly better on all six student outcomes considered: greater exposure at home increases the essential reading score by 20 points and the essential math score by roughly 19 points (or roughly 20 percent of a standard deviation on these measures). Even low levels of exposure — merely hearing the language at home — improve students’ learning, suggesting that if children heard and used the official language more in their daily lives — something that does not occur in most African communities — they might be better able to amass human capital. Reliance on the colonial language clearly has incurred learning costs for future generations of African citizens.7 A fascinating experiment in northwestern Cameroon confirms the SACMEQ results. In this English-official zone of Cameroon (a former trust territory having both English and French zones), a set of primary schools was chosen (nonrandomly) to implement a curriculum with Kom, the local indigenous language, as the medium of instruction for the first three years of education. A matched set of schools continued to use the English curriculum. Test results in both math and English revealed that the students using the Kom curriculum exhibited dramatic gains (over one standard deviation of the outcome variables)

6

In this context, all students’ mother tongues are maximally distant from the official language. Therefore, this variable cannot explain variation in students’ outcomes.

7

While the authors control for parents’ education, it is still difficult to rule out confounds that may explain a household’s propensity to use English and children’s test scores.

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relative to the control students. Though the experiment does not allow for an analysis of why the greater exposure to English in the control schools was associated with lower English scores, a plausible answer is that the quality of the exposure in the control schools was low and that the returns to explanations about English grammar in Kom outweighed the advantages of hearing English from a poor source. Laitin, Ramachandran, and Walter (2019) show (figure 10.2) that the differences in standardized test results hold even after accounting for attrition (i.e., children dropping out of school). Again we see cognitive losses due to continued reliance on the colonial language: the distribution of test scores is shifted to the right in schools that employed Kom (light gray). This is true when the authors look at all students that attend grade one (left panel) or only those students present for grades one, three, and five (right panel).

Control (English) Present Grade 1

Kernel Density

1.5

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Present Grades 1,3

Present Grades 1,3,5

1.0

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0

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Below Average

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Standardized Overall Test Score Figure 10.2 Indigenous Language Instruction and Learning Outcomes

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Cultural Implications Reliance on a colonial language also impacts how people interact with each other. In an experiment developed in the Somali-speaking region of Kenya, Laitin (1977) finds evidence for what has been called the “linguistic relativity hypothesis.” The experiment evaluated whether Somalis behave differently when they speak to each other in Somali, the colonial languages of English, French, Italian, or Amharic; or the language of their religious instruction, Arabic. In the Somali-speaking town of Wajir in northeast Kenya, bilingual secondary students were recruited to participate in role-playing sessions. In the first of them, Laitin assigned one student the role of “headmaster” of a secondary school and his or her partner the role of “teacher.” Participants were told that the “teacher” had set a practice test for the students before taking their external examinations. The headmaster saw the exam and summoned the teacher to his or her office, demanding that the teacher revise the exam, because the headmaster deemed it too easy. The participant who played the headmaster was assigned the task of initiating the conversation and trying to get the teacher to revise the examination. In the sixteen dialogs (half in English, half in Somali, with the students randomly assigned at the start of the session which language they would be using), there were two tropes. First was the issue of which exam would best prepare the students for the external evaluation. Laitin considered this trope to be “pedagogical,” in the sense that the two role players argued about what would provide students with the best chance at succeeding on the subsequent external exam. The second trope turned on who had the right to set the exam, the headmaster or the teacher. This trope related to “authority” — that is, who decides.

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Laitin’s hypothesis was that Somali-language dialogs would be more likely to turn on pedagogy, because Somali culture was highly egalitarian without clearly demarcated authority roles and because its language did not allow for easy claims based on authority. Meanwhile, sentences such as “I am the headmaster and the rules of the Ministry of Education give me the right to determine educational policies in this school” are common in English, and these authority claims would more likely be employed in the English-language dialogs. Figure 10.3 shows, first (on the left), that authority claims were more common in the English-language dialogs. The average number of authority claims, represented by the dashed vertical line, is higher among the English-speaking pairs. Second (on the right), pedagogical claims were more often used in the Somali-language dialogs: Somali-speaking pairs used

Authority Based Claims

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2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 Number of Pedagogical Claims Figure 10.3 Language and Interpersonal Relations

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three pedagogical claims on average; English-speaking pairs, just one. In another test for the same study, Laitin found that Somalis assigned to speak in English relied on a politics of confrontation (e.g., by starting many of their responses with the word “but”). Yet, in the Somali-language dialogs, a more diplomatic style predominated, in which interlocutors sought more to question the premises of their role-playing partners. Here we see that in everyday conversation, cultural norms manifest themselves. The choice of a national language, it follows, implies an expected model for interpersonal relations — of what it is appropriate to say under specific circumstances. If these cultural models are altered by the choice of language, then we can expect the neocolonial residue of official language policies on the conversations that individuals have in courts, hospitals, schools, or work. Language choice also affects the inclusiveness of the public sphere. Kenyan or Tanzanian political leaders’ pronouncements on freedom, or independence, or solidarity have less resonance (now to Swahili) compared with uhuru or harrambee, both of which are rich with local connotations. When the Somali president Siyaad Barre, in cahoots with his Soviet patrons, announced a program of socialism, it had little resonance. But when adapted in Somali, it became hantiwadaag, literally “camel sharing” (Laitin, 1983). Suddenly, nomads were activated, asking each other, “sharing my camels with whom?” Reliance on indigenous languages can turn abstract concepts into comprehensible, if not always welcome, policies.

Social Implications Social scientists have repeatedly found a negative relationship between cultural diversity and the provision of public goods. That is, more culturally diverse communities or polities tend to also have fewer (or lower quality)

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freely available services, such as public schools and parks, clean air and water, or well-maintained roads. Several mechanisms could explain this relationship (see Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner, and Weinstein, 2009): citizens may be unwilling to pay taxes if expenditures also benefit cultural “others;” alternatively, citizens may feel that they are better able to police free-riding among their coethnics (i.e., those that share their ethnicity).8 Some of the consequences of high levels of ethnic fractionalization were outlined in chapter 5, but here we show how a unifying language policy in Tanzania helped moderate the downside of ethnic diversity. Tanzania, unlike neighboring Kenya, had greater geographical exposure to Arab trade; the Rift Valley in Kenya acted as a geographic barrier. This allowed Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere to better promote Swahili, the lingua franca of that trade, as a unifying language. Although Tanzania is highly fractionalized across groups with different mother tongues (i.e., there are at least ten distinct and uniformly small language clusters), Swahili is linguistically close to nearly all other Tanzanian languages. By contrast, Kenya has relied more heavily on English, with only local affairs being run in indigenous languages. Miguel (2004) exploited this difference between Tanzania and Kenya to understand whether a unifying language can help to overcome the challenge of providing public goods in a diverse society. More concretely, he compared districts situated about 500 kilometers apart on two sides of the Kenya-Tanzania border: Busia in Kenya and Meatu in Tanzania (figure 10.4). What makes this comparison powerful is that these districts were otherwise quite similar: both districts had comparable ethnic heterogeneity, demographic profiles, and geography. What differed between the regions was the language of public life: in Meatu, that was uniformly Swahili; in Busia, it was Luo or Luhya, depending on the speakers.

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Free riders are individuals that benefit from a service without paying for it. For example, employees that benefit from higher, union-negotiated wages but refuse to pay dues are freeriding on their unionized colleagues.

Figure 10.4 Busia, Kenya, and Meatu, Tanzania

Busia

Meatu

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Miguel’s findings are stunning: in Kenya, we see that as the diversity of the community surrounding a school goes up, both funding and desks per pupil decline. He explains that “most parents have refused to participate in community fund-raisers (harambees) or in school meetings in recent years due to a general lack of trust across ethnic groups and the absence of a feeling of ‘ownership’ for the school” (359). However, in Tanzania, diversity has virtually no effect on school finances or other local public goods. Miguel interprets these results as evidence that the costs of fractionalization have been overcome by a concerted nation-building effort that required the adoption of a common and widely understood language.

4

Linguistic Innovation in African States

The persistence of colonial languages in education and administration does not imply an absence of linguistic innovation from below, in the form of pidgins and other new speech forms. Pidgins (defined as lingua francas that are native to none of their speakers) have been crucial in Africa for intercultural contact. Sango in French West Africa, Lingala in Democratic Republic of the Congo (now the language of the army and much of popular culture), and West African pidgin in British West Africa are widely used and thoroughly indigenized speech forms. West African pidgin arose in slave factories and developed centuries later among African brigades in allied armies in the two world wars. Drawing from Portuguese and English, and incorporating speech forms from Yoruba, Igbo, Ijo, Itshekiri, Kongo, Krio, Urhobo, Fante, Arabic, Mausa, and Twi, it is a thoroughly indigenized language. Consider this phrase, “A no laik pipul wei d ei tek konikoni wei,” that Barbag-Stoll (1983, 94-95) translates as “I don’t like people who are not straightforward.” Nigerian pidgin is becoming a mother tongue for young Nigerians. Three examples speak to its popularity

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and legitimacy. First, Wole Soyinka, now a Nobel laureate in literature, quotes himself in his childhood memoir, Aké (1983), pleading with his mother in pidgin. Second, Ken Saro-Wiwa (killed by Nigerian authorities for his activism in the Ogoni national movement) was a popular culture author who wrote in pidgin. He scripted a fabulously popular sitcom shown on Nigerian television, reaching an estimated 30 million viewers. His novel, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1994), was written entirely in pidgin. Finally, “Nollywood,” the Nigerian film industry, exports movies throughout the continent, and its scripts’ pidgin dialect is now being emulated as far away as Tanzania (Onishi, 2016). Alas, these indigenized speech forms play virtually no role in what linguists refer to as “high” speech encounters.9 When added to a language repertoire, linguists refer to the mix of “high” and “low” speech forms as “diglossia” (Ferguson, 1959) rather than bilingualism, suggesting an asymmetric status alignment between the two languages. Their low status, even in the eyes of its speakers, is apparent in language surveys where respondents often deny ever using their local pidgin (Forson, 1979). Again, we see the commanding neocolonial role of European standard languages in African countries.

5

Why Do Neocolonial Language Policies Persist?

In most states, it would have been a herculean political task to adopt an indigenous language at the point of independence. As noted above, this was partially due to elites’ reluctance to dilute the value of their English and French fluency, which enabled them to win valuable government jobs. However, there was also a second, less cynical reason why states opted to continue using the colonial language: founders wanted to avoid civil conflict. Ali Mazrui, a brilliantly provocative founding father of

9

Of these pidgins and other language innovations, only Krio in Sierra Leone has a de facto national language status. (Once a speech form is passed on across generations as a primary language, as with Krio, linguists no longer classify it as a pidgin.) Krio is understood by virtually all Sierra Leoneans. It is an offshoot of English brought by the English-speaking settlers, escaped slaves from Jamaica, and the African slaves recaptured during the British interdiction campaign who were then settled in Freetown.

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Africanist political science, noted the challenge of selecting one from among a multitude of indigenous languages. Facing this choice, one fair approach is the colonial language — a tongue that is foreign to all groups (Mazrui and Mazrui, 1998). Survey evidence supports this argument. Laitin (1994) presented Ghanaian respondents with the following question: would you agree to monetary compensation in return for another language (i.e., one other than the respondent’s mother tongue) being made official? Nearly all respondents dismissed the possibility. One typical respondent pleaded, “I cannot sell my birth right. . . . You can’t kill one language and use it as a manure for another.” Another respondent was more threatening: “I know they want us to accept Akan. But let me tell you this is a dream. It is going to bring war” (628). Most respondents (60 percent) were, however, receptive to the idea of English being used as the official language. When the survey asked respondents if they would accept an official indigenous language if well-paying jobs were promised at the end of the educational cycle, there was much more willingness to accept this, though respondents still had doubts that these job commitments were credible. This helps explain why the retention of the colonial language is a stubborn equilibrium: retaining the colonial language as official leads to educational failure or, for the few individuals that succeed, emigration. The result of both is low economic growth. Low economic growth leads to a belief that there will be no high-quality jobs in the country. And that belief makes assurances of good jobs under an alternative language policy seem incredible. There was another argument made to discredit an Africanist language policy — namely, a belief that African languages were not languages for high-status communi-

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cation such as science or public administration. But this claim has no foundation in science.10 The fact that a corpus of adequate scientific terminology and words does not exist currently in most African languages remains a reality, and the costs of translation and printing in a variety of indigenous language would be substantial. Yet, the assertion that they are inherently unsuitable for science is unfounded. Bourdieu (1991) notes that elevating a language to a certain status or to fulfill certain domain functions in society is a conscious choice that has nothing to do with the inherent properties of the language. However, over time, we tend to forget these earlier choices and, thus, wrongly conclude that some languages are intrinsically more suitable for a given domain. A classic example is church leaders who replaced Amharic with Greek and then Greek with Latin, which over time became the only “appropriate” language for the church. So after a language is chosen, an extensive vocabulary is accumulated. The fact that theologians, clergy, and scientists invent terms and phrases is soon forgotten (B. Weinstein, 1982). Detractors of African languages fall prey to this same fallacy. Indeed, a major reason that the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Swahili was to discredit the notion that African languages were not suitable for high-status communication. African languages are not structurally disadvantaged. However, in the data from Laitin and Ramachandran (2016), only six of forty-two countries in sub-Saharan Africa have a major linguistic group with a precolonial writing tradition. As a point of comparison, all fortyseven North African and Asian countries contain such a group. This may, in part, be a consequence of geography: Scott (2017) argues that the introduction of cereals (unlike yams or cassava) enabled the development of tax systems, and such systems demanded record keeping. Although Scott would not characterize it as a constraint,

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A contemporary example is English, which is now considered more appropriate for scientific communication than other languages, even those with rich scientific traditions. However, there is no proof that English has inherent qualities that enable scientific communication. Indeed Adam Smith, in his 1761 monograph on Formation of Languages, argued that science could never advance as long as it relied on English, a language whose structure promoted ambiguity. A return to Latin, he argued, would bring precision into our thinking. Smith was wrong about English, as are detractors of African languages.

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limited grain production across sub-Saharan Africa may have impeded the development of written language and bureaucracies. Vansina (1978), for example, observes that the lack of a writing tradition in the Kuba Kingdom (in today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) inhibited the emergence of an expansive, modern state. Whatever its historical origin, language choice has distributive implications. That is, it creates winners (i.e., those who already speak the official language) and losers. And it is very difficult to change the official language where the prospective losers wield power (e.g., the English-speaking elite) or can threaten to destabilize the government (e.g., the non-Akan Ghanaians if Akan were chosen as official).

6

Conclusion

High hopes for négritude or African personality articulated by charismatic founders did not materialize with independence. Entrenched bureaucrats would not support the adoption of a more widely spoken indigenous language, as that might induce greater competition for their lucrative civil service positions. Fearing opposition from these elites and that elevating any one language might anger members of other linguistic groups, leaders opted for the status quo. As this chapter outlines, the costs were substantial. Colonial languages retained their official status and prominence in school curricula. And the dissimilarity of French or English from indigenous languages created a large barrier for students wanting to acquire the education that spurs individual mobility and sustains economic growth. Moreover, reliance on colonial languages limits the dissemination of public health information and can foreclose substantive debate. Finally, colonialism’s linguistic legacy has been to block the development of new speech forms

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that might have developed into indigenous state languages (Laitin, 1992, ch. 4). The negative association between relying on European languages and political and economic development is apparent in the microdata (e.g., from students in Cameroon forced to speak French rather than Kom) and national accounts. It is also made apparent by the divergent experience of Tanzania, which promoted a Swahili as a national language. To be sure, Tanzania has had its struggles economically (our topic in chapter 12). Yet, it has also overcome several of the challenges facing its neighbors. Tanzanian communities have been more successful than their Kenyan counterparts in providing public goods, such as school funding or properly maintained water wells. Moreover, Tanzania (save for a short rebellion that followed the incorporation of Zanzibar) has not faced a civil war. Nor has the country experienced the political turmoil associated with coups. While the short-term costs of promoting a national language are perhaps too high for many states to follow this example, the long-term costs of maintaining neocolonial cultural ties are substantial. Our conceptual scheme in part III works from the constraints highlighted in part II and draws implications for each of three policy arenas (in this and the subsequent two chapters). In figure 10.5, we examine the constraints of

Constraints

Economic Development

• Heterogeneous Populations (HP) • Entrenched Bureaucrats Speak European Languages (EB) Leader’s Objectives • Nation-Building (NB) • Promoting African Culture (PAC) • Limiting Opposition from Bureaucrats or Society (LO)

Policy Choice • Status Quo: European Language Remains Official Language (HP, EB, LO à SQ)

• Diminished Human Capital (Health and Education) Democracy • Limited Non-Elites’ Voice Security • Limited Interethnic Violence

Figure 10.5 Conceptual Framework: Cultural Policy

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high ELF (i.e., heterogeneous populations culturally) and inherited bureaucracies where civil servants were literate in European languages with no interest in switching to native languages for official business. While charismatic founders of African independent states favored policies that would enable nation-building and the promotion of African cultures, they also sought to delimit opposition to their policies. The result was the abandonment of their ideological goals and the acceptance of the linguistic status quo. While this policy brought some diminished threat of interethnic violence, it had negative implications for human capital, the provision of public goods, and public health. Here we see how historical constraints played into post-independence policies that help account for Africa’s lag.

11. Foreign Policy

A S H A R E D H I S T O RY of slavery, conquest, and paternalistic rule inspired a popular belief that no African can be free unless all of Africa is freed. Pan-Africanism was not an empty slogan among the first generation of Africa’s charismatic leaders; rather, it acknowledged a common plight that could be addressed only by a unified continent. In this chapter, we traverse the origins of this panAfrican dream, but we also show that there was a downside to it, namely the perpetuation of what scholars have called the “juridical state” (Jackson and Rosberg, 1982). Juridical states — protected by regional agreements consecrated in the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and with seats in the United Nations — existed in law, but their leaders had little incentive to transform them into sociological and political realities. In short, African leaders had little reason to fear external attack and, thus, no incentive to build state institutions capable of protecting their populations from foreign invaders. The legal protections afforded African states by the UN Charter and OAU treaty are partially responsible for Africa’s lag in statebuilding and the maintenance of internal order described in chapter 4.

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The Early Stirrings of Unity

W. E. B. Dubois and the Pan-African Congress Pan-Africanism as a social movement was brought to the world’s attention at a conference in London in July 1900. Henry Sylvester Williams, a lawyer from Trinidad, organized the conference, which included thirty-seven delegates from Africa, the West Indies, the US, and the UK. W. E. B. Dubois — among his other achievements, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard — played a leading role. His letter, “Address to the Nations of the World” (Dubois, W. E. B, excerpted below), appealed to European leaders not only to combat racism, but also to grant their colonies in Africa and the West Indies the right to self-government: Let the German Empire, and the French Republic, true to their great past, remember that the true worth of colonies lies in their prosperity and progress, and that justice, impartial alike to black and white, is the first element of prosperity. Let the Congo Free State become a great central Negro state of the world, and let its prosperity be counted not simply in cash and commerce, but in the happiness and true advancement to its black people.

The common plight of people from African origins tied together efforts to promote self-government and antiracism.1 Beyond his intellectual contribution, Dubois helped organize several pre-independence meetings of the Pan-African Congress: in 1919 (Paris), in 1921 (London), in 1923 (London), in 1927 (New York), and in 1945 (Manchester).

Unity as a Political Project It was not until after World War II that solidarity among the colonized peoples became an active political project. In its 1945 meeting in Manchester, the PanAfrican Congress sought unity, condemning the artificial

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For a brilliant critique of Dubois’s views on race, and an attempt to justify panAfricanism as a constructed and cultural project, read Appiah (1992).

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boundaries separating Africans into distinct political units. Shortly thereafter, the Congress had an opportunity to broaden its goals beyond Africa. In 1955, Sukarno of Indonesia hosted delegates from all over the colonized world in Bandung. Here the big idea unifying the colonized world was “non-alignment” in the Cold War. Nationalist leaders at this conference rejected the US secretary of state’s active promotion of regional alliances to stand against the Soviet Union, which was then expanding its sphere of influence throughout the colonial world. The idea of non-alignment was attractive to the young generation of African nationalists, with some repeating a proverb from Kenya noting that “when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers” (Crabb, 1965). The Bandung conference was followed by the AfroAsian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference in Cairo. African delegates to these conferences from West Africa organized the All-African Peoples’ Conference (AAPC) in 1958. This event included both newly independent and colonized states and crossed the linguistic barrier, including elites from both English-speaking (e.g., Ghana) and French-speaking (e.g., Guinea) colonies. A plethora of new organizations, such as the “Community of Independent African States” (CIAS) and the AAPC met in the late 1950s. Multiple resolutions (Johnson, 1962) emphasized independence and unity. These emphatic demands, and especially Guinea’s vote for immediate independence, stood in tension with France’s goal to create a French Community, in which its West African states would receive only partial independence. In furtherance of this goal, France unsuccessfully sought to block Guinea’s accession into the United Nations. Tensions between France and African independence activists were exacerbated when France protected its client Ahmadou Ahidjo as president of its former Cameroon trust territory, thereby blocking the accession

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of a popular insurgency. Eventually nearly all former French colonies (save Guinea) accepted membership in the French Community, albeit with lackluster involvement. In this same period, a second pan-African organization was forming in east and central Africa. The PanAfrican Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) emerged from a conference held in Mwanza, Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania), in 1958. The goal was to coordinate freedom movements. The represented countries — Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, the Central African Federation (including today’s Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia), and Zanzibar (today incorporated into Tanzania) — addressed a problem that was not relevant to West Africa, namely the presence of non-African minority populations that had settled in these territories. Of special concern was the possibility that Britain’s formation of the Central African Federation would create a second (after South Africa) white-dominated state.

Fissures Emerge Upsetting Unity Despite these gatherings professing unity among new or prospective sub-Saharan states, the immediate breakdown of order following the liberation of the former Belgian Congo in July 1960 divided African elites. President Joseph Kasavubu (tied to the US) and prime minister Patrice Lumumba (tied to the Soviet Union) were at loggerheads, with both demanding recognition as the head of state and therewith the authority to name Congo’s representative in the United Nations. This political conflict divided countries in the region, undermining calls for unity. Ghana, Guinea, and Mali supported Lumumba, and delegates at a PAFMECA meeting in Uganda joined the cause (even though their home countries did not yet have a seat in the UN). When this radical group eventually

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lost the UN vote, King Mohammed V invited them to Casablanca in January 1961 to give voice to their leftist agenda. They, hence, became known as the Casablanca Group. In support of president Kasavubu, president Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire convened a meeting in Abidjan. But there was more at stake. HouphuoëtBoigny served as the spokesperson for French interests in Africa. He supported a peace in Algeria that recognized French interests and stood against King Mohammed V’s desire to incorporate Mauritania (a member of the French Community) into its national territory. They met in the capital of the French Congo and became known as the Brazzaville Group. When they next met in Monrovia in May 1961, this group encompassed twenty African delegations.

The Reconciliation of the Casablanca-Brazzaville Divide By 1962, Cameroon was politically stable with Ahidjo in firm control, a United Nations–imposed reconciliation government was installed in Congo after the murder of Patrice Lumumba, President Touré adopted a more conciliatory tone toward the now-independent former French colonies of West Africa, and the National Liberation Front attained victory in Algeria. There were no longer any foreign policy issues to divide the Brazzaville and Casablanca blocs. All this time, emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, who refused to join either bloc, argued that there should be a single African voice in international affairs. In May 1963, he convened thirty heads of state to a summit, and in their final statement they declared themselves “determined to safeguard and consolidate the hard-won independence as well as the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our State, and to fight against neo-colonialism in all its forms”

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(Wallerstein, 1967, 65). This became the basis for the Charter of the Organization of African Unity.

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The Organization of African Unity (OAU)

Signed in 1963 (and lasting until 2002 when it was replaced by the African Union), the OAU was designed to promote the unity and solidarity of African states, to co-ordinate and intensify their cooperation and efforts to achieve a better life for the peoples of Africa; to defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity and independence; to eradicate all forms of colonialism from Africa; and to promote international cooperation. Several observations about this set of goals should be underlined. First, the goal of eradicating all forms of colonialism was important and ambitious in 1963. At the time this document was signed, the Portuguese colonies (Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau) were in early stages of armed insurgency. In southern Africa, white rule in South Africa seemed impregnable; white settlers in Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) were about to declare themselves independent from Britain to consolidate an apartheid-like state (their Unilateral Declaration of Independence came in 1965); and the territory of Namibia remained a UN trust supervised by South Africa and, thus, far from any chance for freedom. Despite this, the OAU committed its members to pay whatever cost necessary to ensure independence for all. Second, there was a tension between a commitment to self-rule and the maintenance of territorial integrity. While members wanted colonies to be liberated, they did not want to condone separatist movements within newly independent states. To resolve this tension, the OAU had to specify which groups could legitimately demand freedom under its bylaws. The Charter affirms the OAU’s “absolute dedication to the total emancipation of the African territories which are still dependent” (Art. III, para. 6).

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However, in 1963 and again in its 1964 Declaration on Orders, the OAU stated that self-determination was applicable only to dependent territories, and not to ethnic or national groups within each of these territories. This delineation served the interests of several African leaders, including Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, the OAU’s initial convener. When the charter was signed, Selassie faced separatist movements by the Eritreans, Somalis, and Oromos — each movement seeking independence from Ethiopia’s imperial rule. Selassie was bolstered by an agreement that no African state would interfere in any nationalist movement within another country’s borders. This agreement was to the chagrin of Somalia, as we discuss in the next section, whose leaders urged the OAU to consider their irredentist claim for territory lying inside of Ethiopia as an appeal for African freedom. Third, while the OAU enshrined a shared, if carefully delimited, desire for African self-rule, it did not represent or enable an African federation. The OAU was uninterested in building upon regional efforts, such as the Mali Federation (conjoining Mali and Senegal) and the East African Community (conjoining Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda), and these groups fell into desuetude. Rather than breaking down borders as the Pan-African Congress envisioned, the OAU solidified these territorial divisions. Pan-Africanism in the sense of a United States of Africa disappeared from the political agenda of African leaders.

The OAU in the Face of Intra-African Conflict Somali irredentism exemplifies the OAU’s failure to bring unity to Africa and to resolve conflicts between states and groups seeking greater autonomy. The Somali language community stretches from Djibouti, through the former British Somaliland, the Ethiopian Ogaadeen desert region and the former Italian Somalia, and ends in the former Northeastern Province of

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Kenya.2 If the Ogaadeen is culturally Somali, politically it has long been part of a wider Ethiopia. As we noted in chapter 8, Emperor Menelik II was a party to the Berlin Agreement in which the Great Powers acknowledged his broad territorial claims. After defeating the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, the British attempted to broaden Somalia’s borders into the Ogaadeen, but the restored emperor Haile Selassie won support in the emergent United Nations to block this border shift. With its independence in 1960, Somalia’s call for the unification of Somali lands and an insurgent campaign in the Ogaadeen to fulfill that goal put considerable pressure on the newly formed OAU. During the 1963 Inauguration Conference of the OAU, at a plenum of foreign ministers and heads of state, the Somali president called for the “self-determination of the inhabitants of the Somali areas adjacent to the Somali Republic.” All other OAU members summarily rejected his appeal. With an insurgency brewing in 1964, the Emergency Council of Ministers met in Dar-es-Salaam to demand an immediate ceasefire and a settlement along the lines of the Charter. This adherence to the colonial borders was reaffirmed shortly thereafter at the Ordinary Council of Ministers meeting held in Lagos. Subsequent Somali governments settled for a détente, but in 1973 they again brought their territorial dispute with Ethiopia to the OAU Council of Ministers. The OAU tried various gambits to resolve the issue, including an eight-country “Good Offices Committee.” Full-scale war broke out in 1977. Haile Selassie had been deposed, and Ethiopia was facing internal wars. As we discussed in chapter 4, the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) was one of the insurgent groups, and Somalia’s President Siyaad ordered his own army to use its Soviet-provided arsenal to support the WSLF cause. Somalia initially appeared to be winning, and Siyaad thus refused the OAU’s offer to reestablish its Good Offices

2

In colonial times, the Somalipopulated area of Kenya was called the Northern Frontier District. Upon independence, it became the Northeastern Province. The 2013 Constitution replaced the provinces with a system of counties.

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Committee. When the Soviets turned coat and, with the help of imported Cuban troops, defeated the Somalis, the new government of Ethiopia categorically rejected an OAU plan for a demilitarized zone. Meanwhile, at war’s end, some three-quarters of a million refugees were straddling the Somali-Ethiopian border. Ethiopia secured control of the Ogaadeen, but the region would continue to be a thorn in its side. After the war, Somalia collapsed into interclan warfare that would ultimately destroy any semblance of a state. The OAU, with its proclamations and committees, and with a rigid commitment to Africa’s borders, preserved neither unity nor peace.

Implications of the OAU for Political Order Charles Tilly’s grand theory of state-building declares that “states make war and war makes states” (Tilly, 1990, ch. 3). With a focus on early modern Europe, Tilly shows why these clauses complement one another. European kings feared that if they did not prepare for war, they would be defeated by rival states; moreover, if they defeated a rival, their tax bases grew. This gave leaders defensive and offensive rationales for war preparations. Meanwhile, winning wars required kings to build state capacity, so that they could mobilize troops and taxes. In this way, war also helped to make states. Tilly posits an evolutionary process, in which effective states grow while weaker powers are eventually subsumed. In chapter 4, we noted that Africa’s civil conflicts do not appear to have the same state-building features of Tilly’s interstate wars. Since independence in Africa, there have been only a few real threats of interstate conflict. As a result, Tilly’s state-building process was never activated. An examination of figure 11.1 reveals a significant change in the types of wars fought after World War II. The

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Extra−state

Inter−state

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Figure 11.1 Changing Composition of Conflict, 1816-2008 (COW)

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Correlates of War data used to create the graph classifies the wars that occurred between 1816 and 2008 into four categories: (1) non-state wars waged between parties not recognized as states by the Great Powers (e.g., communal groups in pre-independence Africa); (2) extrastate wars fought by a recognized state in an unrecognized territory; (3) interstate wars between two recognized states; and (4) intrastate wars that pit states against militias within their own borders seeking separation or control of the center (i.e., civil wars).3 The striking fact revealed by this graph is that since the world wars, interstate wars have virtually ended; the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by civil wars. In sub-Saharan Africa since independence, there have been only five interstate wars: the war over Angola, fought among the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and South Africa; the Ogaadeen war of 1977-78 between Somalia and Ethiopia; the Ugandan-Tanzanian

3

According to the Correlates of War (COW) website, “COW seeks to facilitate the collection, dissemination, and use of accurate and reliable quantitative data in international relations.”

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war of 1978-79; the war over the Aouzou Strip fought between Chad and Libya; and the Badme border war of 1998-2000 between Ethiopia and Eritrea. None of these wars lasted more than two years, though it took the selection of Abiy Ahmed as Ethiopia’s prime minister in 2018 to defuse hostilities with Eritrea and initiate a new period of peace. Meanwhile, there have been thirty-eight civil wars in Africa in this same period (figure 11.2); these wars had an an average duration of more than eight years.4 Across the globe, two forces protected the territorial integrity of states and, thus, deterred interstate wars. First is the United Nations, whose charter proclaims (Art. 2, Section 4) that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Second, during the Cold War, either the US or Soviet Union offered protection to aligned states against foreign threats. In sub-Saharan Africa, the OAU helped

4

What has been called “Africa’s Great War” (1998-) centered in the Kivu Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has a broad interstate intervention, involving Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola, all in pursuit of regional power and mineral wealth. However, and in part due to the OAU tradition, all parties seek control over Kinshasa and support internal militias, thus qualifying this as an intrastate war. See Roessler (2016, ch. 9) for an excellent analysis of the political dynamics of this human catastrophe.

Figure 11.2 Number of Civil Wars by Country, 1960-2010

Number of Civil Wars

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both the UN and the Great Powers (as well as the former metropoles) to protect their member states against any rivals. If (interstate) wars made states, the OAU, supplemented by the UN and the US-Soviet rivalry, helped undermine incentives for African leaders to build strong and effective states. The result has been states that have seats in the UN General Assembly and are recognized as valid members of the OAU, but whose leaders have little capacity to govern. These are states in law only — juridical states.

3

The United Nations and the Politics of Peacekeeping

While African states have not been embroiled in interstate wars, they have been wracked by civil wars. Why has the fight against internal insurgencies not strengthened these states? Fearon and Laitin (2013) demonstrate that the countries that fought civil wars from 1815 through 1944 were relatively immune from civil war onsets in later years, at least relative to comparable countries that did not have what we might call “state-building” civil wars. Should we therefore infer that post-independence African civil wars are an early stage of state-building that, at some future time, will be seen as contributing to state-building and long-term stability? The Biafran secession in Nigeria might offer some support for this rosy view of modern civil conflicts. Yet, it was also a unique civil war in Africa (more like the US Civil War in the 1860s), as it was fought between two regular armies constituted from the former national army. To win this conventional war, the Federal Army had to build an infrastructure of roads and communication facilities that connected populations throughout the country. The Federal Army was made up of soldiers that were often of mixed ethnic backgrounds (save for Igbos), and this

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helped create a “Nigerian” identity that superseded ethnic identities for many soldiers. Still, as we discussed in chapter 4, the failure of the Nigerian military to cauterize the Boko Haram insurgency reflects the country’s continued struggle to maintain order. Despite Biafra, there is also reason to be skeptical of this inference, in large part due to the UN’s insistence that warring parties share power in any post-conflict government. Fearon and Laitin (2007) estimate that 17 percent of civil wars where insurgents sought to overthrow the central government and 47 percent of separatist conflicts where insurgents sought self-rule in Africa have been settled with a power-sharing agreement. This is quite different from pre-World War II civil wars, after which the victors occupied the presidential palace. These older wars were contests won by the side with more capacity; this is quite different from a peace built on coalitions of former combatants. Unsurprisingly, post–civil war coalition governments in Africa are fragile; former enemies are not likely to trust one another as they jointly seek to rebuild state institutions (J. Weinstein, 2005). Recent examples are easy to find: consider the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia attempting to encompass all rival clans, or the regular attempts to induce president Salva Kiir and vice president Riek Machar of South Sudan to share power across the Nuer and Dinka divide defining their post-independence civil war. These coalitions of former enemies, as we shall elaborate in chapter 15, have not built up the capacity to project power and ensure peace.

4

Conclusion

The UN Charter respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all member states. This not only solved the problem of interstate war but also served the interests of the two superpowers: the United States and Soviet

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Union wanted to preserve a world order that ensured their influence over large blocs. Other colonial powers did not object, as wars induce unwanted refugee flows and trade disruptions. With independence, African states took seats at the UN. Moreover, these new states gave up the earlier project of political unity and formulated their own charter — the Organization of African Unity — that protected the new leaders from military threats from neighboring states. The UN and OAU had the unintended consequence of creating juridical states that did not fear external threats and, thus, saw little need to acquire a complete monopoly on legitimate violence in their territories. African leaders were protected from invasion and did not need to build the infrastructure to project power up to their boundaries (in chapter 5 we discussed the geographic impediments to consolidating authority). While sheltered from external enemies, these weak states struggled to prevent insurgencies. When civil wars occurred, they did not always end in one side vanquishing the other. Rather, United Nations’ peacekeeping operations worked to restore order, forging fragile power-sharing arrangements between recently warring factions. These tenuous pacts generated uncertainty, discouraging leaders from making long-term investments in reconstructing and expanding state capacity. War is always horrific, but Africa’s post-independence civil wars lack the silver lining of producing more capable states. Back to our conceptual model in figure 11.3, we see that early African leaders inherited arbitrary borders. And in becoming members of the UN, leaders signed on to a charter that consecrated those boundaries. In addition to this international constraint, the inheritors of Africa’s colonies had conflicting goals: they both envisaged a continent that was unified, and yet wanted to preserve the sovereignty of their states. Working with these constraints and goals, they created a continental organization, the OAU, that forestalled unity and protected the sovereignty

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Democracy Constraints • Arbitrary Borders (AB) • UN Charter (UN) Leader’s Objectives • African Unity (AU)

Policy Choice • Non-Interference (UN, SS à NI) • Solidarity Around Black African Rule (AU à S)

• State Sovereignty (SS)

of states that were unable to govern their own populations. While sub-Saharan states eventually eliminated foreign rule (a democratic success), autocracy was tolerated (a democratic failure). Moreover, without state-building warfare, African unity perpetuated weak states and civil war.

• Limited Pressures on Indigenous Autocrats (NI) • End to Foreign, White Rule (S) Security • Weak States (NI) • Susceptibility to Civil War (NI)

Figure 11.3 Conceptual Framework: Foreign Policy

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12. Economic Policy

T W O E C O N O M I C P RO G R A M S D O M I NAT E D policy discussions in and about newly independent African states. The first was African socialism, and the second was the World Bank and United Nations development plans. Each of these programs had its failures. While some thought African socialism was tailored to Africa’s history of subjugation and traditions of communalism, the resulting policies ignored African states’ capacities and individuals’ incentives. Nor did the development theories popular in international institutions at the time of independence inspire the envisioned economic “takeoff.” World Bank economists encouraged countries to incur massive budget and trade deficits. Unfortunately, when the hypothesized growth never materialized, this burden became crushing. These programs did not deliver on their promises of promoting growth and relieving poverty in Africa and other parts of the developing world.1 In this chapter, we outline prominent economic theories that shaped policy decisions by African leaders or their Western donors. We also discuss the flaws in the reigning theories of economic change. In this second discussion, there remains some ambiguity about whether the doctrines were flawed, the implementation inadequate, or the timing unfortunate.

1

On the route to “takeoff,” see Rostow (1991). Ever since the creation of the International Development Association (IDA) in 1960 at the World Bank, its reports are unyieldingly optimistic about Africa’s prospects. And the optimism continues. The IDA website in April 2016 proclaimed, “In the last five years, the Bank and its partners have increased their commitments to Africa to fight poverty, boost economic growth and lessen the impact of the economic, food and fuel crises.”

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African Socialism

African socialism was widely endorsed by African leaders: Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Léopold Senghor, Sékou Touré, and Nelson Mandela (before assuming power). Indeed, nearly all leading voices of African independence were committed socialists. These men believed that capitalism was unsuitable for promoting growth in Africa. Capitalism was associated with racism, with colonialism, with inequality, with apartheid, and with disrespect for the communal and traditional. Given the antipathy toward capitalism at the moment of African independence, Berg (1964, 549) notes that “it is hard these days to find an African statesman who does not advocate ‘a socialist path’ to economic development.” African socialists instead envisioned an enlarged role for the state and hoped that an active state could help “telescope” the long route to prosperity, skipping the destructive early stages of capitalist development (e.g., the enclosure of the commons in England, which drove independent peasants into urban factories; or the scenes of destitution in east London that Karl Marx observed in his daily walks to the British Museum Reading Room). Yet, this broad agreement did not translate into a common set of economic policies. Under the banner of African socialism, leaders pursued very different paths — some influenced by European socialist parties (whose leaders were early supporters of African self-rule) and others by the Soviet model, not recognizing the human and social costs associated with Stalin’s program of rapid industrialization.2 Ironically, African socialism often reflected a continuation of the paternalistic economic policies of the colonial states. Colonial capitalism entailed “price-fixing arrangements, government-bestowed monopoly privileges, restricted wage and labor market policies, [and] forced la-

2

Here we focus on the socialist doctrines of the charismatic generation, owing to the Fabian Society and related nonrevolutionary doctrines from Western Europe, as well as traditional African models. Several countries emulated Soviet industrialization policies, but those rigid Marxist models are not analyzed here. Most of these impositions were maintained only as long as they generated military aid from the USSR.

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bor” (Berg, 1964, 554). Similarly, proponents of African socialism promoted state regulation of prices, a government monopoly on foreign trade, and state involvement in the operation of industrial enterprises. Socialism, not unlike colonialism, was an economic arrangement in which the state would control the commanding heights of the economy. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s charismatic founder, attempted to forge a socialist path to development. He established a panoply of state-owned enterprises ranging from timber, food, and diamond boards to the Black Star Shipping Line and Ghana Sanyo Electrical Manufacturing. He sought foreign aid to build a gigantic state-owned hydroelectric plant on the Volta River. He was a spokesperson for socialism throughout the soon-to-be-independent countries of Africa. Yet, Nkrumah’s counsel was not always heeded by fellow African leaders. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the heir apparent to French colonial rule in Côte d’Ivoire, remained a client and ally of French president Charles de Gaulle. He rejected the socialist path, as did several of his fellow first-generation presidents such as Hastings Banda (Malawi) and Seretse Khama (Botswana). In his speech welcoming Nkrumah on a state visit in 1957, Houphouët-Boigny announced a challenge: “A wager has been made between two territories,” Houphouët-Boigny revealed, “one having chosen independence, the other preferring the difficult road to the construction, with the metropole, of a community of men in equal rights and duties. Let us each undertake his experiment, in absolute respect for the experiment of his neighbor, and in ten years we shall compare the results.” The data suggest that Houphouët-Boigny won this bet (figure 12.1). Up through 1966 when Nkrumah was deposed, the Ghanaian economy stagnated; meanwhile, the economy of Côte

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d’Ivoire grew impressively. Several reasons help explain the disappointing performance of African socialism. 2,100

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Missing Managerial Class Directing the commanding heights of even a small economy requires an expert managerial class. Consider just the issue of managing the farming sector. The Guinean government wanted to increase productivity by promoting mechanized state farms. To that end, they imported heavy farm machinery, emulating Soviet-style agriculture. Yet, the state officials managing the project overestimated the local demand for these machines. First, African soils are delicate and require years of fallowing to recuperate. Heavy machinery spoiled plots for a generation and, thus, had no positive impact on long-term yields. Second, these machines failed in the local climate and could be seen rusting at the edges of struggling farms. In the end, these expensive machines only added to Guinea’s budget and trade deficits.

Figure 12.1 Income Growth in Ghana vs. Côte d’Ivoire

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The government of Guinea also nationalized foreign trade and domestic wholesaling. In doing so, it created one of the largest trading firms in Africa. Yet, inexperienced local managers were not prepared to run an operation of this scale. In Berg’s (1964, 558) summary, “Despite some gallant efforts, the distribution system rapidly fell victim to a massive administrative muddle. Goods were ordered for which there was no demand, or in quantities far beyond normal needs. Desired staples were frequently in short supply because of inadequate inventory policies and irregular deliveries.” The state needs a class of trained personnel to approximate the wisdom of the market. Yet, according to Berg (1964, 651), on the eve of independence in 1958, only about 8,000 sub-Saharan Africans had graduated from secondary school. Despite this limited labor pool, African leaders were eager to reassert political control by Africanizing government. As described by Leonard (1991, 81), a principal theme of Jomo Kenyatta’s presidency in Kenya was Africanization.3 “In this way,” Leonard writes, “he could provide the flow of benefits both to buy the unity of the Kikuyu and to provide patronage resources to keep the other ethnic leaders in his coalition.” The Africanization of the upper levels of the civil service happened rapidly and was essentially completed two years into independence. Leonard tells the exemplary story of Simeon Nyachae’s rise. Nyachae held an entry-level post as a district officer when Kenya became independent. He was then sent to Cambridge for training (he had already studied at a British technical college) but was shortly recalled to take a more demanding post as a district commissioner. After demonstrating his loyalty to Kenyatta’s government, Nyachae received another promotion, becoming the youngest provincial commissioner, in charge of the politically sen-

3

Kenyatta’s push to Africanize was exemplary of transitions across the region. Yet, he was not a committed socialist. Despite his cabinet minister, Tom Mboya, advocating “Democratic African Socialism” in a sessional paper that was adopted by Parliament in 1964, Kenyatta accommodated international capitalism.

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sitive Rift Valley. Although he was not a coethnic Kikuyu of the president, Nyachae continued to grow in stature. Nyachae’s trajectory reflects Kenyatta’s dependence on personal (and often ethnic) connections to staff his bureaucracy (Leonard, 1991, 260). The president valued loyalty, not the effective delivery of public services. Leonard, however, stops short of condemning Kenyatta or his appointees. Although he is more critical of Kenyatta’s successor (Leonard, 1991, 181-182), overall, his more sympathetic tone contrasts with Price’s (1975) critique of Ghana’s civil service. The charismatic generation’s decision to Africanize as quickly as possible, promoting junior officers to senior positions without sufficient training, surely incurred a cost. Although we know of no attempts to quantify the effects of these staffing choices, two cases suggest these affected states’ economic management. In Côte d’Ivoire, President Houphouët-Boigny surrounded himself with French advisers, such as Guy Nairay, chief of staff from 1960 to 1993, and Alain Belkiri, secretary-general of the Ivorian government. A treaty of defense and cooperation with France allowed Houphouët-Boigny to reduce the size of indigenous police and military while depending on French forces for security. From 1960 through 1993, an estimated 11,350 French expatriates working in the Ivorian civil service received state decorations (Mbemap and Salhi, 2000, 54). A similar story has been told for Botswana, Africa’s economic miracle. Independent Botswana has relied on a wide variety of international civil servants to manage its economy and state administration. As Dale (1995, 94) points out, “The need for expatriates in the higher reaches of the civil service, particularly in the professional and technical branches, has continued, and the localization issue [read “Africanization”] has tended to be subordinated to economic development.” While there are other explanations for Botswana’s success (which we review in

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chapter 14), the decision to favor competence over local control may have contributed.

Elusive Peasantry The vast majority of Africans at the moment of independence were peasants. For any set of economic policies to succeed, this constituency needed to be “captured.”4 In Hyden (1980), Africa’s peasants are enmeshed in an economy of affection based on a support network of kinship and community. Through their tacit insurance schemes, peasants could assure themselves basic survival and social stability. The problem for development from this framework is it enables the peasantry to remain outside of the influence of the state — that is to say, they cannot be captured. And so, if government policies are seen as threatening, peasants are free to escape through their reliance on the economy of affection. From this notion of an uncaptured peasantry, let us consider the socialist experiment in Tanzania, with the attempt to create collectivist farms in so-called ujamaa villages. This campaign ran from 1973 to 1976 and relocated some 5 million of Tanzania’s 12 million rural dwellers. The goal was to rationalize agriculture in Tanzania by consolidating the peasantry in core villages, thus enabling the state to provide services such as clean water, tractors, electricity, and education to all peasants. In its original conception, moving to ujamaa villages would be voluntary; but with few peasants volunteering, the program’s fulfillment required coercion. In their decision to place peasants in planned villages and run campaigns to promote scientific agricultural practices, Tanzanian bureaucrats (like many of their colonial predecessors) treated peasants and local practices as intolerably traditionalist and inefficient. Yet, this scheme for creating new ujamaa villages failed in large part due to a poor understanding of local

4

This section is indebted to Hyden (1980) and Scott (1999). The uncaptured peasantry of Africa is a dominant theme in the literature on African politics, but it is treated in this volume only in terms of the failures of the socialist experiment. For compelling critiques of Hyden’s notion of an uncaptured peasantry, see Samoff (1989) and Kasfir (1986). While critics point out that African peasants have long been active in international commerce and the capitalist world economy, they do not deny that African peasants had strong local resources to resist megalomaniacal state programs.

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conditions. Sites for villages were chosen without carefully considering the availability of water, or food, or the carrying capacity of soils. As a result, citizens evaded and sabotaged government efforts to relocate them, infuriating President Nyerere. In a radio address to the nation, he bragged of his government’s great successes in education and health. He then asked what the peasants had given the state in return and intimated that they had done little, remaining idle and evading the responsibilities of building their economy and nation. He soon recognized he couldn’t turn peasants into socialists, but the state could compel them to live in villages (Hyden, 1980, 130). The result of the socialist agricultural program in Tanzania was economic stagnation. Per capita GDP dropped from $593 in 1973 to $577 in 1981 (Groningen Growth and Development Centre, 2013). The style of socialism borrowed from the Soviet experience required the peasantry to subsidize the development of the modern industrial sector. Peasants resisted this exchange, foiling socialist leaders’ plans to capture the peasantry.

Foreign Control Dependency theory viewed African socialism as a mirage. The colonial economy, dependency theorists insisted, enriched a small segment of an African bourgeoisie that profited from practices that perpetuated foreign control and African dependency. In an extensive study of the postcolonial Kenyan economy, Colin Leys (1975) shows the power of multinational firms relative to state regulators. Multinational corporations employed several strategies for offshoring profits and, thus, avoiding taxes: parent companies, for example, charged their Kenyan branches management fees, consultancy fees, and royalties for use of intellectual property, which made it appear that the Kenyan branches were less profitable. Even when governments bought into these companies, they continued their

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practices of offshoring profits. While these accounting tricks robbed the state of much-needed revenues, political support came from “bridgehead elites” who got rich sitting on corporate boards. Post-independence economic policy was hardly socialist from this point of view. Rather, it was dependent capitalism (Leys, 1975, 125-128, 135).5

Favored Urban Populations The urban service class became a key support group for African leaders. Through protests or subversion, these city dwellers could destabilize the country’s capital and even depose the ruler.6 Keeping these urban folk docile, thus, became a major concern for leaders (Christensen, 2018). Naturally, urban residents wanted high real wages. As the socialist leaders took greater control of industry, they became the target of these wage demands. In Zambia, after president Kenneth Kaunda nationalized the copper mines, suddenly labor strife became a concern for government rather than a European conglomerate (Bates, 1971). In Nigeria, after the windfall of oil production, urban workers demanded pay increases, and a governmentappointed committee led by Simeon Adebo recommended massive back pay for all Nigerians on the public payroll as a cost-of-living adjustment. To amplify the purchasing power of city dwellers, governments allowed their exchange rates to appreciate. This enabled urban consumers to buy more imported goods. While this currency manipulation served the short-term goal of satisfying urban residents, it had two deleterious long-term effects. First, it generated a massive trade deficit (or glut of imports relative to exports). For example, higher exchange rates raised the price of export crops, making them less competitive on world markets. As a consequence, governments had to borrow money in the face of a high volume of imports and meager exports

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Reno (1999) offers a different political logic for why leaders tolerated continued (even expanded) foreign control of key economic sectors. He argues that weak leaders, like Samuel Doe in Liberia, feared the rise of domestic economic elites and, thus, preferred foreign control if it impoverished would-be rivals. 6 This section relies on the seminal contributions of Bates, especially (Bates, 1981).

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that depleted foreign currency reserves. This eventually brought many African governments into near bankruptcy. Second, rural farms folded, and displaced peasants moved to urban areas, thereby increasing the size of the constituencies that governments had to mollify. Over time, with fewer peasants growing food crops, many African states became net importers of basic staples. City folk consumed (subsidized) Uncle Ben’s rice while former farmers were working as houseboys for central government bureaucrats.

Porous Borders In 1924 Joseph Stalin acknowledged that communism was not imminent outside of the Soviet Union, and that the Communist Party needed to develop doctrine (pushed by Nikolai Bukharin) of “socialism in one country.” In simple terms, to the extent that socialism would reward all citizens based on their needs, this would advantage those with abundant skills (say workers) and disadvantage those with scarce skills (say managers). If there were an exit option (i.e., another country in which capitalism reigned), there would be an exodus of the highly skilled from the communist state to the capitalist state, where people are rewarded based on principles of supply and demand. This doctrine of socialism in one country compelled Soviet leaders to restrict emigration. Given their porous borders, weak, newly independent states could not foreclose this exit option. First, the costs of border control are exorbitant: states not only have to hire sentries, but pay and monitor them enough to curtail bribe-taking. Second, with ethnic kin straddling many of Africa’s borders — due in part to the partition we discussed in chapter 8 — arranging transfer across borders is relatively inexpensive. One result of easy exit was “brain drain,” as skilled personnel left for advanced industrial countries where they could get wages commensurate with

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their skills, and this helped to undermine socialist experiments in Africa. But not only skilled labor crossed borders. Commodities crossed borders as well; smuggling in Africa is unfortunately easy. Indeed, on this dimension, Nkrumah’s failure worked to Houphouët-Boigny’s advantage. To pay for Nkrumah’s monumental socialist investments (as well as monuments to himself), Ghana’s marketing boards (the only legal purchasers of cocoa in Ghana at the time) paid cocoa farmers far less than the world price. The difference between what the marketing boards received from international buyers and what they paid to the growers went to the state — a tax on the peasantry that subsidized the socialist experiment. Peasants quickly learned that they could receive much higher prices if they smuggled their cocoa into Côte d’Ivoire. Many did, and the result was an enormous loss of government revenues and foreign exchange. Similarly, in Tanzania, peasants in the rich coffee regions smuggled billions of shillings in foreign exchange into Kenya and Uganda, a practice that persists today (M. Brooks, 2007; Thomas, 2014, 120). Socialism in one country cannot succeed under conditions of weak states with porous borders.

2

A Succession of Economic Orthodoxies

International financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — derisively called the “terrible twins” in Zambia (Callaghy, 1990, 302) — have a more varied record. Over the past four decades, different schools of thought emerged among economists around the causes of economic stagnation and the policy prescriptions that would deliver rapid growth. When one orthodoxy failed another took its place, leading to a series of policy fads that all promised salvation from economic crises and poverty. On the eve of independence, economic wisdom advo-

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cated filling the “financing gap” — an undersupply of the capital needed to industrialize. Would-be African industrialists, economists argued, simply required financing, and donors should step in to fill that gap. When profitable ventures failed to materialize, a related theory took hold, important substitution industrialization (ISI). This proposed that states should invest in manufacturing products otherwise imported from abroad. The oil boom of the mid-1970s provided a glut of petrodollars to finance these state-led investments. Unfortunately, when these investments failed, many countries were stuck with unmanageable debts. The apparent failure of ISI engendered skepticism about state-led industrialization. A new orthodoxy arose in response that saw the state investments as a source of corruption and distortions. This approach was ultimately consecrated as the “Washington Consensus,” a set of policy guidelines that tied foreign aid to privatization and responsible (read: austere) monetary and fiscal policy. This belt-tightening led to discomfort: citizens protested cutbacks in subsidies and public services; elites resisted reforms that threatened their lucrative control of state-owned enterprises. The economic upheaval associated with structural adjustment was partially ameliorated by donor states’ willingness to relieve and restructure debt. In the spirit of the Catholic Church’s Jubilee 2000, a coalition in the Paris Club, an informal consortium of donor states, called for the cancellation of debt for the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs). According to the IMF and the World Bank, debt relief granted since the beginning of the HIPC initiative reduced beneficiary countries’ debt burden by about 90 percent relative to the height of the crisis. While not completely fulfilled, this initiative brought some relief to ordinary folk, but perhaps greater relief to presidents whose political budgets were threatened.

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Taking into account the need for states to provide the basic infrastructure and public services to increase productivity, the Washington Consensus was augmented by a UN-led effort to meet eight Millennium Development Goals (e.g., universal primary education). By hitting these targets, states would simultaneously alleviate the most important constraints on economic development. As this succession of policies suggests, when one idea failed to deliver the promised development, it was quickly replaced.

The Financing Gap In the early 1960s, many economists argued that to propel growth, African states needed to close their financing gap. They argued that countries needed machinery to flourish. Yet, poor countries could not afford this muchneeded physical capital — they faced a financing gap. And to fill that gap, economists recommended large infusions of foreign aid. These theories became dogma in the international aid community even though a half-century of data showed no relationship between (domestic or foreign) savings and rapid economic growth. Easterly (2002) provides the Morogoro shoe factory in Tanzania as an emblem of this failed theory. Constructed with World Bank funds in the 1970s, experts thought they were building a company that would both supply the country with all its shoes and still export three-fourths of its production to Europe. Yet, few shoes were even made before production ceased in 1990. Financing alone, Easterly insists, does not generate growth. The finance-gap theory was blind to another tenet of economics, namely that people respond to incentives. Easterly observes that low rates of investment in poor countries could reflect an absence of lucrative investment opportunities. That is, aid recipients had no reason to

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invest, and large infusions of foreign aid (figure 12.2) did not change that. Instead, the aid that came in was consumed by local elites. These elites quickly recognized that if they consumed aid and kept their domestic savings rates low, then they could garner more generous disbursements from donors eager to fill a stubborn financing gap. As shown by Easterly (2002, 37-38), in only seventeen of eighty-eight developing countries did aid lead to added levels of investment. In a later work, Easterly (2006, 46) correlates the tripling of aid to Africa (from 5 to 15 percent of GDP) in the period from 1970 to 1999 with a plummeting average growth rate, from 2 percent per annum to virtual stagnation (with negative growth rates throughout the 1980s and early 1990s). This finding did not curb the enthusiasm of the international aid lobby.

Average ODA (Percent of GDP)

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Figure 12.2 Increased Disbursements of Foreign Aid to Africa (WDI) 29 Cases w/o Missing Data

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10 All Non−Missing Observations

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0 1960

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Import Substitution Industrialization A related and once conventional economic theory was import substitution industrialization (ISI).7 The premise,

7

For an excellent history of ISI’s varied success going back to the nineteenth century, see Waterbury (1999).

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articulated by a top United Nations economist, Raúl Prebisch, was that the value of raw materials was systematically declining relative to manufacturing. Therefore, to escape poverty, less developed countries needed to substitute manufacturing for their agriculture and mineral exports. But what to manufacture? Here the idea was to produce locally goods that would otherwise be imported from abroad (i.e., import substitution). This would allow the state to hold on to its foreign currency reserves. Import substitution industrialization entailed a number of distortionary policies. To promote investment in domestic manufacturing, governments had to protect newly created “infant” industries from foreign competition. This often involved imposing tariffs on imported goods that competed with products from infant industries. Second, governments overvalued their exchange rates, making it relatively cheap for protected enterprises to import the machinery they needed. Initially, ISI showed broad signs of success: until the middle of the 1970s, ISI countries (including several in Africa) enjoyed economic growth and increases in productivity. “The puzzle,” Rodrik (1997, 4) writes, “is why so many economies that seemed to be doing well took the express train to hell after 1975.” Critics of ISI point to several shortcomings. First, the theory (like arguments about the financing gap) was based on a faulty assumption about the primacy of physical capital accumulation. Without productivity increases, growth is unlikely. And ISI insulated “infant” industries from international competition and, thus, incentives to rapidly increase productivity. Second, the distortions incurred through exchange rate policies undervalued the real costs of domestic production (Ndiaye, 2008, 412). Third, as was the case with socialist experiments, poorly

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trained government planners struggled to prevent bottlenecks and misallocations. Economic stagnation or decline in many ISI countries, combined with the dramatic rise of the Asian Tigers (pursuing export-led growth), convinced many economists to abandon ISI as a failed policy.

The Washington Consensus With the dismissal of ISI, a new orthodoxy emerged counseling minimal government — the new theme for African development was to “stabilize, privatize, and liberalize” (Rodrik and the World Bank 2006, 973). For a time, this strategy of “structural adjustment” held sway at the World Bank, IMF, and USAID; it, hence, became known as the Washington Consensus. These institutions agreed that developing countries needed to reign in the budget, insulate the central bank from political incentives to manipulate currency, and meanwhile expand the role of the private market at the expense of the state. However hard to swallow, this bitter pill, they argued, would resolve debt crises and restore growth. Structural adjustment was designed to get both the prices and the institutions right, setting the stage for profitable private investments. But the prescriptions associated with the Washington Consensus mostly failed to dig desperate African economies out of their debt crises. Despite their training, these economists again failed to consider the incentives of debt-ridden African leaders. Indeed, van de Walle (2001) argues that recommended reforms (despite the IMF’s strict conditions) were never fully implemented by African governments. Rather, African leaders used donors’ demands for reform to implement policies that concentrated power in the executive, thereby undermining institutional checks and balances. Stopgap interventions, such as requiring states to produce a “Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper” (PRSP) that engaged civil society society

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in monitoring state officials, suffered similar fates. As Easterly (2006, 144) recounts, in Burkina Faso, the head of state drafted the PRSP; in Tanzania, it was written by the World Bank. As with ISI, we are left uncertain about how to apportion blame — were the policies wrongheaded, were they selectively implemented, or both? To be sure, the Washington Consensus, as the World Bank proclaimed with pride, had a “poster child.” In Ghana, president Jerry Rawlings abandoned his leftist populism and began working closely with IMF and World Bank advisers. He put together a group of Ghanaian technocrats and protected them from the laid-off civil servants and recipients of massive state subsidies who were hurt by their reforms. As the Ghanaian economy began to show signs of life, the World Bank showered it with new funds, basically to cover the enormous debtservicing charges that were draining state finances. After years of negative growth, Ghana’s GDP per capita grew by 8.7 percent in 1984 and continued to grow at a modest rate in the following years (Callaghy, 1990). Alas, Ghana was an exception. More typical is the case of Cameroon (van de Walle, 1993). In 1985 Cameroon was hailed as a success story for structural adjustment policies led by the pragmatist Paul Biya. Indeed, from 1970 to 1985, Cameroon had an 8 percent annual growth rate, largely due to a boom in oil exports. But with the collapse of oil prices the following year, a severe balance-ofpayments crisis arose. The state marketing boards could not even pay farmers for their cocoa and coffee produce. A new stabilization package was signed with IMF in 1988, and in 1989 its debt was rescheduled. Nonetheless, by 1992, the country had experienced six years of negative economic growth, with nominal GDP at 75 percent of its 1985 level. Van de Walle’s explanation for Cameroon’s failed reforms was that there had never been any reform. State

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elites were profiting from the status quo, and they subverted all efforts at reform. During the 1970s, twenty agricultural parastatals were created, yet only a few (for cotton) ever reached profitability, requiring 150 billion CFA a year to cover parastatal debts. For these and other enterprises, the state sector grew from 20,000 in the 1960s to 180,000 in 1988. Laying off these folk to satisfy international financial institutions was politically impossible; only programs could be cut. So in the 1988-89 budget, 95 percent of the Ministry of Agriculture’s expenses were personnel costs. More generally, van de Walle explains, “economic reform along the lines advocated by the IMF and World Bank is often unlikely to succeed because it would undermine the very sociological foundations of the state” (van de Walle, 1993, 364). These economic doctrines did not account for the incentives of those domestic elites entrusted with implementation. Cameroon was not an outlier. Under socialist regimes, bureaucracies became bloated. In Senegal, the number of civil servants increased from 10,000 at independence to 34,900 in 1965 and 61,000 in 1973 (Ndiaye, 2008, 420). In Zambia, state officials used President Kaunda’s ideology of humanism against his attempts at reform, arguing that laying off parastatal bureaucrats would impoverish them and undermine their dignity (Callaghy and Ravenhill, 1993, 286-303). Congo, according to Tsassa and Yamb (2008), took the cake as the most fonctionnarisé of all states relying on the French-supported CFA franc, with one bureaucrat for every thirty inhabitants (one for every fifteen in the workforce). It was no simple task for the advocates of structural adjustment to convince governments to send these officials into unemployment without causing unrest. All of these factors led Rodrik and the World Bank (2006, 974) to conclude that “nobody really believes the Washington Consensus anymore.”

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The Millennium Project The next orthodoxy, associated with Jeffrey Sachs and numerous collaborators, called for coordinated investments in infrastructure and public services. There are, in this view, multiple barriers to growth — high transport costs, low education, poor health — and these all need to be overcome to generate economic growth.8 In 2000, heads of state from 147 countries pledged to meet eight Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Project was established to coordinate the global effort to achieve these targets. It called for public investments amounting to 25 percent of recipient countries’ GDP, all financed by rich donor countries. The Millennium Project was not only a call for donors to make large investments. It also demanded that African countries initiate reforms to address several problematic “syndromes,” to use the clinical language adopted by the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) and the World Bank (Fosu, 2008). First, countries needed to eliminate excessive state controls. Second, states had to halt adverse redistribution, reallocating funds to politically favored groups, as had Burundi’s Tutsi political elite from 1975 to 1987 by excluding Hutus from state programs. Third, states needed to spend more sustainably, saving during high times, so that deficits did not explode during downturns. Togo, for example, had used a windfall in phosphate and coffee prices to double its public workforce, an expansion that impoverished the government when prices fell. If states could rid themselves of these syndromes, as the AERC then envisioned, the influx of donor funds could serve public needs rather than patronage purposes. It is certainly true that the era of the Millennium Project has been one of impressive economic growth in Africa. But most analysts are reticent to attribute this

8 For a good critique of the Washington Consensus and an early statement of the Millennium Development Goals project see McCord, Sachs, and Woo (2005).

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growth to it. To be sure, donations never came close to the levels that Sachs envisioned. And where investments have been made, clear benefits are hard to detect. Consider a well-publicized example: the Millennium Villages Project. The project started in fourteen clusters of rural villages across Africa and involved investments that amounted to doubling the size of these villages’ economies (Clemens and Demombynes, 2010, 31). These high costs reflected spending on a huge bundle of programs (e.g., bed-nets, electricity, irrigation, roads, schools, and piped water), with the goal of making “the investments in human capital and infrastructure required to achieve self-sustaining economic growth” (quoted in Clemens and Demombynes, 2010, 7). Unfortunately, when Clemens and Demombynes compare changes in the selected Millennium Villages relative to nearby communities, they find modest gains (especially relative to the program cost). Moreover, even if pilot projects like the Millennium Villages prove successful, there is continued skepticism that sub-Saharan states can effectively scale programs up from the local to the national level and thereby make efficient use of massive aid inflows. Mistry (2005) puts it simply: “the absorptive capacity does not exist to handle it.” The Millennium Project became the next impressive theory yielding mediocre returns. Debate continues as to whether all these big development theories were wrong or their implementation lacking. On the one hand, Easterly (2002, 30) argues, “it was the bad luck of poor countries that the first generation of development experts was influenced by two simultaneous historical events: the Great Depression and the industrialization of the Soviet Union through forced saving and investment.” This led, in his estimation, to misguided theories that stressed the accumulation of physical capital. On the other hand, others argue that these ideas weren’t wrong; rather, they were never seriously implemented.

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Bruton (1998, 918), for example, argues that import substitution industrialization “did not fail in Africa, rather it was never really tried.”

Foreign Aid as the Stopgap These different orthodoxies were supported by infusions of foreign aid: from 1960 to 2013, 3.5 trillion USD was transferred from rich to poor countries (Qian, 2015, 2). This aid serves different purposes (humanitarian vs. non-humanitarian) and takes many forms (e.g., debt relief, food aid, grants, loans, technical expertise). Qian (quoted in 2015, 14) offers Sierra Leone as an example which, in 2011, “received US$181 million in cash grants, US$48 million in loans, US$82 million in cash and inkind transfers to support specific projects, US$35 million in food and other commodities, US$48 million in people and expertise, and US$10 million invested on its behalf in GPGs [global public goods], development education and NGOs; US$3 million was sent within donor countries on administrative costs, student costs and similar items.” There has been a heated debate in economics about whether this foreign aid promotes growth and reduces poverty. The two sides are often represented by Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly, whom we introduced above. Sachs (2006) warns that reducing aid “amounts to a death sentence for 6 million Africans a year.” And yet, Easterly (2006) observes that, despite hundreds of billions in aid, “the typical African country is no richer than 40 years ago.” This debate is not entirely surprising: aid both takes many forms and has, following different development fads, been put to diverse purposes — sometimes supporting state-led investment, sometimes pushing privatization. Aid has not only been guided by different economic ideas, but has also been used to serve political, rather than economic, goals. Here the Cold War looms large. Western donors were reluctant to pressure “pro-West” African

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governments to implement the economic or political reforms that were a supposed precondition for continued aid. Dunning (2004), for example, finds no evidence that aid bolstered democratization during the Cold War, only after.9 Similarly, Vreeland and Dreher (2014) find that aid was channeled to states holding rotating seats on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and, thus, were temporarily able to influence international affairs.10 Moreover, in years when the UNSC took votes that mattered to the US, bilateral aid to those countries with Security Council seats went up. This work aligns with a parallel study by Stone (2004), who reports that countries of greater strategic value to the United States were better able to escape IMF punishment after squandering loans. Foreign aid or loans were used to buy allies rather than help the poor. The eminent Africanist Claude Ake (2001, 63-64) argues that Western powers “ignored human rights violations and sought clients wherever they could [leaving a] legacy of indifference.” The domestic politics of donor states can also pervert the motives and effects of aid. Nunn and Qian (2014) find that in periods of wheat abundance, the US raises levels of food aid to Africa. One effect of this aid is to create a contest for control over that food among rival militias in conflict zones. Where low-level conflicts were taking place, more food aid led to longer conflicts. Examples abound. In Somalia, the Islamist rebel movement alShabaab demanded that the local offices of the World Food Programme pay them a security fee of 20,000 USD every six months. In 2008, MSF Holland, an international aid organization working in Chad and Darfur, reported that militias targeted and stole the vehicles transporting food aid. In the Hutu refugee camps near Goma (in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) post-1994, militias taxed the food aid of civilians to support their military exploits.

9 Moss, Pettersson, and van de Walle (2006) make a more timeless argument about the effects of aid on political accountability, noting that large unearned income flows can reduce leaders’ reliance on domestic taxation and, thus, their responsiveness to citizens’ concerns. 10

This diversion of aid is only apparent after Western donors joined the African Development Bank in 1982.

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It is difficult to pinpoint why foreign aid has not led to greater economic growth over the past four decades — was it guided by a flawed economic orthodoxy, was it diverted by elites in recipient states, was it channeled to Cold War clients, or was it undermining political accountability and peace?

3

Conclusion

In the decade when most African countries received independence, the per capita incomes of Kenya and Thailand hardly differed. Yet, while Thailand and other “Asian Tigers” saw rapid growth, African states largely stagnated. This divergence can be traced in part to policy choices made in the first decade of independence. As Collier and Gunning (1999, 16-17) observe, “the arrival of slow economic growth in the 1970s coincides with a phase in which African economic policy became both statist and biased against exports.” African leaders did not intend to derail economic performance; they hoped to promote industrialization, equality, and their own status and wealth. Yet, in addition to these (mostly noble) objectives, these rulers faced several daunting constraints. First, they inherited weak states: borders remained porous, newly promoted bureaucrats had little training or experience, and rulers worried about being toppled by protests in major cities. These features — several of them the result of extractive and poorly administered colonial states — complicated policy implementation and also forced leaders to kowtow to the demands of city dwellers. Moreover, many African leaders subscribed to now defunct economic doctrines. Given the association between capitalism and colonialism, Tanzania’s Nyerere and others gravitated toward socialist ideas, which recommended that the state assume a large role in financing and managing domestic industries. Facing these constraints (figure 12.3), we should be

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Constraints • Weak States (WS) • Low Domestic Savings (LDS) • National and International Economic Doctrines (ED) Leader’s Objectives • Industrialization (I) • Equality (E)

Policy Choice • Urban Bias (WS à UB) • Statist Industrial Policy (ED, I à SIP) • Reliance on Foreign Aid (LDS, R à RFA) • “Africanization” of Civil Service (WS, R à ACS)

Economic Development • Economic Stagnation (UB, SIP, ACS) Democracy • Low Accountability (RFA)

• Rents (R)

less surprised by leaders’ economic policy agendas. To pacify the urban masses, leaders depressed food prices of imported grains by setting artificially high exchange rates for their currencies. This helped incumbents keep hold of office, but it discouraged investments in agricultural productivity and raised the returns to smuggling across states’ porous borders. Currency manipulation drove down the costs of imported goods for urban elites, but it also undermined the competitiveness of prospective exporters, whose wares cost more on global markets. Here we see the importance of patronage for core constituencies that can threaten incumbents. To launch and promote new industries, socialist governments stepped in to close the financing gap. Nkrumah used government money to start timber, shipping, and electricity companies in Ghana (among other failed ventures). While public sector payrolls expanded, these state enterprises often failed, as poorly trained civil servants struggled to make (near impossible) planning decisions to keep afloat businesses for which there was little domestic demand. In Tanzania, motivated by ideals of African socialism, Nyerere ignored practical realities as he coerced peasants into ujamaa villages, with disastrous consequences for agricultural production. Unfortunately, international financial institutions and

Figure 12.3 Conceptual Framework: Economic Policy

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their resident economists abetted this economic mismanagement. Prevailing economic ideas suggested that large infusions of aid would enable leaders to initiate new industries, invest in much-needed physical capital, and spur industrialization. Yet, rather than enabling investment and generating economic growth, foreign aid incentivized leaders to pad their political budgets. New theories emerged in what became the “Washington Consensus,” with free-market principles replacing inefficient government-subsidized parastatals. But structural adjustment was not easily accomplished; the Great Powers, it turns out, were also interested in maintaining loyal leaders in Africa and their Cold War alliances rather than reducing poverty. Flush with foreign aid, leaders could avoid collecting taxes and thus quell demands for representation and accountability. By the late 1980s, few believed that the economic returns to independence were as promising as originally envisioned. Since then, many African countries have turned a corner, heralding renewed hopes of “Africa’s rising.” Those more recent and more positive developments will be our subject in chapter 14.

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Part IV. Toward a New Era?

The forces of geography and history that have weighed on the shoulders of Africa’s charismatic founders and their successors for a generation are not excuses for policy failure. Politics and vision can and should see these forces not as shackles on historical chains, but as constraints that can be overcome. As economic historians are fond of highlighting, there are “reversals of fortune.” And we are beginning to see this today in contemporary Africa. Starting in the early 1990s, a new generation of leaders working within a new international environment began to make progress on each of the three outcomes that this book has traced — security, growth, and democracy. While progress has not been without setbacks, the chapters in part IV allow for cautious optimism. Here in part IV, we examine the positive, if halting, progress on democracy (chapter 13), economic stabilization (chapter 14), and the rebuilding of war-torn states (chapter 15). These new trends are not universal, as there is a divergence among African states in righting the ship of state. Future research needs to teach us the conditions leading some countries to overcome the constraints that have fostered Africa’s lag. As well, we need to learn why some countries remain delimited by their geographical and historical constraints. Although Radelet (2010) has made an interesting first step in this regard, those

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looking for a causal theory explaining success will be disappointed. But here we highlight, with examples of several impressive successes, that the deleterious factors highlighted in parts II and III are not deterministic. Indeed, a new generation of Africans in a number of states, seeking to free themselves of the shackles of autocracy, poverty, and warfare, has started to loosen these structural and historical constraints. Informed by past failures and new evidence, we argue, foreign and domestic policy should enable these efforts and not allow “big men” — that is, those remaining personalist rulers — to overshadow those mobilizing for the secure and healthy future that citizens throughout the world deserve.

13. Democratization and the “Third Wave”

T H E E A R LY 1990 S H E R A L D E D A N E W E R A for many African countries — pressures both internal and external mounted for the end of personalist rule and a return to democracy. This political liberalization, to borrow Samuel Huntington’s metaphor, represented a possible extension of the “third wave” of democratization across the globe — a trend propelled by the world historic transformation of the former Soviet Union (Huntington, 1991; Diamond, 1997; Schraeder, 1995). According to Huntington, the first wave commenced in the early nineteenth century with the extension of the franchise to most white males in the United States (Jacksonian Democracy) and ended with Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy. At its peak, this period included twenty-nine democratic countries. There was an ebb during the world wars, but the Allied victory in World War II touched off a second wave: up until 1962, the number of democracies increased to thirty-six countries. The defeated and occupied aggressor states of Germany and Japan were compelled to accept democratic constitutions; meanwhile, several countries that achieved independence, such as India and Israel, joined the list of world democracies. Beginning in the 1970s a third wave included Portugal, Spain, and several Latin American and East Asian countries. The wave continued with the collapse of the Soviet Union and

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democratization in the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, but it progressed more haltingly in several of the former Soviet Republics. Africa began to ride that third wave in its late stages. Reacting to a half-century of regimes that were either autocratic or anocratic (halfway houses between democracy and autocracy), in the early 1990s several African countries sponsored national conferences dedicated to the democratization of the continent. These efforts engendered hope that citizens of African countries would enjoy greater freedoms and rights. The progress, as we show here, has been halting, but the trend promising: figure 13.1 shows that the Polity score for all but four sub-Saharan African countries increased between 1980 and 2010. Backsliding

Liberalizing

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In this chapter, we first highlight one of the miracles of the late twentieth century, namely the overturning of the apartheid state in South Africa and its transformation without mass violence into a free, multicultural country. We then look at the processes that brought hopes for multiparty elections, first in former French and then in

Figure 13.1 Political Liberalization in Africa, 1980-2010

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“THIRD

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former British colonies. After analyzing the political forces pushing for democracy in these states, we examine the barriers that limit further reform. In conclusion, we survey contemporary African regimes, evaluating their progress toward consolidated democracy. The news is not always encouraging, but small, positive steps need to be appreciated.

1

South Africa’s Entry as an Independent African State

As the right panel of figure 13.1 indicates, several sub-Saharan African countries transitioned to democracy (if not always permanently) in the early 1990s. Yet, the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela (figure 13.2) in South Africa in 1994 was an iconic and worldhistoric political transformation that inspired reformers in and beyond sub-Saharan Africa. Following Britain’s victory over Dutch settlers in the Second Boer War, in 1909 the territory constituting today’s South Africa became a dominion of the British Empire. With the Status of the Union Act in 1934, it became a sovereign independent state ruled by the 20 percent of citizens with European cultural roots. In 1948 the National Party (NP) legally instituted apartheid, its strategy of minority rule, which denied blacks basic political rights and segregated public services. apartheid involved the creation of so-called Bantustans (or homelands) where designated ethnic groups were given nominally independent mini-states. The government herded the large African workforce living outside of these Bantustans into townships on the borders of cities, regarding these individuals as temporary workers. The rest of the world refused to recognize the Bantustans as independent entities. However, as British prime minister Harold Macmillan foresaw in 1960, the apartheid leaders would eventually

Figure 13.2 Nelson Mandela

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fall to the “winds of change.” In 1989, South African president P. W. Botha initiated private conversations with Nelson Mandela, who had been incarcerated since 1962. Botha’s successor, F. W. De Klerk, freed Mandela and recognized the African National Congress (ANC), which had been leading a guerrilla war against the apartheid state. Three years of largely bilateral negotiations between Mandela’s ANC and the NP preceded the first general election in 1994. The commitment by the ANC to minority rights (for the whites and their property) was a key to success. In the first full representative election, Mandela’s ANC secured an impressive victory over the NP, over Inkatha (a party whose core constituents were Zulus from KwaZulu/Natal) and over the Democratic Party (made up of old-line, mostly English-speaking liberals who had long opposed apartheid). Most extraordinarily, the transition to majority rule was without great incident. As of this writing, the ANC has not yet lost a national election, and the country faces persistent corruption, poverty, and crime. The Institute for Economics and Peace estimates that the cost of violence in 2016 exceeded 20 percent of GDP.1 Popular discontent with policy failure was expressed at the polls in August 2016 when the ANC lost control over several municipalities to the Democratic Alliance, the successor of the Democratic Party. Despite these challenges, the ANC’s role in founding a democratic South Africa is a historic achievement. Its current problems have forced it to confront a viable political opposition. And this can only strengthen South Africa’s democratic credentials. Indeed, in 2018, in a bold move to reform itself, the ANC deposed president Jacob Zuma, and Parliament subsequently replaced him with another anti-apartheid hero, Cyril Ramaphosa. In this alternation of power, democratic procedures were adhered to.

1

Two books by Jonny Steinberg (2002, 2015), the South African journalist, scholar, and longtime champion of democratic rule, offer distressing portraits of this racial and xenophobic violence.

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The National Conferences in Francophone Africa

South Africa’s democratization was part of a broader political renaissance. In the early 1990s, sixteen African countries experienced unprecedented protest movements (Bratton and van de Walle, 1992). Although largely urban and without a peasant base or political party, these protests were significant, ushering in reforms in over twenty countries and preceding multiparty elections in five. In addition to this domestic mobilization, international actors also began pushing for political liberalization. A 1990 report from the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the “African Charter for Popular Participation in Development,” demanded political reform as a condition for future financial support. Popular and external calls for the removal of defunct dictators reverberated and led to the creation of national conferences in Francophone Africa. They began in Benin.2 President Mathieu Kérékou could not mollify civil society leaders and faced calls for a general strike. As a political business manager (to recall deWaal’s [2015] characterization of leaders from chapter 3), Kérékou’s political budget was running dangerously low. French president François Mitterrand withheld life support unless Kérékou promised political and economic liberalization. These preconditions departed sharply from France’s past policy and the position of its prime minister Jacques Chirac.3 Kérékou had little choice but to convene a ten-day national conference in February 1990 that included members of his ruling People’s Revolutionary Party, trade unionists, civil servants, students, religious leaders, military officers, farmers, and members of the Beninois diaspora.4 The results of the national conference were startling: delegates declared themselves sovereign, suspended the constitution, sidelined the presi-

2

This account is drawn from Robinson (1994). For more detailed analysis, see Eboussi Boulaga (1993) or, for a rich blow-by-blow account of democracy’s third wave in both Francophone and Anglophone Africa, see Nugent (2004, ch. 9). 3

The most revealing work on French complicity with African dictators are the memoirs of Jacques Foccart (2001), known as the “man in the shadows.” 4

This gathering picked up on themes of revolutionary liberty that were the focus of a 1989 international conference in Benin on “Africa and the French Revolution” organized by the PanAfrican Social Prospects Centre. We can safely assume that all elites in the former French colonies had studied the events of 1789 in France and felt themselves to be retracing those steps in the 1990s.

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dent, and set the stage for multiparty elections. In those elections, Nicéphore Soglo, a technocrat from the World Bank, defeated Kérékou. Yet, Soglo was unable to extricate Benin from its economic woes. Taking advantage of misery and political missteps by the neophyte politician, Kérékou ran again in 1996 and returned to the presidential palace. Rewinding again to 1990, news of Benin’s national conference set off a cascade in Francophone Africa. Within a year, similar conferences were organized in Gabon, Congo, Mali, Togo, Niger, and Zaire, with civil society groups in other Francophone African states demanding their own national conferences. The success of these uprisings was varied. Senegal has been a more promising success. Its charismatic founder, Léopold Senghor, oversaw an open if mildly autocratic regime, permitting three approved parties to contest elections. His chosen successor, Abdou Diouf, maintained Senghor’s autocracy. Although Diouf permitted fourteen fragmented parties, he still won the presidential election in 1983. In 1988, he arrested his principal opponent, forbade coalitions of opposition parties, and openly engaged in electoral fraud. His victory in that election was unsurprisingly marred by violence. He assumed dictatorial powers and won reelection in 1993. But in 2000, without having convened a national conference, Diouf lost and ceded power to Abdoulaye Wade (representing the opposition Parti Démocratique Sénégalais) after the second round of voting. This willingness to step down was crucial for Senegal’s democratization. But there was more road to travel. Wade peacefully assumed power. However, in his attempt to win a second term in 2007, he arrested his opponent. In 2012 he got the Constitutional Council to rule in his favor for a third term (though this was of dubious legality). But he accepted defeat in a second-round vote to Macky Sall. Democracy

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remains precarious in Senegal, but two electoral turnovers are quite encouraging for the future. But the failures were more general. Consider Niger. After three students were killed and ninety-one injured by government security forces responding to a demonstration in 1990, the military government of General Ali Saïbou faced a rebellion just ten days before Benin’s conference. The military expanded its murderous repression in the following weeks. Saïbou moved to bring reform in the face of ensuing protests but insisted on one-party (that is, his party’s) rule. Unfortunately for Saïbou, his political budget had emptied due to a near collapse in world uranium prices, and French president Mitterrand refused to offer support without political reforms. Saïbou had no choice but to call for a national conference and resign himself to multiparty democracy. Eighteen political parties quickly applied for recognition, and intense politicking followed as to who would be eligible. This process was temporarily derailed when the roof of the conference hall collapsed, but Niger’s national conference reopened in July 1991. At that point, it designated Saïbou as ceremonial head of state and declared itself the country’s sovereign. In October 1991, an interim (and technocratic) prime minister was chosen, Cheiffou Amadou, the West African director of the International Air Transport Organization. Following Benin’s model, the national conference created the High Council of the Republic as a provisional legislature. In 1993 multiparty elections were first conducted. Saïbou’s party won the most seats, but a coalition of opposition parties led by Mahamane Ousmane captured the parliamentary majority, and Ousmane assumed the presidency. This democratic opening was short-lived, as votes of no confidence, a presidential assassination, a military coup, and a return to power for Saïbou’s party dimmed hopes for a consolidated democracy in Niger. Dictators held on elsewhere as well. President Omar

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Bongo in Gabon retained strict control over Gabon’s national conference and was able to preserve his power in the subsequent election. Similarly, president Gnassingbé Eyadéma rejected the verdict of Togo’s national conference and never relinquished power in Togo, ruling until his death in 2005. In other cases, there was backsliding. Mali’s military dictator since 1968, Moussa Traoré, stepped down in the face of street protests in 1990. The national conference that followed paved the way for democratic elections, which saw different parties alternate in and out of government — a hallmark of a functioning democracy. Alas, in the wake of a regional rebellion of the Tuaregs in the country’s north, a military coup undermined the fragile democracy. Despite these many setbacks, Benin set a new democratic standard for much of Africa, and the ideals of the national conferences are reflected in the ongoing efforts of Africans seeking greater freedoms.

3

Democratization in Anglophone Africa

In former British colonies, the national conferences taking place in Francophone Africa were largely ignored. Nonetheless, the economic strains created by structural adjustment programs (e.g., the reform of trade policies that raised prices for imported food) increased popular discontent, especially among urban residents. Here we focus first on the popular movements for democratic change — comparable to the national conferences in Francophone countries — and then on democracies that emerged from divisions among elites. Popular protests for democratic change in Anglophone Africa began in the states of the former Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, today’s Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. With desperate economic conditions due to the fall in the price of copper, Zambia’s founding father, Kenneth Kaunda, faced some of the earliest pres-

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sures. The market for copper, Zambia’s primary export, began softening, spurring a decline in foreign exchange, a devaluation of the currency, and, finally, increased consumer prices in urban areas. These conditions prompted labor strife, food riots, and popular protests. A new party formed, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), and pressed for open elections. Kaunda could not resist popular support for these reforms. In the 1991 election, his challenger, Frederick Chiluba, got more than three-fourths of the vote. Zambia’s first political turnover was peaceful. But by 2001, Chiluba also caved in to popular protests opposing his dictatorial tendencies and demanding that he relinquish power. His successor in the MMD, Levy Mwanawasa, barely won a subsequent election that was plagued by allegations of electoral misconduct. Zambia’s democratic future remains fragile: despite several peaceful transitions after Mwanawasa, the most recent presidential election in 2015 (again, amid depressed copper prices) was marred by violence and accusations of fraud by the losing party. A similar story can be told about neighboring Malawi’s independence leader, Hastings Banda. With the end of the Cold War, unconditional aid from Western donors dried up. Calls for reforms came from marching students and the British foreign office. Shortly thereafter, Banda fell, paving the way for multiparty elections. There have been regular elections since then. In 2014, opposition candidate Peter Mutharika of the Democratic Progressive Party defeated incumbent president Joyce Banda with but 36.4 percent of the reported vote. Due to a malfunction in the voting machines, the results were challenged in Malawi’s High Court, with Banda declaring the results “fraudulent.” This transition is hopeful, but Malawi remains with an as yet unconsolidated democracy, with a Polity score of 6, which can be interpreted as a regime just above the threshold for anocracy.

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Finally, consider the sad regress in Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe had led an armed nationalist struggle against the perpetrators of a white-ruled Rhodesia whose leaders had issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 breaking from British colonial rule. The military stalemate was eventually resolved in 1979 with British and American intervention that permitted a government led by black Africans, who constituted 95 percent of the population. Mugabe became a nationalist hero as father of the newly independent Zimbabwe in 1980. Yet he ignored the third wave of democratization. His Shona-centric ZANU-PF established political (and military) dominance over Joshua Nkomo’s Ndebele-centric PF-ZAPU, which signed the 1987 Unity Accord with Mugabe largely to save its constituents from Mugabe’s reign of terror. In 1990, when Mugabe’s rule wavered, he attempted to legislate a one-party state. Although some rump groups from his ZANU-PF began to split off and form electoral alliances, Mugabe’s political budget remained ample. Through the expropriation of white farmlands, he generated resources that allowed him to retain control, despite strong challenges from Morgan Tsvangirai in 2002 and in the first round of the 2008 election.5 Transitions to multiparty democracy also took place “top-down” in Anglophone Africa without being spurred by popular anger in Kenya, in Tanzania, and in Ghana. Ghana’s top-down transition is especially noteworthy in its continued success. Its reforms protected political losers from incarceration, and as a consequence incumbents did not need to use repression to forestall political turnover. Given Ghana’s post-independence history, this was a significant advance. Recall how Ghanaians were exhilarated by the vision and charisma of their founding father, Kwame Nkrumah. However, Nkrumah’s dictatorial control and economic mismanagement resulted in a string of coups, interrupted by short-lived experiments with mul-

5

Tsvangirai did not contest the second round of the 2008 presidential election, alleging widespread intimidation by Mugabe’s government that undermined the legitimacy of any results.

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tiparty democracy (as discussed in chapter 3). The two coups (1979, 1981) of flight lieutenant Jerry Rawlings brought some stability to the country, but also a deep sense of resignation. Upon seizing power in 1981, Rawlings promised to return control to the people: “We are asking for nothing more than the power to organize this country in such a way that nothing will be done from the Castle without the consent and authority of the people. In other words, the people, the farmers, the police, the soldiers, the workers you — the guardians — rich or poor, should be part of the decision-making process of this country” (quoted in Adedeji, 2001). To this end, he set up a variety of commissions (overseen by his junta in the Provisional National Defense Council, PNDC) with the stated objective of better preparing his country for democracy. The notion of “party” was a rather dirty word in the PNDC, given the rampant corruption of past political parties. Instead, private clubs and friendship societies formed in anticipation of elections, as proto-political parties. It took nearly a decade before local elections were conducted (1988-89) and still longer before multiparty general elections were held under strict control by the PNDC. When Rawlings finally faced multiparty competition in 1992, and again in 1996, he won in landslides. Yet, after reaching his two-term limit, Rawlings bowed out. His chosen successor was defeated by J. A. Kufuor in Ghana’s first peaceful alternation of power. After eight years in power, Kufuor’s party, represented by Nana Akufo-Addo, was defeated by John Mills, of Rawlings’s National Democratic Congress, in a second peaceful democratic turnover. By most criteria, Ghana is now a consolidated democracy, with a Polity score of 8, with only South Africa (with a score of 9) having a higher score among sub-Saharan countries in the 2014 accounting.

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Undemocratic Undercurrents

Africa’s democratic wave has been both promising and troubling. In this section we examine several forces that have undermined democratic consolidation and review a recent explanation of why competitive elections have been so rare.

Disputed Electoral Results Challengers often compete on an uneven playing field in new multiparty democracies; the delegitimization of opposition is an oft-used tactic. In Côte d’Ivoire in the 1995 election, president Henri Konan Bédié got his principal opponent barred on unsubstantiated claims that he was not an Ivorian citizen. Similarly, Frederick Chiluba, president of Zambia, pulled the same tactic against his opponent in the 1996 election, even though the opponent was his presidential predecessor. Electoral fraud is commonly claimed by losers in contested elections. In response, the Carter Center and other international and domestic NGOs organize missions to monitor elections with the hope of deterring illegal activity and, thus, increasing fairness.6 As is apparent in figure 13.3, inter-

Cumulative Number of Executive Elections with International Monitors

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NGOs, or non-governmental organizations, make up part of civil society and often try to provide public goods, such as election monitoring or peacekeeping, which we discuss in chapter 15.

Figure 13.3 The Increased Prevalence of Election Monitoring

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national monitoring has become a more common feature of executive elections since the early 1990s. Recent scholarship suggests that this outlay of resources for election observation does deter fraud. Experimental research in Afghanistan (Callen and Long, 2014), Armenia (Hyde, 2007), Ghana (Ichino and Schündeln, 2012; Asunka et al., 2017), and Russia (Enikolopov et al., 2013) suggests that monitoring (or the threat of monitoring) at specific polling locations reduces indicators of fraud, such as the support for the incumbent party.7 In Ghana, to take a recent example, the presence of domestic election observers more than halved the likelihood of voter intimidation in the 2012 presidential election, according to Asunka et al. (2017). While these results are promising, several of these studies also suggest that election monitors displace, rather than reduce, illegal activity. More simply, political goons skip the sites where monitors are present, but redouble their efforts in the unmonitored polling stations. As a result, the net effect of election monitoring is attenuated. Also in Ghana, while Ichino and Schündeln (2012) find that domestic observers reduce fraudulent voter registrations, they also show that questionable registrations increase in electoral areas just down the road (within five kilometers). Perpetrators of fraud are savvy and respond in ways that counteract the laudable efforts of international and domestic efforts to increase electoral integrity.

Recurrent Backsliding: A Case Study of Nigeria As several of the cases above indicated, democratization is a fitful process. Electoral victors (as with Chiluba in Zambia) have often used government to enrich themselves and their party cadres. Even Rawlings, whose initial motivation was to curtail rent-seeking in Ghana, oversaw an increasingly corrupt party following his reelection in 1996. While Rawlings did not counter this

7

Hyde (2010), in contrast, finds that monitoring actually increased the incumbent’s vote share in the second round of the 2004 presidential election in Indonesia.

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trend by suspending the constitution a third time, elsewhere militaries have seized control. In chapter 3, we documented a cycle of increased corruption, coups, and short-lived returns to electoral competition. Nigeria, which (as of 2018) has spent just over half of its post-independence years under military rule, has been the paradigmatic case of this cycling. We recount the rapid succession of civilian and military governments that have occupied presidential power in Nigeria since 1960. This exercise reveals that the country’s political development is characterized by churn and uncertainty; one struggles to find a critical juncture or sustained trend toward democracy. • The first civilian government in 1960 was an alliance of the NPC (the party of the Northern region) and the NCNC (the party of the Eastern Region). Balewa of the NPC became prime minister, and Nnamdi Azikiwe became the president, a ceremonial post in the Westminster Constitution that was inherited from the British. • In 1966, this gave way to a thirteen-year period of military rule, from General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi (January 1966), General Yakubu Gowon (July 1966), Murtala Mohammed (1975), and Olesegun Obasanjo (1976). Those thirteen years included two assassinations (of Ironsi and Murtala), two intramilitary coups (overthrowing Ironsi and Gowon), and a three-year civil war (1967-70) in which the military government of the Eastern Region sought independence as the state of Biafra. • Obasanjo, taking power after Murtala’s assassination, promised a return to civilian rule. A new constitution was drafted, and elections in 1979 brought Shehu Shagari a Northerner from the NPC voter base, to power. Civilian rule lasted a mere four years.

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• Shortly after Shagari’s reelection, the military intervened, first with a coup by Muhammadu Buhari (1983) and then another by a member of Buhari’s staff, Ibrahim Babangida (1985). • President Babangida’s rationale was the importance of organizing a democratic election, but one in which he dictated the rules. He required, for example, that the National Election Commission create, and the federal government fund, two parties that differed only on a left-right dimension. The election was held in 1993. The winner, Chief Moshood Abiola, a Yoruba from the South, was never allowed to assume power; the socalled Kaduna Mafia, a powerful group of Northerners, opposed a Southerner (even if a Muslim) taking office. • Ernest Shonekan (who, like Abiola, was from the Yoruba region of the southwest) was appointed as interim leader, but another Northern officer and then minister of defense, Sani Abacha, quickly overthrew the interim government. Abacha ruled with a deadly hand until his own death in office in 1998. Among his victims was Ken Saro-Wiwa, a writer of wildly popular TV soap operas and a leader among his native Ogoni who sought compensation for oil extraction and pollution in the region. • Abacha was succeeded by General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who organized multiparty elections for 1999. In those elections, Olesegun Obasanjo (a Westerner and former military leader accused of treason by Abacha) became president. This began seventeen years of democratic rule, with an implicit agreement that the presidency would rotate from north to south. MajorGeneral Shehu Yar-Adua (a Northerner) succeeded Obasanjo in 2007; Goodluck Jonathan (a Southerner) won in 2010; and Muhammadu Buhari (a Northerner) returned to the presidency with his election in 2015.

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Whether Buhari’s presidency represents an alteration of power and hopeful sign for democracy or a return to power of a military aristocracy remains, as of this writing, an open question. His announcement of his reelection intentions in 2018 set off rioting throughout the country, suggesting that Nigeria’s democracy remains fragile.

Nigeria’s road to democracy has been tortuous, and few feel certain that the cycling between military and civilian control has conclusively ended.

Constitutional Manipulations to Maintain Presidential Power To assure democratic turnover, many multiparty constitutions set term limits for executives. However, in several African countries, incumbents have refused to honor these constraints. When possible they have used their political budgets to buy support for amendments that permit additional terms. Examples of this self-serving constitutional engineering include: Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos, Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré, Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza, Cameroon’s Paul Biya, Chad’s Idress Déby, Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Gabon’s Omar Bongo, Guinea’s Lansana Conté, Namibia’s Sam Nujoma, Togo’s Gnassingbé Eyadéma, Republic of Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. In September 2016, violent riots broke out in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) when president Joseph Kabila indicated that he would ignore his constitutional obligation to step down from power. Omondi (2015) reports that thirty-three of the forty-eight new constitutions enacted in Africa in the 1990s provided for presidential term limits. That represents a huge increase, up from six countries prior to the third wave. Yet, as of September

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2015, Omondi calculated that “nearly 30 countries have contemplated the removal of term limits since 1998.” To take just one example, consider Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. He was a national hero when his National Resistance Movement (NRM) seized power in January 1986, bringing a sense of security to the Ugandan population for the first time in two decades. In early village council elections, he permitted political parties to form, but not to contest. A presidential election was held in 1996, in which Museveni received nearly three-quarters of the votes. He ran for a second term in 2001, and this time won with nearly 70 percent of the votes against his former insurgent ally and physician in the bush, Kizza Besigye. According to the constitution that Museveni’s movement sponsored, this should have been Museveni’s final term. However, as the date for the next election approached, Museveni pressed for a third term and succeeded in constitutional change permitting him to run. Amid international opprobrium and demonstrations at home, Museveni ran again, this time charging Besigye with treason and rape. Again Museveni was victorious, and now more or less president for life. In his fifth electoral contest in 2016, he again defeated Besigye, who was jailed for contesting the results (Kron, 2016). Museveni’s rule since that victory has become ever more autocratic. His regime charged the popular singer Bobi Wine with treason (for being irreverent to power) and subjected him to ghastly torture. Why wouldn’t Museveni step down and retire with the legacy of a true democrat? An interview (conducted by one of this book’s authors) with officials in his inner circle before the 2005 vote amending the constitution contains a clue. These officials insisted that if Museveni stepped down, the country would descend into the chaos that characterized Idi Amin’s and Milton Obote’s tenures. What these advisers did not openly acknowledge is that Musev-

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eni’s retirement would also leave them jobless. Members of his inner circle had a strong incentive to remind their boss of his indispensability and, thus, to encourage Museveni’s continued reign. In Africa, party officials out of office have few opportunities to secure the livelihood that they become accustomed to. And thus, a less nefarious explanation for constitutional reengineering is that leaders come to see themselves through the eyes of their self-serving sycophants as essential to stability. Ironically, Museveni’s latest term extension in 2016 may actually suggest greater respect for the rule of law. Posner and Young (2018) observe that in the first decades of independence, it was common for leaders to defy constitutional limits (becoming typically “presidents for life”) without political maneuvering. Yet, after 1990 absolutist rule gave way to a more “rule-bound, institutionalized political order” (Posner and Young, 2018, 261). To be sure, Museveni used bribery and coercion to secure legislators’ support for an additional term. But this reflects his need to legitimize his continued rule by respecting the letter (if not the spirit) of the law. Beyond Uganda, Posner and Young point out that after 1990 over half (twenty of thirty-six) of the African heads of state facing two-term limits voluntarily retired. Of the sixteen that attempted to defy the two-term limit, only eleven succeeded, and nearly all of them sought to change the rule rather than defy tout court. In the two cases in which presidents extended their rule without altering the constitutions (Burkina Faso and Niger), the military intervened to oppose these attempts. There is thus a trend compelling long-serving leaders to step down. In 2016, neighboring Senegal threatened a military invasion to induce Yahya Jammeh in The Gambia to relinquish office. President Joseph Kabila in the Democratic Republic of the Congo kept deferring elections until international financial pressure mounted, compelling him

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to announce his retirement. Pierre Nkurunziza in Burundi pushed through a constitution that would have allowed him to rule through 2034, but in the face of imminent civil war, announced his retirement for 2020. Without any external pressure, Africa’s first elected female president and Nobel Peace laureate, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf stepped down as president of Liberia after her two-term limit in January 2018. Hopefully, this move will reinforce respect for constitutional limits on executive power.

Fragmented Oppositions One common standard for democracy is some degree of uncertainty about the incumbent (party) winning the next election — the core criterion of Przeworski (1991). If a single party wins every election, we cannot know if its leaders would step down if they ever lost.8 One ongoing challenge to democratic consolidation is that many countries in sub-Saharan Africa lack a viable opposition party. Parties, as we saw in Nigeria, are sometimes organized around ethnicity. In diverse countries, this can lead to a large number of small parties that must coordinate to oust an incumbent. Arriola (2012) opens his book on multiethnic coalitions with a quote from Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré after his victory in the 2005 presidential election: “You cannot fight fairly against a candidate who is in power if you are divided, especially in Africa” (quoted in Arriola, 2012, 1). Compaoré had just won 80 percent of the vote against a field comprising a dozen opposition candidates. Examples of an opposition failing to coordinate abound (Arriola, 2012). After winning three elections against fragmented oppositions, president Omar Bongo of Gabon died in 2009. Citizens were ready for a change, and his chosen successor and son, Ali Bondo Ondimba, had only weak support. Yet, Ondimba won with just 42

8

This is not a universally accepted criterion, as some would argue that Botswana is a democracy despite the Botswana Democratic Party’s uninterrupted electoral success.

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percent of the vote, with his two (ethnically different) opponents splitting the remaining votes. In Zambia, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy dominated every election from 1991 to 2011. Both Levy Mwanawasa and his chosen successor retained control in 2006 and 2008, with around 40 percent of the vote. Similarly in Kenya, Daniel arap Moi (a Kalenjin) continued the Kenya African National Union’s unbroken winning streak by securing just 36 percent of the vote in 1992. Moi’s success was due to his opponents’ — candidates from the country’s two largest ethnic groups, the Kikuyu and Luo — failure to coordinate. Despite the national conferences and the move to multiparty democracy, what Zolberg (1966) characterized as the “one party state” remains at least a partial reality in Africa. Paradoxically, in these first-pastthe-post elections (i.e., contests in which the largest vote share wins), a proliferation of candidates and parties can actually shield incumbents from serious competition. Consider figure 13.4, where we see that of thirty-one countries only four had opposition parties that won over 40 percent of the vote in recent elections: Ghana (2012), Kenya (2007), Guinea (2010), and Zimbabwe (2008). This problem has been apparent since the start of the multiparty regimes stimulated by the third wave. Figure 13.4 plots the trend in the vote share of the leading opposition party for all African elections between 1990 and 2012. We do not see improvement on this measure, which stays around 25 percent for the two decades post 1990, the first year of Africa’s democratic wave. What prevents consolidation of opposition parties in Africa? Let’s return to de Waal’s (2015) notion of a political business manager (PBM). To retain office, incumbent PBMs need to maintain an interethnic coalition, as very rarely can one ethnic group provide the votes needed to win the election. Building and maintaining this coalition requires ample funds. Fortunately for incumbents,

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they can draw on government revenues, including foreign aid and rents from natural resources, to buy the loyalty of coalition partners. But challengers face a financial problem: Arriola argues that challengers in Africa typically have neither the personal wealth nor the fundraising capacity to mount the funds needed to build winning, multiethnic coalitions.

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Even if they don’t have the cash on hand to cajole coalition partners, why don’t opposition candidates sim-

2012

Figure 13.4 Opposition Vote Share in African Elections

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ply promise these potential allies a share of state resources upon victory? Arriola argues that this is simply not a credible promise, as the opposition candidate has an incentive to renege once in office and cut out allies from other ethnic groups. There is of course some variation in the financial resources available to opposition candidates across Africa, and Arriola uses this to assess his theory. Arriola’s data set includes eighty-five contested elections between 1990 and 2005. Across these elections, he codes thirty-two multiethnic electoral coalitions (i.e., partnerships that preceded the election contest), which account for over half of all executive turnovers. He argues that such coalitions are more likely to form among challengers when there is an autonomous business elite that can bankroll this consolidated opposition. In short, when business operates free from state intervention, it can supply the capital challengers need to assemble coalitions and successfully defeat incumbents.9 In further support of his theory, Arriola observes that countries that accepted loans from the IMF were often required to relinquish state controls over banking and finance. In these settings, businesses enjoyed greater autonomy and, thus, could use their resources to support political challengers. Governments that escaped IMF conditionality were able to retain tighter controls on businesses and thereby curtail their political activities. Arriola describes two typical cases (or equilibria): one where business fears reprisals from incumbents, and political challengers fail to coordinate; the other where business does not fear state reprisal, and ethnically diverse coalitions successfully coordinate in presidential elections. Consider Kenya’s presidential election in 2002 as an example of the second and more promising equilibrium. President Moi faced a term limit but selected Uhuru Kenyatta, a Kikuyu and son of Kenya’s founding father, as

9

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition in Zimbabwe, had the funds from white farms and businesses to succeed, but President Mugabe responded by confiscating white-owned land and torturing political opponents. Financial resources are necessary for successful opposition, but clearly not sufficient.

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the ruling party’s next leader. A plethora of opposition candidates from the 1997 election — Mwai Kibaki (a Kikuyu, representing 22 percent of Kenya’s population), Michael Kijana Wamalwa (a Luhya, with about 14 percent of Kenya’s population), and Charity Ngilu (a Kamba, a group representing about 11 percent of Kenya’s population) — formed a powerful opposition coalition called the National Alliance for Change (later renamed the National Rainbow Coalition). Kibaki had secured funding from the Kenyan business sector, which allowed him to make up-front payments to Wamalwa and Ngilu and, thus, hold together a successful multiethnic coalition, garnering 29 percent of the vote. To be sure, several factors permitted Kibaki to hold together this coalition. For one, his party was not facing an incumbent, and Uhuru Kenyatta did not control the coercive resources that were in Moi’s hands. Second, Kibaki, though rich in campaign funds, was infirm, and his coalition partners may have been positioning themselves as potential successors should their president die in office. But Arriola’s analysis points strongly to Kibaki’s financial resources making him a credible opposition candidate and PBM (197-204).

5

Conclusion: An Updated Survey of Democratization

There have been twenty-eight “new democracies” in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990, taking place in twentyfour countries. Eight lasted at least a decade. Another eight of them (in seven countries) failed, by a coup or irregular election: in Gambia, Niger, Zambia, Congo, Guinea-Bissau (twice), Lesotho, and Central African Republic. Another way to look at the net outcome is to ask how many countries have a democracy score that political scientists regard as reasonably democratic. In the Polity data set, a score greater than 5 is one such standard. In 1990,

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there were only four countries in sub-Saharan Africa with a score in this range (Mauritius, Botswana, Namibia, and Gambia); by 2010, there were eighteen. All but Gambia from the 1990 list survived. The others are Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Senegal, Benin, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya, Burundi, Zambia, Malawi, South Africa, Lesotho (which has had a subsequent setback), and Comoros. Despite the churn we described in this chapter, the propagation rate since 1990 has outpaced the failure rate, indicating that the third wave has not fully receded. Unfortunately, several events since 2016 do not inspire great hope that the backsliding has stopped. Problems of constitutional re-engineering, of poor coordination among challengers, and of electoral corruption are regularly reported in the press. • Following a civil war that displaced a quarter of its population, the Central African Republic held its first election in February 2016. Faustin Archange Touadéra won the first round of voting but later lost in the runoff; Touadéra has publicly attributed his ultimate defeat to widespread fraud (Benn, 2016). • Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Denis Sassou Nguesso, a former paratrooper turned military dictator, won a third term of seven years in an election in March 2016, in which France, the US, and the European Union jointly criticized the election as unfair. • Meanwhile, in Niger also in March 2016, president Mahamadou Issoufou, a big European ally against terrorism and illegal migration, won a second term. He obtained 93 percent of the vote in an election boycotted by an opposition, whose candidate spent much of the campaign in jail. In this case, France, the EU, and the US refused any comment on that vote (Hinshaw and Tumanjong, 2016).

D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N A N D T H E

• In April 2016, opposition party members campaigning against the reelection of Yahya Jammeh, who has been president in Gambia for more than two decades, were killed while participating in a political demonstration (Ruble, 2016). • In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, president Joseph Kabila has used both institutional changes and (threats of) violence to retain power. Kabila faced a term limit in 2016 — a constitutional barrier that his sycophants have been lobbying to remove. He surely understood that he would face a popular challenger in Moise Katumbi, the ex-governor of the once-called Katanga Province and owner of a soccer club. Katumbi resigned his governorship in 2015 to explore a presidential run. Police harassment and a buildup of security forces around Katumbi’s mansion in Lubumbashi sent an ominous signal about the costs of contestation (Gettleman, 2016). Concurrently, President Kabila faced a challenge to his regime from the Bundu dia Kongo, a religious cult seeking to revive the precolonial Kongo Kingdom, with violence moving into the capital in February 2017. In response, Kabila kept postponing elections, citing a variety of excuses, including lack of funds to conduct a national poll (A. Ross and Nyemba, 2017). With international pressure growing, he finally relented in 2019. His favored successor was roundly defeated, but the prospects for a stable transition are uncertain. • In Zimbabwe, president Robert Mugabe was deposed by his own military despite recently promising to govern “until God say ‘come’ ” (Chin’ono and Onishi, 2016). Power passed to Emmerson Mnangagwa, who had been a member of Mugabe’s inner circle. Mnangagwa won reelection in 2018 in a disputed election marred by violence and the arrest of an opposition

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leader. This does not portend will for Zimbabwe’s democratic future. • Kenya’s Supreme Court annulled the August 2017 re-election of president Uhuru Kenyatta (son of charismatic founder Jomo), citing flawed polls that were “neither transparent nor verifiable.” A fresh election was run, but the opposition candidate Raila Odinga withdrew, calling upon his supporters to boycott the process. While Kenyatta was sworn in without the large-scale violence experienced in the aftermath of the 2007 elections, the democratic rules of the game remain in question. Approaching two decades after the democratization movement put Africa on a new course, the gains remain tentative. Democratization in many African countries is an anathema to the ambitions of many elected leaders. And there have been harsh critics of African democracies (despite their Polity scores) (Diamond, 1997). Claude Ake, former director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at Port Harcourt, Nigeria, characterized Africa’s apparent successes as the “democratization of disempowerment” (Ake, 1994). These political transitions, he argued, simply permit the rotation of ruling mafias that exploit rural citizens, who constitute a majority in many sub-Saharan states and remain disempowered despite new electoral rules (Schraeder, 1995, 1161). Indeed, the third wave has not brought democracy to all of Africa’s shores; nor has it washed away all autocratic tendencies. But the trends in democratization have been in the right direction. South Africa’s miracle set a new standard for Africa. Benin’s national conference provided a model for an active civil society. African civil societies since the late 1980s, encouraged by Benin’s example, have been actively pursuing constitutional change to prevent presidents from becoming lifelong dictators.

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Presidents seeking to overturn constitutional constraints on reelection have felt compelled to rely on votes of democratically elected legislators to extend their rule. Foreign powers (save for China) and international organizations supporting African development have demanded multiparty democracy and free and fair elections. Financial deregulation has permitted fragmented oppositions to consolidate and challenge incumbents. All this suggests a future for African citizens of greater freedom and political representation.

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14. Economic Stabilization

T H I S C H A P T E R R E P O RT S E N C O U R AG I N G N E W S of a recent economic resurgence. Between 1995 and 2013, economies in sub-Saharan Africa grew by 4.5 percent annually on average; only one region, East Asia and the Pacific, outperformed sub-Saharan Africa on this measure (The World Bank, 2014). In 2013, four countries in the region grew faster than China (Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Democratic Republic of the Congo), and another seven outpaced India (figure 14.1).1 While resource extraction (i.e., oil and minerals) has fueled economic development in several countries, not all of these high performers are resource-rich: Ethiopia, for example, grew by over 10 percent in 2013-14, benefiting from increased agricultural productivity and merchandise exports. Moreover, growth reflects not only increased investment (in mining or agriculture), but also an increase in total factor productivity (i.e., how efficiently inputs are translated into outputs) — the first uptick on this measure since the early 1970s (Rodrik, 2016a). We review several candidate causes for the resurgence in this chapter, but we start by noting that there is little consensus. Some point to more proximate reasons, such as better control over inflation and reduced debt burdens; others point to the democratic political institutions (discussed in the previous chapter) that facilitated the implementation of better macroeconomic policies; still others focus

1

However encouraging, recent economic growth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is barely apparent in figure 14.1, dwarfed by the economic destruction wrought by civil conflict. Average incomes in 2014 were just over half (57 percent) of what they were in 1990.

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Figure 14.1 Recent Increases in GDP per Capita

on external factors, such as rising mineral and oil prices and increased trade with China, which raised the value of primary commodity exports (Hostland and Giugale, 2013). Just as the lag had myriad potential causes, a mix of factors has likely contributed to recent improvements; unfortunately, for these more recent trends, researchers have not yet isolated clear causal relationships.2 As with democratization, there are concerns that this economic resurgence is unsustainable. To take an extreme example, Sierra Leone was projected to grow by over 10 percent; yet, due to Ebola and collapsing mineral prices, the World Bank was warning of double-digit contraction in late 2015. More broadly, for countries like Equatorial Guinea or Zambia that rely on oil and copper (respectively) for foreign exchange and government revenues, the dramatic fall in world prices has darkened their economic outlook and also limited these governments’ capacity to

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Rodrik (2016a, 4) writes, “As economists, we have a pretty good idea of what can cause economic collapse, but not so much about what can produce a miracle. The upside potential of these policy reforms remains uncertain as a result.”

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engage in countercyclical fiscal policy (i.e., ramping up public spending to offset decreased activity in the private sector) (The World Bank, 2015). Despite these ominous trends and deficient infrastructure (e.g., power shortages), sub-Saharan African countries are still projected to grow at or above 4 percent on average in the coming years. This will likely help to close the gap between average incomes among Africans and individuals living in more developed regions; however, that gap remains very wide: per capita GDP in 2010 in Kenya, for example, was 3.15 percent of that in the US — $1,467 versus $46,569. In this chapter, we review the reasons for both optimism and skepticism regarding Africa’s recent and continued economic development. As political scientists, we focus attention on the role of political institutions, though we end by discussing recent work by the economist Dani Rodrik, who warns of premature deindustrialization and an overreliance on services in many African countries.

1

Recent Economic and Human Development

The question at hand is, what institutions and policies have helped overcome historical constraints? To help answer this, a team of forty political economists supported by the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) have carefully analyzed policy successes and failures in a monumental two-volume compilation (Ndulu et al., 2008). The authors analyzed the typically unfortunate economic trajectories of African states since independence. Their overwhelming orientation, inspired by the classic work of Robert Bates (1981), was that rather than destiny or geography, guilt for failure was in poor policy decisions. The lead authors synthesized both econometric results and country studies to point to four policy syndromes that have impeded growth: (1) rent-seeking regulations, (2) ethno-regional redistributions, (3) borrowing from the future in order to pay for current projects, and (4)

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state breakdown. When countries had episodes of rule that were “syndrome-free,” the authors detected growth meeting world standards. We now turn to Botswana, the poster child for “syndrome-free” policies.

The Botswana Miracle Botswana defied the economic stagnation and decline that we described when characterizing the region’s economic lag in chapter 2: its annual growth rate averaged 9 percent per year from 1966 to 1999 — a rate comparable to that of the “Asian Tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan). While this rate has declined recently (figure 14.2), the country has maintained a relatively steady rate (4-5 percent) of recent growth. And this development is also reflected in poverty measures: the proportion of the population living on less than one dollar per day declined from 30.6 percent in 2002-03 to 19.3 percent in 2009-10 (Kariuki et al., 2014).

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Botswana has also made impressive progress on public health. Although the country was initially devastated by HIV/AIDS, as of December 2012, Botswana had attained universal access to anti-retroviral therapy, with 96 percent of those eligible receiving it. Similarly, the tuberculosis

2014 Figure 14.2 Botswana’s Outlying Economic Performance

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notification rate declined by almost half between 2006 and 2011 (from 511 to 330 per 100,000), and the country has made progress toward the elimination of malaria. As of 2018, Botswana was malaria free, save for pockets in the Central and North West districts (including Chobe National Park). Several historical reasons have been offered to explain Botswana’s extraordinary success (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2003).3 Precolonial institutions in the territory of today’s Botswana (the principal territory of the Tswana-speaking peoples) were participatory. Moreover, this political equality was not undermined by the colonial state. Furthermore, the Tswana were not directly affected by the Atlantic or Indian Ocean slave trades. Based on Nunn (2008) (reviewed in chapter 6), this bodes well for present-day development.4 More contemporary factors also likely played a role. First, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), which has monopolized political power since independence, was dominated by cattle herders. This economic and political elite benefited from free trade. Thus, the party never toyed with the disastrous protectionist parties we described in chapter 12. Their focus was on the protection of property rights and investments in infrastructure that increase ranching incomes, rather than the redistribution of wealth. Second, rents from diamond production were widely distributed among the BDP’s broad coalition. As a result, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2003) argue that no elites had an incentive to jeopardize their cut by “rocking the boat.” In other words, diamond sales supplied a rich political budget that was used to buy the loyalty of potential challengers. Furthermore, the diamonds were not alluvial, and could only be extracted with large capital investments (e.g., in heavy machinery). Christensen (forthcoming) shows that these capital-intensive commercial mining projects are not subject to predation by insurgent

3

Herbst (2000) codes Botswana as having a “favorable” geography. Yet, Botswana’s performance dramatically exceeds other countries in that “favorable” category (e.g., Burundi or Zimbabwe), suggesting that its success is due to features beyond geography. 4 However, one of the mechanisms that connects the slave trade and contemporary economic development is interpersonal trust, and Botswana scores relatively low on this measure. In the Afrobarometer’s comparison of twentyseven sub-Saharan countries, only 12 percent of respondents in Botswana report trusting fellow citizens “a lot,” roughly 25 percent less than the regional average. We must therefore look for other factors explaining the country’s economic success.

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groups. Third, Botswana was blessed with political leaders, from Seretse Khama to Quett Masire, who did not line their pockets at citizens’ expense. This absence of corruption is evident in Botswana’s excellent score on the Transparency Index: in 2015 it ranked twenty-eighth in the world, tied with Portugal and far better than all other sub-Saharan states. As is apparent from this case, there is no singular explanation for Botswana’s success, but we highlight here political institutions that afforded political equality, constrained corruption, and facilitated technocratically prudent macroeconomic policies. We now look more broadly at whether these indicators of good governance are associated with improved (or improving) economic outcomes.

Good Governance and Growth Botswana and the findings of neo-institutional economists (from chapter 6) point to the importance of political institutions in promoting economic development. Below we quickly assess whether there is a positive association between improved governance and recent economic growth. We note at the outset that these are merely correlations, not further evidence of a causal relationship between political and economic development.5 The International Country Risk Guide tracks a number of measures of “political risk,” including democratic accountability (how responsive a government is to its constituents), corruption (e.g., excessive patronage, nepotism, and suspicious ties between business and government), and government stability (government unity, legislative strength, and popular support; not affected by peaceful turnovers due to elections) (The PRS Group, 2011). These variables best operationalize the qualities that differentiate the Botswana case. We calculate the percentage change in these measures between 1984 (when the data set starts) and 1995, and then plot these changes against the per-

5 Work by Acemoglu et al. (2005) contends that institutions have a positive, longrun effect on economic development. Their empirical work does not assess whether changes in institutional quality produce immediate increases in growth (Rodrik, 2016a, 4). As such, our analysis in figure 14.3 does not directly speak to these authors’ claims about the longrun effects of institutional quality.

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centage change in per capita incomes between 1995 and 2010 (figure 14.3). There is a positive (if imprecisely estimated) correlation between all three measures of institutional change (from 1985 to 1995) and economic growth in the following fifteen years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the association between government stability and subsequent development appears strongest in the data — fractionalized conflicts among ministers or antigovernment demonstrations generate uncertainty that deters forward-looking investments.

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Greater Exposure to Trade and Investment, Especially from China Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa has increased dramatically, with an estimated inflow of about $54 billion in 2015. While a large share flows to the commodity sector, there is increasing investment in manufacturing and information technology. China has become a vigorous entrant, holding 4.5 percent of Africa’s FDI, now ranking seventh across the globe in new FDI projects in Africa (Hruby and Bright, 2015). China is also now Africa’s

Figure 14.3 Improvements in Governance and Economic Growth

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largest trading partner. This trade and investment has been accompanied by an increase in the amount of foreign aid that China sends to African governments: in 2015, Beijing pledged $60 billion in aid to African states (primarily in loans and export credits). Some have raised concerns that Chinese investors and diplomats do not discriminate against autocrats like Robert Mugabe, particularly if those autocrats control valuable primary commodities. As a result, these investment and aid flows undermine incentives for governments to respect political freedoms in order to attract the interest of multinational corporations or donors (e.g., Kishi and Raleigh, 2015). While new evidence finds that Chinese aid projects disproportionately appear in the hometowns of Africa’s leaders and their spouses (Dreher et al., 2016), many are skeptical that Chinese money is unusually concentrated in resource-rich states or (indirectly) promoting authoritarian regimes (Hendrix and Noland, 2013; Hruby and Bright, 2015). While it may still be too early to tell, we know of no empirical research that credibly identifies a causal effect of increased Chinese aid or investments on recipient countries’ political institutions. What does seem indisputable is that African economies have diversified their trading partners.

Gains in Health As we have already discussed (chapter 2), many countries have seen impressive gains in dealing with malaria and other germ-based diseases. Kudamatsu (2012) finds that democratic institutions enable these improvements in public health. His research design is rather ingenious. Kudamatsu uses surveys from twenty-eight African countries that asked women about their birthing histories. From this data, he knew when a child was born and whether it survived. He then compared the mortality rates of children born to the same mother, some of which were born

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during periods of democratic rule; others, during periods of autocracy. He reports that infant mortality fell by 1.2 percentage points, or more than 10 percent of the mean, after democratization. What is the mechanism that connects democracy to infant mortality? Kudamatsu finds that democratization increased maternal health services: women report greater access to health professionals, higher vaccination rates, and more encouragement to breastfeed. Here we see how improvements on one of our outcome variables (regime type) can cause improvements on another (development or health). And this relationship is not confined to health: research has shown that competitive elections in Africa correspond to higher expenditure on public education (Stasavage, 2005), road construction (Burgess et al., 2015), and agricultural investment and output (Bates and Block, 2013). This augurs well for future development, as long as democratic consolidation continues.

2

Dark Clouds

Where Is the Manufacturing? Economist Dani Rodrik, an eminent scholar of development, remains skeptical that recent economic improvements in sub-Saharan Africa foreshadow sustained high growth and, thus, convergence (i.e., a significantly diminished gap between the rich and poor countries of the world). Rodrik (2016a) notes that the recent boom may be due to temporary factors, such as the commodity boom during the 2000s. Moreover, industrialization and structural change (i.e., the reallocation of workers to high-productivity sectors) have been the “traditional engines behind rapid growth and convergence,” and these processes appear be slowing down rather than picking up steam (14). Rodrik’s pessimism reflects recent history; industrial

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decline has marked many African economies since independence. “From 1965 to 1984,” according to Riddell (1993), “the ratio of manufactured to total exports fell from 7.8% to 5.9% in Sub-Saharan Africa; meanwhile, it rose . . . from 28.3% to 58.5% in developing south and southeast Asia and from 5.2% to 18.6% in developing Latin America.” Despite this decline, international donors and financial institutions did not ramp up support for industry. Both structural adjustment and the Washington Consensus — prevailing economic paradigms during the 1980s and 1990s — viewed subsidies to industry as highly distortionary, likely to be spent on enterprises that had little hope of ever competing internationally. In the era of the Washington Consensus, foreign aid to manufacturing in Africa, which was less than 12 percent of GDP in the early 1980s, fell to about 7 percent by 1989. Industrial decline, while common, was not uniform: Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and Zimbabwe did very well vis-à-vis all middle income countries. But their exports were largely sales to neighboring countries in regional markets. Even in Botswana, nearly 95 percent of its industrial exports went to neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa, reflecting a regional economy rather than an internationally competitive export sector (Riddell, 1993). Ethiopia is a partial exception. The country built a moderate industrial base during the regime of Halie Selassie (1930-74). Yet, with the Marxist Revolution in 1974, most industrial firms were nationalized; expatriate managers of larger enterprises were driven out of the country. The war with Eritrea decimated production in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital and a core industrial area. With the fall of the Marxist regime in 1994, the newly installed government bought into structural adjustment, and industry had a rapid, if short-lived, recovery. Over the course of the decade beginning in 2000, Ethiopia’s growth was

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impressive, reaching gains of 10 percent in some years. However, industry never exceeded earlier levels; services and agriculture remained 46 and 42 percent of GDP, respectively (Gebreeyesus, 2016). These figures worry Rodrik and other developmental economists. Based on the histories of developed countries, Rodrik sees industrialization as an essential catalyst of economic growth: “When manufacturing takes off, it can generate millions of jobs for unskilled workers, often women, who previously were employed in traditional agriculture or petty services. Industrialization was the driving force of rapid growth in southern Europe during the 1950’s and 1960’s, and in East and Southeast Asia since the 1960’s” (Rodrik, 2011).6 Yet, African countries have achieved very low levels of industrialization, especially relative to Asian countries. Figure 14.4 shows that, even looking at cases with comparable levels of development (i.e., logged GDP per capita), sub-Saharan

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economies tend to have a lower share of workers employed in manufacturing compared with their East Asian counterparts. While Kenyans are leaving farms and migrating to cities, these migrants are being absorbed by the service sector rather than manufacturing (Rodrik, 2016a). Worse still, according to Rodrik, African manufacturing is “dominated by small, informal firms that are not particularly productive” (9). Mass movements into cities in West Africa have been fruitless journeys for too many rural migrants, many of whom subsequently risk their lives seeking gainful employment in Europe. Even South Africa’s urban migrants, living in the sub-Saharan economic giant, faced 27% unemployment in 2018 with a stagnant GNP since 2009. Rodrik contrasts these African cases with Vietnam, where farmers are taking up work in large factories, producing goods for international markets. Thus, Rodrik has a pessimistic assessment of current trends in sub-Saharan Africa: “Labor is moving out of agriculture and rural areas. . . . Urban migrants are being absorbed largely into services that are not particularly productive and into informal activities. The pace of industrialization is much too slow for the convergence dynamics to play out in full force” (9). Rodrik does outline four possible high-growth scenarios for the region: (1) follow historical examples and industrialize; (2) rely on agricultural-led growth; (3) develop highly productive service sectors; or (4) depend on natural resource production. He is not particularly bullish about any of these prospects. As we discussed above, poor (if improving) governance and weak infrastructure deter investments in new factories or commercial farms. Moreover, competing on world markets with long-standing European or Asian exporters has proven difficult for both African and Latin American firms (Rodrik, 2016b). These internal and external factors work against the first two scenarios. Many hope that services, particularly mobile com-

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munication and banking (e.g., Mpesa in Kenya, which allows users to transfer money using their phones), will continue to grow. However, these businesses rely on a relatively small number of educated programmers or call center operators; they cannot put to work able-bodied but uneducated rural migrants. Finally, as we discussed in chapter 5, there is a large literature regarding the uncertain consequences of depending on natural resources.

Where Are the Savings? As we discussed in chapter 12, savings rates — the difference between GDP and consumption expenditure — have long been considered an important predictor of economic growth. As governance and the business climate improve so too do the incentives for investment, and domestic savings could provide the capital to launch new factories. Yet, the World Bank recently realized that the traditional approach to measuring domestic savings is misleading. Take the oft-quoted example of Ecuador. Between 1970 and 1994, the country boasted orthodox savings of more than 20 percent of GDP. But once the bank factored in the depletion of the country’s nonrenewable oil resources, “genuine savings” (or adjusted net savings) were near zero or even negative (Everett and Wilks, 1999, 4).7 Similarly, for resource-rich African countries like South Sudan, recent oil revenues gave the appearance of large domestic savings. However, the country was doing very little to reinvest what it was pulling out of the ground into infrastructure or human capital (Voegele, 2013). Figure 14.5 shows the trend (left) in genuine savings across sub-Saharan Africa and levels across regions (right). While countries like Botswana and Ghana are increasing their genuine savings, many of the mineralrich African countries are taking net losses. Countries have not been using their new wealth to invest in the fu-

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“Genuine” or adjusted net savings is national savings minus the extraction of minerals and environmental depletion, plus investments in human capital (The World Bank, 2014).

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ture. This does not bode well for sustained growth; to prepare citizens for highly productive service-sector jobs (one of Rodrik’s rosy scenarios), governments need to be pumping oil and mineral revenues into improving educational access and quality. Unfortunately, the average sub-Saharan country falls far below the genuine savings rates we observe in other regions.

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Figure 14.5 Adjusted (“Genuine”) Savings as a Percentage of Gross National Income

New Economic Visions

Undaunted by the failures of economic theory to discover the true route to African economic takeoff, two new initiatives are gaining attention: first, a call for smaller projects that can be evaluated through experimental methods and scaled up if successful; second, economic prescriptions that envision the state making strategic investments to boost productivity.

Policy Experimentation Frustrated by grand theories of development, a new generation of development economists has started to use field experiments (similar to drug trials in the medical field) to study whether specific aid interventions improve welfare.8 Development economists have now subjected a

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The number of randomized controlled trials in development economics is too large to summarize here. Banerjee and Duflo (2012) offer a relatively recent review.

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range of important programs to rigorous evaluations. To take a recent (and massive) example, a six-country study in Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Pakistan, and Peru analyzed how the delivery of short-term aid (e.g., a grant) and longer-term support (e.g., access to savings) affected thousands of poor households. Banerjee et al. (2015) find that this bundle of assistance generates lasting increases in consumption and food security. On a slightly smaller scale, Cohen and Dupas (2010) use an experiment to demonstrate that pregnant women are just as likely to use insecticide-treated bed nets if they pay for them or receive them for free. Charging a price for bed nets, they find, does not deter waste, but it does discourage use, leading to higher malaria incidence and child mortality. These studies represent only a tiny fraction of the important empirical contributions that development economists have recently made to the study of how poor households make decisions and break out of poverty traps. This evidence-based approach to development policy has much to recommend it. However, so did past theories. Looking back at the theoretical fads, it seems foolhardy to gloss over the limitations of this current approach. For one, many of these experiments fail to consider how agents adapt, how they “reoptimize” in light of a new policy or intervention — what economists call general (as opposed to partial) equilibrium effects (Acemoglu, 2010; Bold et al., 2013). Second, these evaluations are based on local interventions in unique contexts, making it hard to assess whether the results generalize to different settings. Finally, while we are accumulating important new evidence, these interventions are often quite small, and whether they can be scaled up to the national level remains uncertain. While we remain excited about work in this tradition, we also stop short of proclaiming that the experimental approach seems destined to deliver rapid development to African states.

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New Structural Economics Recent economic growth has coincided with the efforts of a new generation of African economists, working at the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Bank. Moving beyond structural adjustment and debt relief, these economists have formulated policies that envision governments as important, strategic investors. The African Development Bank, created in 1964, used their 2003-07 Strategic Plan to call for large, state-funded infrastructure projects. In 2013, AfDB officials met with the director general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and argued for a “big push” that would provide government ministries with the resources needed to make strategic investments. For example, in 2013 an agreement with Liberia’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry launched the Programme of Assistance to Trade Support Institutions in Liberia. The program was intended to lower export costs by rolling out automated systems for processing import and export permits. This view is shared beyond the AfDB. Célestin Monga, a Cameroonian economist at the World Bank, has been pressing governments to make targeted investments to spur growth. Monga (2009) argues that the standard theories explaining “Africa’s poor macroeconomic performance, which has been alternately attributed to: the brutality of its tropical climate; the narrowness of its market or the weakness of its social and political institutions” are all flawed. Japan, he points out, lacks natural resources. Switzerland is landlocked. Dubai is hot. Singapore has a narrow market. And despite theories of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005), Monga argues (citing Glaeser et al. 2004) that all developed states had weak institutions before their economic takeoffs. He accuses the advocates of the Washington Consensus of having a rigid,

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excessively anti-statist and ahistorical view of economic advance. In collaboration with Justin Lin, Monga has expanded on this alternative — the new structural economics — in a massive two-volume work (Monga and Lin, 2015). Introducing the second volume on policies and practices, they advocate an approach adapted to each country’s endowments. Growth, they argue, comes “leapfrogging technologies” that translate abundant labor and natural resources into capital. State investments in infrastructure promote this type of innovation; entrepreneurs are not going to lay new fiber-optic cables or reorganize a country’s ports. Yet, their ability to innovate and export may depend on these improvements. Their prescription, again sensitive to local possibilities, is industrial upgrading. Old theories, looking for “gaps,” will fail. No developed country, they argue, had filled all gaps before advancing. The key is to build on the positive: cut flowers in Ethiopia, cotton in Burkina, and gorilla tourism in Rwanda. These all require different sorts of infrastructure (e.g., refrigeration in Ethiopia’s airports for the flowers) and, thus, the need for governments to be selective. They are confident that such investment will attract human and financial resources that promote structural change, pushing countries from subsistence to higher productivity sectors. Ethiopia’s cut flower industry provides partial support for the new structural economics (Gebreeyesus, 2016). In 2000 only three commercial flower firms existed in Ethiopia, with earnings of less than 500,000 USD. By 2008, the sector grew to 81 farms, 50,000 workers, and 100 million USD in foreign exchange. By 2003, the country became the fifth largest non-EU exporter to the EU cut-flower market, with foreign exchange earnings attaining 189 million USD. The government supported this expansion, providing access to land and credit, support-

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ing infrastructure, and coordinating air transport. It also subsidized university programs in horticulture. But interestingly, the flower industry was not even among the priority sectors when Ethiopia formulated its industrial policy document. The government was only belatedly aware of the sector’s export potential, and only after private entrepreneurs lobbied the government for support. The private industry association played a vital role in diversifying export destinations, developing trade networks, and instituting standards. Somewhat different from Monga’s ideal, the Ethiopian government succeeded as a reactive, but not a proactive, investor. Consistent with Monga’s larger claim, and quite different from the Washington Consensus, state investment facilitated growth rather than distorting economic activity. However exciting this new vision, past theories also inspired. We wonder if the confidence Monga and collaborators have in the new generation of African leaders to invest limited resources in sectors with the highest potential yield is justified, given incentives of leaders to invest in enterprises that help sustain their political budgets. Perhaps, as in nineteenth-century Germany and Japan, this can be achieved by a class of incorruptible but autocratic leaders focused on national development (Gerschenkron, 1962). Paul Kagame of Rwanda may see himself in this role, sacrificing democracy for development.

4

Conclusion: A Modest Recovery

This chapter shows that there has been a significant turnaround in African economies, with at least thirteen sub-Saharan countries exhibiting impressive gains in GDP per capita since the extremely difficult years of structural adjustment, when the economic policies of the early independence years were dismantled. A vignette on the “Botswana miracle” suggests institutions foster economic success, especially inclusive

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political institutions that protect property and promote stability. These institutions allow for predictability and security, both key to long-term investments (Acemoglu et al., 2005). To be sure, the rule of law and stability are not assured, as our chapter on democratic consolidation reveals. There have been relapses with constitutional breakdown (in Lesotho) and even near anarchy (in Burundi and Central African Republic) in the past decade. The fallout has been only partially contained, in Lesotho’s case by the Southern Africa Development Commission, in Burundi by the African Union, and in the Central African Republic by a United Nations-sponsored peacekeeping mission. But these cases should not obscure the steady progress that has been made in many other African polities toward granting political freedoms and, thus, constraining rapacious and economically harmful autocrats. Indeed, since 2000 there has been a noticeable turnaround in the institutional foundations for growth in Africa. This gives us hope that many of the deep historical constraints we identified in part II are not permanent, but can be overcome with political reform. We also recognize the important challenges ahead, given low and stagnating rates of industrialization and a common failure to translate (potentially fleeting) resource revenues into forward-looking investments in infrastructure and education. Both the experimental initiative and the new structural economics recognize those challenges, and their proponents feel their proposals are built on a stronger empirical foundation than the silver bullets of an earlier era. On Africa’s economic front, optimism must be muted, but there is reason to be hopeful.

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15. Rebuilding War-Torn States

C I V I L WA R S I N A F R I C A N S TAT E S have been both prevalent and costly. Figure 15.1 presents the percentage of years since independence that a country has been embroiled in civil war for the ten most conflict-prone states. Pooling all countries in the region, states have been mired in civil conflict 17 percent of the time. This warfare entails a large human and economic cost: Fearon and Laitin (2014) estimate that every year of civil war is associated with a more than 2 percent reduction in annual growth. A back-of-the-envelope calculation using this estimate suggests that the overall GDP of sub-Saharan Africa is 39 percent lower due to civil wars. As we saw in chapter 5, the difficult geography of countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Angola left them prone to civil conflict. But given climate change, geographies are becoming even more unfavorable. To be sure, climate change is not confined to Africa; yet the region remains especially vulnerable. First, temperature increases will likely be more pronounced: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2014, 16) reports that “temperatures in the African continent are likely to rise more quickly than in other land areas, particularly in more arid regions.”1 Second, many African countries rely heavily on activities, such as agriculture, fisheries, and forestry, that could be adversely affected by climate change. Given the projected tempera-

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Under a high-emissions scenario, rainfall is expected to decrease in northern and southern Africa but increase in more central countries; under a lowemissions scenario, no large change is anticipated.

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ture increases, the IPCC estimates declines in the yields of major cereal crops of 22 percent across sub-Saharan Africa. Third, as we discussed in chapter 13, political competition in many African states remains weak or ethnically delineated or both. This could insulate politicians from pressure to support programs that limit the adverse effects of climate change — public goods that may not be realized in the time frame of any fragile government. More closely related to the subject of this chapter, recent scholarship links climate change to the outbreak of conflict. In their meta-analysis of sixty quantitative studies, Hsiang et al. (2013, 1) find “causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across a range of spatial and temporal scales and across all major regions of the world.” These authors find that a one-standard-deviation increase in temperature or more extreme rainfall increases the frequency of intergroup conflicts, such as civil wars, by 14 percent. This leads to a pessimistic forecast: “amplified rates of human conflict could represent a large and critical impact of anthropogenic climate change” (11). While there is widespread agreement that climate change increases conflict, the mechanism that links rising temperatures to increased violence remains the subject of debate. Climate-related reductions in economic productivity may increase the relative value of engaging in violence or, alternatively, reduce tax revenues and, thus, the government’s ability to ward off challengers (Hsiang et al., 2013, 11). Whatever the mechanism, the ubiquity of climate change could complicate regional peacekeeping efforts: if all African countries are warming and, thus, experiencing heightened conflict risk, this could diminish states’ willingness to dispatch troops to make or keep peace abroad. Unfortunately, in its past handling of civil conflicts, the Organization of African Unity has been rigid and ineffective. Separatists, no matter the justice of their appeals,

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never got OAU support (recall chapter 11); rather, these were considered the internal matters of each state.2 After the Congo fiasco (1960-63) when the UN got mired in a civil war it could not contain (and before the end of the Cold War), civil war onsets in DRC (1977), Uganda (1981), Burundi (1972), Somalia (1981), and Ethiopia (1974) raised no flags in the Security Council for a peacekeeping mission. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the United Nations has advanced an ambitious agenda, deploying coercive force to make and maintain peace in countries affected by civil war. In this effort, the UN has been joined by NGOs dedicated to post-conflict reconstruction. In this chapter, we discuss the research on civil war terminations, seeking to learn how these wars end. We then assess the performance of the United Nations’ Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UN DPKO) and like-minded NGOs in turning swords into plowshares. We end by introducing new efforts by the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to assume greater responsibility for peacekeeping.

1

Civil War Termination: General Considerations

Civil wars, whether in Africa or other regions, are difficult to end. On average, they last considerably longer than interstate wars. Fearon and Laitin (2003) estimate that the median duration of interstate wars has been less than three months, compared with about seven years for civil wars for conflicts that began and ended after 1945. This is not because civil wars involve especially intractable issues. Rather, a peaceful end to a civil war requires tremendous trust between recent adversaries. To end the fighting, rebels need to lay down their arms. Yet, in doing so, they leave their soldiers and supporters vul-

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Compare with postcolonial interstate relations in Asia, with several cases in which secessionist rebels were either aided (East Pakistan by India; Iraqi Kurds by Iran; and Iranian Kurds by Iraq) or ignored (the Mindanao insurgency in Philippines; the Aceh insurgency in Indonesia) by neighboring governments.

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nerable to attack by the central state. While the central government could promise to protect rebels’ rights, the army is tempted to break that promise once rebels disarm and demobilize. This commitment problem — the incentive to defect on a promise — leaves insurgents reluctant to leave their strongholds in the hills or jungles and sign a peace treaty (Walter, 1997; Fearon, 1998). For this reason, a civil war tends to persist unless there is some shock to one party’s strength: for example, the death of a rebel leader (e.g., the death of charismatic rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in Angola) or the withdrawal of support by an external actor (e.g., the Algerians’ withdrawal of open support for the Polisario rebels, who were fighting for independence from Morocco in the Western Sahara). In cases such as these, rebels face a sharp decline in their capacity and, thus, have an incentive to sue for peace. Having lost an important leader or sanctuary in a friendly, neighboring state, rebels fear they will be unable to recruit soldiers or escape an onslaught going forward (Fearon and Laitin, 2007). Third-party intervention can also end civil wars. A third, neutral party assures both sides of protection should the other side renege on the peace deal and resume fighting. This solves the commitment problem described above; rebels can lay down their arms knowing that the third party will prevent retribution by the state. In civil wars across Africa, the UN DPKO has tried to play this role, aided by other UN departments, international organizations, former colonial powers, and NGOs. These international efforts to resolve civil wars, which expanded considerably with the end of the Cold War, have had a limited but promising impact on security.

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UN Peacekeeping Operations

Multilateral peacekeeping efforts can be difficult to muster. Why should a stable country pay to bring stability

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to a foreign, sometimes distant state? A compelling motivation is that in a world of relatively open borders, civil wars create “public bads” (i.e., negative externalities), such as reduced trade, refugee flows, and safe spaces for terrorists. All countries bear these costs, giving them a reason to support peacekeeping efforts. But there is still a free-rider problem. Intervention imposes a concentrated cost on the countries that support peacekeeping operations (PKOs). Yet, the benefits are diffuse: all states benefit from the cessation of hostilities and the “public bads” that civil wars generate. As with any situation in which costs are concentrated and benefits diffuse, this generates a collective action problem — an incentive to free-ride and shirk responsibility. Organizations such as the UN, NATO, or the Commonwealth of Independent States (the regional security organization led by Russia) help overcome this collective action problem by levying resources from their member states and using these to finance peacekeeping interventions. Moreover, countries that contribute troops to UN PKOs not only get refunded for each troop sent to an international mission (supplementing the high military budgets of many middleincome, troop-contributing states) but also get status and legitimacy as contributors to international public goods. International organizations have attempted to cauterize violent conflict throughout the world: in Guatemala, in Bosnia, in Moldova, and in Georgia. Doyle and Sambanis (2006, 5) argue that while the UN has struggled to impose settlements by force, it has been “very good at ‘peace’ mediating and implementing a comprehensively negotiated peace.” We discussed the UN’s first foray into an African civil war in chapter 8. In 1960, the UN intervened to prevent the secession of the Katanga region from the newly independent Republic of the Congo (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo). The Security Council authorized

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the UN Operation in the Congo (ONUC) some two weeks after the country became independent, ultimately deploying 20,000 troops. Initially, the UN gave its officers a narrow mandate, not permitting combat despite Prime Minister Lumumba’s pleas for a direct UN assault on the separatists in Katanga. However, two factors led to more aggressive tactics, eventually embroiling UN forces in full combat: first, a frustrated Lumumba enlisted the support of the Soviet Union, inflaming Cold War rivalries and threatening a large-scale war; and second, both Lumumba and the UN secretary-general were killed during the conflict, the latter in a suspicious plane crash. The new secretary-general, U Thant, took a more aggressive stance, and UN forces took control of Katanga in early 1963. Although Katanga was reintegrated, this did not generate stability. As the UN was preparing to withdraw its forces, new rebellions broke out in central and eastern Congo. The government in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital city, was incapable of responding. To be sure, a new governor brought Katanga to heel, and secessionist leader Moïse Tshombe eventually returned to Congo as prime minister. But violence was brewing throughout the country. With the country on the brink in 1965, Joseph-Desiré Mobutu (who later took the name Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga) seized power in a bloodless coup and consolidated control over the country, ruling (and plundering) for the next generation. He also accused Tshombe, who escaped to Spain, of high treason. The high costs and ultimate failure of the ONUC (along with Cold War suspicions dividing the US and USSR in the Security Council) left the UN virtually incapable of new military entanglements in the name of peacekeeping for the next three decades. However, since the end of the Cold War, UN peacekeeping operations have increased dramatically (fig-

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ure 15.2). Animosity between the US and USSR had stymied the Security Council, which cannot act if any of the permanent five members (P-5: Britain, China, France, the US, or the USSR/Russia) veto a resolution. With the end of the Cold War, it became far easier to muster support for UN peacekeeping, and secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali seized this opportunity, outlining a new mission in his 1992 report to the Security Council, “An Agenda for Peace” (Boutros-Ghali, 1992). The Agenda conflated traditional peacekeeping (Chapter VI of the UN Charter) and peace enforcement (Chapter VII of the UN Charter), laying the groundwork for what came to be called “Chapter 6 12 Operations.” In Boutros-Ghali’s vision, the UN Security Council would have access to troops “available on call” and carry out “comprehensive efforts” that involved UN troops in kinetic operations and post-conflict support (e.g., policing, the repatriation of refugees, and monitoring of elections). This agenda was implemented with vigor by BoutrosGhali’s successor, Kofi Annan. In reflecting on the expanded role of UN forces to build and sustain peace, Annan argued that “Our job [at the UN] is to intervene: to prevent conflict where we can, to put a stop to it when it

Figure 15.2 Active UN Peacekeeping Operations, 1948-2014

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has broken out, or — when neither of those things is possible — at least to contain it and prevent it from spreading” (Annan, 1999). In the short period from 1987 to 1994, the number of “blue helmets” (the most recognizable feature of UN troops’ uniforms) in PKOs went from below 10,000 to over 70,000; the budget for peacekeeping in that period went from $230 million to $3.6 billion, triple the size of the UN’s operating budget (Doyle and Sambanis, 2006, 6). The UN DPKO has been involved in a number of African conflict zones, listed in table 15.1. Missions still in operation as of 2016 include Western Sahara (started 1991); Liberia (2003); Côte d’Ivoire (2004); Darfur, Western Sudan (2007); Democratic Republic of the Congo (2010); South Sudan (2011); Mali (2013); and the Central African Republic (2014). But continued engagement of the UN in peacekeeping remains questionable.3

Country Angola Burundi Central African Republic Central African Republic & Chad Côte d’Ivoire Dem. Rep. Congo Ethiopia & Eritrea Liberia Libya & Chad (Aouzou Strip) Mozambique Namibia Rwanda Sierra Leone Somalia Sudan Uganda & Rwanda

Years 1988-99 2004-06 1998-2000 2007-10 2003-04 1960-64, 1999-2010 2000-2008 1993-97 1994 1992-94 1989-90 1993-96 1999-2005 1992-95 2005-11 1993-94

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With poorer relations between Russia and the other P-5 members after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cooperation in the Security Council on human rights has declined. Attempts, for example, by the US to impose sanctions on South Sudan for incipient genocide were rebuffed in late 2016 (Sengupta, 2017).

PKOs UNAVEM I-III, MONUA ONUB MINURCA MINURCAT MINUCI ONUC, MONUC UNMEE UNOMIL UNASOG ONUMOZ UNTAG UNAMIR UNAMSIL, UNOMSIL UNOSOM I-II UNMIS UNOMUR

Table 15.1 UN PKOs in Africa

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General Results from PKOs How successful have these efforts been? Doyle and Sambanis (2006), who have addressed this question with comprehensive data, consider a PKO successful if (1) the war ends within two years of intervention, (2) there is no recurrence of violence in that time, and (3) state sovereignty is unified. In general, we learn from their work that imposing peace from the outside rarely works; however, sustaining peace has had greater success. More specifically, Doyle and Sambanis (2000) are interested in whether different types of missions have greater success rates.4 Looking at civil wars from 1944 to 1997, they code whether the UN intervened and, if so, how: using a monitoring/observer mission, enforcement mission, traditional PKO, or multidimensional PKO. The authors find that missions with a UN mandate have greater odds of success, and multidimensional PKOs have the greatest success rate among UN operations. Figure 15.3 shows the probability of success for different types of missions according to Doyle and Sambanis’s (2000) data. While it is difficult (given such a small sample) to distinguish the relative effectiveness of different mission types, it does appear that cases involving multidimensional PKOs had a greater likelihood of success than cases with no mission. While these are encouraging statistics, they do not represent the causal effects of UN PKOs. The UN chooses whether and how to intervene based on its assessment of need and prospects for success. If the UN, for example, avoids intervening in particularly intractable civil wars, then the probabilities in figure 15.3 could be upwardly biased estimates of the effect of a UN operation.5 Here we look at some cases to get a sense of how international intervention has affected order across African states after the Cold War. In many ways, a statistical

4 Doyle and Sambanis (2000, 781) offer the following descriptions of different UN operations: observer mission, “an interim arrangement used in violent conflicts with the consent of the host government”; traditional PKO, “involves the deployment of military units and civilian officials. . . to facilitate the negotiated settlement”; multidimensional PKO, “consent based and is designed to implement a comprehensive negotiated peace agreement”; and peace enforcement, “a (usually multilateral) military intervention, authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. . . designed to impose public order by force, if needed, with or without host government consent.”

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See Fortna (2004) for a similar conclusion based on an improved research design. Matching on the severity of the conflict, strength of the national army, and political conditions at the time of UN entry (a victory for one side; a formal treaty; a truce), she reports that a UN PKO reduces the hazard of a reignited war between the same combatants by about half.

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study of “success” hides some gory details. But first, we present an extended discussion of one poster child for UN intervention, Mozambique.

The Nitty-Gritty of PKOs in Sub-Saharan Africa United Nations Operation in Mozambique (ONUMOZ) ONUMOZ is the UN’s model for how PKOs should work and, hence, a hopeful introductory case. Mozambique achieved independence after a long and bloody civil war with Portugal, an imperial country that refused to acknowledge the “winds of change.” The Mozambique Liberation Front, known by its Portuguese acronym FRELIMO, ousted the Portuguese. FRELIMO formed in 1962, uniting several smaller tribal and regional organizations struggling for independence. The group espoused a Marxist ideology and received support from China and the Soviet Union. The white minority-ruled states of Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) and South Africa feared that FRELIMO’s success would bolster the anti-apartheid forces operating within their own borders. This was not an unwar-

Figure 15.3 Probability of Success for Different Types of PKOs

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ranted concern: while neighboring Botswana refused to challenge the white-ruled regimes, FRELIMO gave aid and cover to rebels and supported the OAU’s stance against white-minority governments. To undermine FRELIMO’s control, the Rhodesian national intelligence service founded the Mozambique Resistance Movement (RENAMO) in 1976. RENAMO constituted “flechas” (police forces that fought against FRELIMO under the Portuguese) and anti-FRELIMO dissident groups. RENAMO was supported by aid from Rhodesia (until the dismantling of the white-minority regime in 1979), South Africa, and anti-communist groups in Portugal, West Germany, and the US. With this support, RENAMO built up a force of 20,000 by 1990 (Morgan, 1990, 605-8).6 RENAMO was in many ways a proxy army. Yet FRELIMO, by alienating many Mozambicans, helped expand RENAMO’s ranks. First, FRELIMO refused to integrate soldiers that had supported the Portuguese, giving them little choice but to support RENAMO (Finnegan, 1992).7 Second, FRELIMO also refused to work with local leaders, such as petty chiefs, religious authorities, or traditional healers. As a result, RENAMO could occupy territory by allying with resentful local elites. To win support, RENAMO embraced customary authorities, legitimated their beliefs, and used their constituents as recruiting pools (e.g., RENAMO drew recruits from the Ndau, a Shona subgroup renowned for its ritual power). RENAMO allowed for religious pluralism, also attracting Christians who opposed the atheist FRELIMO regime (Chingono, 1996, 44; Morgan, 1990, 613). Third, FRELIMO imposed a Marxist program of state farms and rural cooperatives. Recalling our discussion of African socialism in chapter 11, these policies proved inefficient and alienated farmers who felt cheated by state marketing boards, which paid below world prices for crops.8 FRELIMO’s economic policies created hunger and, by forcing

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South Africa, in response to Mozambique’s revolutionary policies, gave support to RENAMO, even sending its own forces to carry out raids and assassinations in 1981 of ANC members living in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo (Morgan, 1990, 610; Isaacman and Isaacman, 1983, 171-88). 7

This was similar to the US’s decision to turn away former Ba’ath soldiers subsequent to its 1993 invasion of Iraq, driving them to the opposition. Contrast this with Zimbabwe, which transformed a guerrilla force into a professional army by incorporating former Rhodesian officers.

8 A candonga (black or gray) economy resulted from these price controls, and violators were subject to public flogging. Needless to say, this was an unpopular economic policy.

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50,000 city dwellers onto state farms in 1983, drove displaced citizens into RENAMO’s fold (Morgan, 1990, 610; Finnegan, 1992, 69). While foreign support was crucial, “RENAMO evolved into a broad, violent collection of FRELIMO’s enemies” (Finnegan, 1992, 70). With the end of the Cold War and the declining power of South Africa’s apartheid government, RENAMO’s external support waned. The warring groups started direct talks in 1990, and general peace accords conducted in Rome officially ended the war in October 1992. The UN played a key role in the establishment and maintenance of peace in Mozambique. By resolution 782 (1992), the Security Council authorized the secretarygeneral to appoint a special representative and up to twenty-five military observers. Special representative Aldo Ajello established the Commissão de Supervisão e Controle (CSC) composed of representatives from the government, RENAMO, Italy, Portugal, France, the UK, and the US. Relying upon Ajello’s detailed peacekeeping plan, ONUMOZ was authorized in December 1992, providing for 7,500 military personnel (mostly Malawian and Zimbabwean troops) and a budget of $260 million. The budget and a status of forces agreement took six months to approve; fortunately, the ceasefire agreed to in Rome (barely) held until June, when UN forces were in the field (Jett, 1995; Alden, 1995). The demobilization of troops is often a major challenge in civil wars; yet, this process proved easier in Mozambique. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the FRELIMO government lost its sponsor and, thus, the capacity to generously pay its soldiers. The Swiss government came to the fore in designing a program (Gabinete de Reintegraçã) to reintegrate soldiers from both sides to create a new national army with generous retirement packages for those who were demobilized.

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To be sure, ONUMOZ was not without immense practical problems that could have derailed the operation. “Timetables slipped, the local parties delayed compliance, budgets soared, parent UN agencies engaged in obstructionism, and UN resources on the ground [and especially the civilian police] were underutilized and worse” (Jett, 1995). Also, despite a well-planned demobilization program, RENAMO troops agitated in the assembly areas, attacking UN officials, taking local hostages, and engaging in local crime (Alden, 1995, 118). Despite these obstacles, Special Representative Ajello was quick to coordinate with the CSC and donor states, such that there was no way either Mozambican party could have played donors off each other. Ajello was also lucky that the RENAMO president, Alfonso Dhlakama, fulfilled promises not to resume the war and seemed content with a modest middle-class home in Maputo for retirement. Multiparty elections, originally scheduled for October 1993, did not take place until June 1994. ONUMOZ kept watch as an overwhelming 5.2 million Mozambicans registered to vote. Dhlakama contested the election and threatened action if RENAMO did not emerge victorious. Yet, voters called his bluff: Joaquim Chissano (FRELIMO’s leader after the death of Samora Machel in an air crash) was elected with 53 percent of the vote (with 33 percent going to Dhlakama), and FRELIMO took a majority (129 of 250 seats) in the National Assembly (112 seats for RENAMO). RENAMO did not protest. After the election, to the astonishment of many, ONUMOZ pulled out of Mozambique, compelling Chissano’s government to live without the UN’s protection. What explains the UN’s success in Mozambique? The outcome is especially striking given events in Angola, another former Portuguese colony, where UN peacekeeping efforts failed. Dennis Jett, former US ambassador

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to Mozambique, argues that rebels in Angola controlled diamond mines, which provided them with resources to fund their campaigns. It was, therefore, more difficult to compensate rebels in Angola for giving up both their political ambitions and control over natural resources.9 In contrast, Mozambique’s resources were largely agricultural and not geographically concentrated, like diamond deposits. This makes it more difficult for the parties to use them to fund fighting. Still, Jett was hardly sanguine about Mozambique’s stability after the UN “declare[d] victory” and sent the peacekeepers home. And he insisted that if Mozambique succeeded in its post-conflict peacebuilding, it would not be due to UN attention since “the institutions in the country remain weak and the peace fragile” (Jett, 2000). Mozambique’s postwar future has, until very recently, been encouraging. In 1994, it succeeded in running multiparty elections, and in 2004 there was a peaceful transfer of power to a new president. In 2015, Mozambique declared itself free of landmines, a legacy of the civil war. At least partial credit for this goes to UN peacekeeping. Unfortunately, RENAMO relaunched its insurgency in 2013, and sporadic violence continues as of this book’s writing.

United Nations Operations in Somalia (UNOSOM I and II) In comparison with ONUMOZ, the UN PKOs in Somalia were ill-fated (see Laitin, 1999, for a more detailed narrative). As we discussed in chapter 8, imperial insouciance about the cultural zones of Africa led to the division of ethnic Somalis into five colonial units. With the hope of forging these units into a unified Somali state, Somalia’s leaders lent support to guerrilla operations in Kenya’s Northeast and Ethiopia’s Ogaadeen Province, regions populated largely by Somali speakers. In 1977,

9

External actors also exacerbated conflict in Angola: 50,000 Cuban troops joined the Angolan government forces in fighting against UNITA — comparable to RENAMO in relying on foreign support to challenge a Marxist-oriented regime — complicating negotiations and prolonging the war until UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi’s death.

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Somalia invaded the Ogaadeen, using weapons supplied by the Soviets to support the insurgent Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) in their fight against Ethiopia. Soviet advisers were aghast, as they never authorized this offensive. As a Marxist rebel, Mengistu Haile Mariam, ascended to power in Ethiopia, the Soviets turned coat. Along with a large Cuban force, the Soviets assisted Ethiopia in repelling the Somali army and the WSLF. In retreat, some 750,000 refugees escaped Ethiopia into camps on the Somali side of the border. The defeat tore apart Somalia’s military. In late 1988, three insurgencies formed, each representing a clan outside the thenpresident Maxamad Siyaad Barre’s ruling coalition. By 1991, one of these insurgencies, the Hawiye-dominated United Somali Congress, took Mogadishu, forcing the president into exile. But the group was unable to consolidate control, and two branches of the Hawiye contested for power, driving the country into chaos and famine. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, who had just assumed office and had once been Egypt’s ambassador to Somalia, pressed for a humanitarian mission. In April 1992, the Security Council authorized UNOSOM. Somalia’s refugees were suffering from hunger and disease, and this led US president George H. W. Bush first to airlift supplies to the refugee camps (in Operation “Provide Relief”) and then to sponsor a new UN operation (called “Restore Hope”). The latter was intended to prevent warlords fighting the civil war from subverting the humanitarian effort. Lest readers see what follows in the darkest colors, we underline here that the best estimate of the airlift’s effect was to save from 10,000 to 25,000 lives (Hansch et al., 1994). The international Somali mission was expanded in December 1992, with a united task force (UNITAF) establishing a permanent humanitarian presence in the southern region of Somalia. (The north, the former British

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Somaliland, had de facto seceded and achieved stability.) UNITAF supported 38,000 troops from twenty-one different countries, though the US played the major military role. President Bush appointed, as his plenipotentiary representative to Somalia, the former US ambassador to Somalia, Robert Oakley. Oakley understood that getting acquiescence from the clan-based warlords was the key to humanitarian success. Yet, this strategy was derided by opponents as “Waltzing with Warlords” and strongly opposed by the head UN operative in Somalia, Mohammed Sahnoun. These critics worried that Oakley’s strategy legitimated the same parties subverting attempts to bring legitimate, unifying leadership to the country. Newly inaugurated US president Bill Clinton recognized that the US involvement in Somalia did not include an exit strategy. He sought to reduce the US’s role by empowering a broader UN mission, to be called UNOSOM II. This was the first unequivocal Chapter 6 UN operation designed to rebuild state institutions. It inspired the derogatory epithet of “mission creep,” which became shorthand for high ambitions with low resources. Under the auspices of UNOSOM II, UNICEF was able to put 40,000 children in schools, reconstruct 32 hospitals, and sponsor 103 mobile vaccination teams. District councils were reinvigorated, and the police force, once a wellfunctioning institution, was rebuilt. Refugees began to return to their home areas (Doyle and Sambanis, 2006, 151-52). However, underequipped militarily and lacking a remotely coherent command structure, UN troops were sitting ducks. The most feared of the warlords, Maxamed Farraax Aidiid, took aim at the UN troops, first killing over twenty Pakistani soldiers. In their effort to capture or kill Aidiid, two US Black Hawk helicopters were attacked — in a now infamous incident known as “Black Hawk Down.” The battle ended with the deaths of eigh-

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teen Americans (the most since Vietnam), two other UN troops, and several hundred Somali militiamen and civilians. The bodies of US soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, an image that led President Clinton to order the quick withdrawal of all US troops from Somalia. UN forces quickly followed, and UNOSOM II ended in failure in March 1995.

United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) Following Somalia, the UN operation in Rwanda turned to world historical tragedy.10 Political violence preceded Rwandan independence in 1962. In 1959, Hutu insurgents overthrew the Belgian-supported Tutsi aristocracy, leading many Tutsis to seek safe havens in neighboring Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda. In 1963, some of these refugees returned, seeking to overthrow the newly independent government. This sparked massacres against Tutsis, which recurred a decade later, in 1973. The interethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis escalated to a civil war from 1990 to 1993. The Security Council established a PKO (initially an observer mission UNOMUR and later UNAMIR) to implement the peace agreement signed in Arusha, Tanzania, in 1993. Despite a history of violence, nearly a million Rwandans displaced in camps, and a perilous situation on the ground, UNAMIR involved at most 2,548 military personnel and some small police units in Kigali, the country’s capital, and other cities. Not only were these forces inadequate, but they also did not have the mandate to disarm or demobilize active militias. In April 1994, the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, were killed when their plane crashed. Controversy persists, but most blame the crash on either the Tutsi-led

10

Accounts of the genocidal moment are many; the one that focuses most centrally on the failure of the UN monitors is that of Prunier (1995). The narrative for this section on Rwanda, along with the quote of the secretary-general, is from the UNDPKO website. An excellent historical summary is available in Doyle and Sambanis (2006, 281-302).

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Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) or the Hutu extremists that rejected Habyarimana’s willingness to negotiate with the RPF. Assuming the former, Habyarimana’s successors then organized a genocidal operation against Tutsis and those Hutus who were reluctant to participate in mass murder. To the greatest shame of those responsible in the UNAMIR operation, the international observers did nothing to stop the massacre. In fact, the Belgian contingent left Rwanda after ten of its troops were killed, leaving the population without defense. The French intervened (in Operation Turquoise), but their operations appeared to enable rather than halt the genocide. In one of the grand understatements of the UN intervention, the secretary-general wrote that the “international community’s delayed reaction to the genocide in Rwanda demonstrated graphically its extreme inadequacy to respond with prompt and decisive action to humanitarian crises entwined with armed conflict.” The civil war resumed, ultimately leading to the victory of RPF forces under Paul Kagame. Kagame has gone on to establish stability (albeit at the expense of political competition) and infrastructural development in Rwanda, but no thanks to the UN.

UNOMSIL, UNAMSIL, and UNIOSIL in Sierra Leone Civil war began in March 1991 in Sierra Leone when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) sought to overthrow the government. The West African regional community (ECOWAS) sent a Military Observer Group (ECOMOG) to defend the government, and they were able to stave off an assault on the capital by the RUF in early 1998. UNOMSIL was established in July 1998 to provide support to ECOMOG, but rebel atrocities and advances on the capital continued. When the RUF reached the capital and challenged the blue-helmeted observers, UNOMSIL personnel were evacuated from the country.

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The ECOMOG troops that remained were able to retake the capital, and this brought the RUF to the bargaining table in Lomé, Togo. A peace accord was signed there, and the UN agreed to a more substantial force of up to 6,000 troops, UNAMSIL, to monitor the Lomé Accord. But the accord collapsed. RUF rebels kidnapped hundreds of blue helmets under Pakistani command, and UK airborne commandos intervened, effectively restoring the colonial order. This UK-led operation was formally authorized by the Security Council, which then expanded its military component to 13,000 personnel. Alongside military units, UNAMSIL personnel worked in civil affairs, police, and other technical spheres. By 2002, UNAMSIL had demobilized more than 75,000 fighters (including drafted children) and helped supervise a free national election. After bringing a degree of social order, the Security Council authorized a new mission, the United Nations Integrated Office in Sierra Leone (UNIOSIL), to assure longer-term peace through the building of democratic institutions. The UN DPKO brags on its website that UNAMSIL “completed most of the tasks assigned to it by the Security Council.” Another interpretation suggested by Fearon and Laitin (2004) is that Sierra Leone was a failed state and returned to a form of neo-trusteeship, a ward of the P-5, more or less giving up its independence for social order.

MONUC and MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Zaire (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) was flooded by over a million Rwandan Hutus in the wake of the 1994 genocide and the RPF’s seizure of power. The Rwandan government saw this refugee population, which included former members of the Rwandan army and other genocidaires (i.e., perpetrators of the genocide),

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as a security threat. And this was not an idle concern: militants staged attacks on Rwanda from camps in eastern Zaire without interference from Zaire’s government. With support from its then-ally Uganda, Rwanda supported a rebellion led by Laurent Désiré Kabila against Zaire’s president, Mobutu Sese Seko (formerly Joseph Mobutu). Kabila’s forces marched west in 1997 and, with little resistance, took the capital of Kinshasa in a few weeks. They renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). But the following year, a rebellion against the Kabila government started in the Kivu regions in eastern DRC. Within weeks, the rebels had seized large areas. Kabila alienated his former allies, expelling Rwandan and Ugandan troops in 1998; these countries then threw support behind the rebels and their Congolese Rally for Democracy. Supporting Kabila now were armies from Angola, Chad, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. A regional war ensued, referred to as the Second Congo War or, perhaps more accurately, the African World War, as it involved nine African countries and at least twenty armed militias and caused an estimated 5.4 million deaths (the most of any war since World War II) and displaced another two million people. The secretary-general worked for a ceasefire, and eventually one was signed in Lusaka in July 1999. The Security Council established the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) as ceasefire observers. But mission creep ensued, and MONUC got additional supervisory roles in implementing the ceasefire. As the situation on the ground deteriorated, the Security Council in 2010 reauthorized the mission as the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). This new mission had Chapter 6 goals, as it authorized its forces “to use all necessary means

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to carry out its mandate relating, among other things, to the protection of civilians, humanitarian personnel and human rights defenders under imminent threat of physical violence and to support the Government of the DRC in its stabilization and peace consolidation efforts” (United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, n.d.). Since its establishment MONUC (and its successor mission) has become the world’s largest UN peacekeeping mission, fielding approximately 22,000 peacekeepers and costing about $1 billion per year for operations. MONUC assumed some of the responsibilities of the Congolese state, which was torn apart by a war that killed millions of people. It was given unprecedented, nearly open, rules of engagement by the Security Council, which also established a Force Intervention Brigade to support offensives against rebel groups. Yet, the war continues, especially in North Kivu and surrounding areas, with an array of militias such as the Tutsi-dominated Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP), a rump faction of the CNDP, the 23 March Movement (M23) that was defeated in 2013, the Hutu-dominated Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the Lendudominated Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI), the Hema-dominated Union of Congolese Patriots, and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) — all freely violating basic human rights of local populations. From a peacekeeping point of view, even the official Congolese army, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), is, if anything, making the situation more violent. We began this section with a remarkable UN success in fostering peace in Mozambique. We end it with the UN’s most ambitious project in its history — the first one where offensive military operations were explicitly authorized — and we see a country whose entire eastern region remains in turmoil, with destroyed infrastructure and destroyed

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lives. International peacekeeping in Africa has had only limited success, but it seems likely that the UN has raised the cost of insurgency and put several countries on a path of peace.11

3

Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR)

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs have become an integral element in postconflict peace-building operations since their first use in Nicaragua in 1990.12 In Africa, DDR programs have been implemented in Mozambique, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. DDR has also been supported by actors outside of the UN system, including the World Bank, the European Union, and the African Union. The goal of DDR is to help transform combatants into civilians by, first, dismantling rebel groups and their arsenals and, second, providing support to former soldiers as they seek to rejoin communities and find an alternative economic livelihood. More recent, “secondgeneration” DDR programs expand the scope, providing emergency employment and targeting vulnerable women, at-risk youth, and gangs in addition to ex-combatants. Given the commitment problem we opened the chapter with and the halting progress of UN peacekeeping efforts, it is perhaps unsurprising that warring parties recently have not always embraced DDR programs. In Côte d’Ivoire — a country that first erupted in a civil war in 2002 — combatants were reticent to relinquish their arms, fearing another outbreak of violence. Despite a shortlived peace starting in 2005, violence did erupt again, following disputed elections in 2010. But DDR programs (backed by an impressive contingent of French troops) continued to be implemented there, and slow progress

11

See Autesserre (2014) for a critique of the international aid community in its community of workers more responsive to each other than the needs and opportunities on the ground.

12

See United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, (2010), which provides an official background on the evolution of the DDR program. The quotes in the following paragraphs are taken from this UN document.

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was made. In June 2015, the government of Côte d’Ivoire reported “having disarmed, demobilised and reintegrated close to 60,000 ex-combatants, which is 90 percent of its target. It collected 20,000 weapons and 1 million rounds of ammunition” (ISS, 2015). The Democratic Republic of the Congo as of 2016 was on its third round of DDR (DDR3); the first two ended in failure. A 2013 report observes that “a large number of current rebel fighters have been through demobilization programmes, only to be re-recruited by rebel groups. Many found no alternative livelihood. Their former leaders pressured them to re-join, or they were prompted to do so by continuing insecurity in their home areas” (Stearns, Verweijen, and Baaz, 2013, 65-66). Even where combatants willingly threw down their arms, reintegration failed due to a lack of economic opportunity in war-torn communities in the DRC. There are some hopeful developments that augur well for DDR3. In particular, the Congolese army (with the support of MONUSCO) defeated the rebel group M23. Other rebel groups worried that they might be the next target, and this has provided an incentive for combatants to enroll in the third iteration of DDR (IRIN News, 2014). But by 2018, the focus had again shifted with the criminal prosecution of soldiers for war crimes taking priority. While figures on convictions are impressive–over 1,200 accused, of whom 963 were convicted–a United Nations’ report admits that the institutions built to bring perpetrators to justice remain “fragile” (MONUSCO, 2018). These anecdotes indicate the challenges associated with recruiting and reintegrating combatants. More careful scholarly analysis has been done to evaluate the individual effects of DDR by comparing similar combatants that were and were not involved in these programs. These studies find limited returns to ex-combatants. In an early study in Sierra Leone, Humphreys and Weinstein (2007,

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549) find that participation in the DDR does not increase ex-combatants’ acceptance by their families and communities, their democratic attitudes, their propensity to break ties with their faction, their probability of returning home, their faith in government, or their employment prospects. Given that DDR participation is nonrandom, the authors are careful in interpreting their results; yet, even if treated as correlations, this study raises doubts about the individual-level benefits of DDR programs. A similar study in Liberia by Levely (2012) reports a slight increase in employment for individuals that complete the DDR program, but no effect on income. Two subsequent studies offer more hopeful results. First, a DDR program was attempted after a decade-long civil war in Burundi. All ex-combatants received an allowance and counseling. However, due to a bureaucratic failure, only some DDR participants gained access to a “socio-economic reintegration” package — an option to resume formal schooling, attend a vocational program, or receive materials (other than cash) to start a new business. Gilligan, Mvukiyehe, and Samii (2013) take advantage of this bureaucratic failure to study the effects of this reintegration package. They find that the package increased monthly income but had no effects on political integration. This study improves on prior work by overcoming concerns about self-selection: in this instance, it was a bureaucratic failure and not individuals’ decisions that determined who received the special DDR programming. Yet, to overcome this selection problem, the authors are forced to narrow their focus, considering only one element of the DDR program. An innovative program in Liberia, studied by Blattman and Annan (2016), provided agricultural training, $125 worth of supplies for agricultural work, and counseling. Critically, eligibility for the program was randomly assigned, ensuring that the individuals that do and do not

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participate in the program are comparable. The authors find that the men who participated in the program spent roughly four more hours per week working in agriculture and just under four fewer hours involved in illicit mining, logging, or rubber tapping. The effects of the program on crime and income are not precisely estimated, but it appears that program participants earned slightly more and had more durable assets. More importantly for the maintenance of peace in West Africa, ex-combatants that participated in the DDR program expressed less interest in joining mercenary groups to fight in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, which was on the brink of a civil war when the authors ran their survey. It would be a mistake to think of DDR programs in post-conflict settings in Africa as the clear pathway to lasting peace. However, there is some evidence that providing capital to ex-combatants can move them toward (slightly) higher paying, legal employment. That is, excombatants respond positively to economic incentives that reward legitimate jobs.

4

The African Union as a New Security Guarantor

The African Union (AU) was first proposed by Muammar al-Gaddafi in 1999 at an OAU summit. The Sirte Declaration (named after the city in Libya) called for the establishment of an African Union to replace the OAU. Formally, the AU was established two years later in Addis Ababa. Unlike the OAU, which exalted the sovereignty of its member states, the AU retained the right to intervene in member states to prevent atrocities. To be sure, the OAU was already in the process of revising its commitment to recognize whatever government exerted control in the capital city, no matter how it got there. In Sierra Leone, for example, Johnny Koroma seized power in 1997 in a military coup. In an about-face,

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the OAU at its summit meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, authorized the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to use military force to forcibly remove Koroma’s junta and reinstate the previous president. On the heels of this action, the OAU adopted the “Declaration on a Framework for Response to Unconstitutional Changes of Government,” known as the Lomé Declaration, which condemned the coup d’état as a means for seizing power from democratically elected governments. The AU consolidated this change. Its founding treaty called for the establishment of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). The basis for the APSA was Article 4(h) of the AU Constitutive Act signed in 2000 establishing “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” In 2004, the AU established the Peace and Security Council (PSC) as an analog to the UN Security Council. The PSC includes fifteen elected members and is charged with identifying and mitigating conflicts, as well as aiding in post-conflict reconstruction. In addition to the PSC, the AU also created a permanent African Standby Force (Kuwali and Viljoen, 2013, 195-206). In contrast to the original charter OAU, the AU demands constitutional rule among its member states and takes action when it is violated. In Togo, president Gnassingbé Eyadéma died in office in 2005. When his son, Faure Gnassingbé, was declared the successor, the AU considered this a military coup undermining Togo’s constitution. The AU’s protest forced Gnassingbé to hold elections. Under heavy allegations of election fraud, he was officially elected president on 4 May 2005. In Mauritania, the AU responded to a coup in August 2005 by suspending the country from all its meetings, compelling the Military Council to promise elections, a promise that

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was fulfilled in early 2007. AU membership was restored, but again suspended in 2008 after another coup. In March 2012, a military coup was staged in Mali, when an alliance of Tuareg and Islamist forces conquered the north, resulting in a coming to power of the Islamists. To counter this illegal takeover, the AU in conjunction with French troops helped foster a caretaker government. In response to regional conflicts, the PSC has been active in relation to the crises in Darfur, Comoros, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Côte d’Ivoire. The AU is still only emerging. In the Somali conflict, for example, the AU oversees five separate armies — Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Burundi, and Djibouti — and receives nearly all of its funds from the United Nations. In this context, it coordinates national armies and taxes the rich countries of the world to outfit troops and provide legitimacy. (This is not a bad deal for richer countries, which are uninterested in sending troops but eager to cauterize refugee flows and close off spaces for terrorist groups.) Without the AU force, the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu would not have survived (even if as of 2018 it can barely govern beyond the presidential palace). However weak in resources, the AU represents a new and broad consensus among African governments that sovereignty does not permit them to terrorize their populations or disregard their constitutions without generating concerns and corrective actions by their neighbors. When the incumbent president of The Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, refused to step down after his electoral defeat on January 19, 2017, the AU authorized ECOWAS to amass troops to support the transition to the electoral victor. This is a step forward not only for African unity, but also potentially for the security of African populations.

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Conclusion

For reasons outlined in earlier chapters — distrust emanating from the slave trade, geography that works against the projection of power by states, the division of Africa without consideration of cultural or economic realities on the ground, a colonial enterprise that forestalled institutions in Africa capable of providing order, education policies that taught students in languages they did not understand, and failed economic policies — order and security were not maintained in several African states. Civil wars were rife. States have become stronger in the past generation. Moreover, with few new states (South Sudan and Eritrea being the two exceptions), the commitment problem for minority groups is lessened (as discussed in chapter 8). Nonetheless, the direct effects of geography and history continue to keep African states weak. Indeed, Roessler (2016) shows that African leaders continue to face a tradeoff between coups and civil wars, as we described in chapter 4. Therefore, it has been international institutions that increasingly play an important role in preventing and terminating civil wars. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been international efforts — spearheaded by the United Nations — to end civil wars. These efforts have been paired with programs like DDR intended to prevent wars from reoccurring. With the advent of the AU, there is now regional buy-in for civil war termination and constitutional rule. Unlike the preceding OAU, which recognized tyrants, the AU has committed itself (on paper) to disciplining member states. This represents progress, showing that deep structural constraints to development and security are not deterministic, and can (as well as should) be overcome.

16. Conclusion

F O R M O S T A F R I C A N C O U N T R I E S , independence was a peaceful process and a moment of great promise. Freed from three-quarters of a century of colonial subjugation, led (in some cases) by charismatic leaders who asserted control and articulated visions of equality and growth, Africans and international observers exuded optimism. This was not just political rhetoric; the UN secretarygeneral, World Bank economists, and other social scientists predicted political and economic development. In this “moment of madness” when everything seemed possible, these sympathetic observers overlooked the grim realities facing the new generation of African leaders.1 Independence did not wipe the slate clean, and charisma alone could not change what post-independence leaders inherited. Geographically, straddling the equator, many African states faced high disease burdens; poor soils limited agricultural productivity; and mineral wealth empowered autocrats and tempted insurgents. Demographically, sparsely populated expanses made it costly to project and consolidate power in peripheral regions. Seeing little evidence of the state’s presence, individuals’ loyalties remained to their ethnic group and not the national government, making it difficult to forge policy consensus. Institutionally, extractive institutions that enslaved and expropriated individuals sowed distrust and uncertainty. Growing up in systems that frequently dis-

1

Zolberg (1972) refers ironically to the belief that all was possible with the fall of Portugal’s dictator in 1968; by this time, however, he was wizened by his own excitement of the possibilities for Africa when he was conducting research there in the 1960s.

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respected their rights, individuals were reticent to make forward-looking investments in themselves or in their land. With the exception of missionaries who promoted health and literacy, European involvement undermined state development. Diplomats partitioned the continent with no clear knowledge of the ethnic communities or the boundaries of emerging military and political forces. Colonial powers constructed states that ruled by empowering local despots rather than providing states services or fostering republican institutions. This inheritance did not constitute a foundation for inclusive development; it represented a set of constraints that new leaders would labor under for at least a generation. Given this history and geography, we should not be surprised that the lofty promises of independence went unfulfilled. But, as this book recounts, leaders had agency. The first generation of post-independence leaders made policy decisions that exacerbated the problems of slow growth, authoritarianism, and violence. To take one example, these founding fathers shared a commitment to socialist ideals, seeing it as both a repudiation of colonial capitalism and route to industrialization. However noble the goals, socialist policies failed for predictable reasons: the absence of a well-trained administrative elite capable of economic planning, and weak states that allowed peasants to escape taxation and attempts at collectivization. Many economic doctrines — including several promoted by preeminent economists in international financial institutions — proved infeasible. Even when “good” policy was feasible, it often ran counter to leaders’ desires to maintain their hold on power and enlarge the associated rents. Leaders agreed to noninterference in foreign affairs, a policy that allowed rapacious autocrats to make a mockery of human rights and democracy. While this diplomacy (or lack thereof) did lit-

CONCLUSION

tle to improve the welfare of Africans, it eliminated pesky threats of foreign intervention. Some policy failures are, from the perspective of the leader, successful moves to safeguard their continued and lucrative rule. Despite the founding fathers’ ability to lead independence movements and energize their populations, many of these leaders fell to self-aggrandizement and corruption once in power. Peter Ekeh (1975) argues that political culture enabled this corruption: stealing from the state was not regarded as immoral, so long as proceeds were used to deliver benefits to supporters. Leaders had strong reciprocal relationships with their supporters — a second public, in Ekeh’s terms, often defined by ethnic groups. Yet, what those clients demanded was not good governance and fiscal discipline, but rather patronage. To survive in office, leaders found it necessary to build up a “political budget” that corrupted and ultimately bankrupted the state. Poor endowments, infeasible goals, incentives not aligned with the promotion of reform, and permissive political cultures were the major sources of policy failure adumbrated in this book. They led to a generation of low growth, authoritarianism, and societal violence. In the evocative metaphor of de Waal (2015), African politics in its first generation of independence was “turbulent.” In many states there were daily changes in key political appointments, announcements of bold new programs, anti-corruption drives, and popular demands for reform. And yet one could return to a country after several years, and politics would look the same. The flurry of activities continued to reproduce the same political equilibrium. However, by 1990, a new generation of leaders, often in power due to popular protest against corruption and authoritarianism, sought to break out of this low growth and authoritarian equilibrium. The national congresses, the OAU reconstituted as the African Union, the newly invigorated department of peacekeeping operations of

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the UN, the end of the Cold War, and a recognition by aid givers of the importance of evidence-based economic policy that takes into account local context and incentives all brought a renewed optimism to observers of Africa. We examined post-1990 trends in part IV of this book. We noted that there is a significant divide within the continent between those countries that have achieved moderate growth, democratic institutions, and social stability and those countries still mired in a distressing equilibrium. This at minimum demonstrates that the poor inheritance that undermined the hopes of independence is not a permanent constraint on growth and good government. From a perspective of la longue durée, African states remain young, with only seventy years of colonial rule and a halfcentury of independent rule. The ancient states of Asia, in this sense, had a head start in institutional development. This is an optimistic, forward-looking view. Yet, our optimism remains cautious. Economic growth in the past two decades has been based on an evanescent commodities boom, and manufacturing remains stunted in even the highest growth economies. The UN Security Council has returned to a deadlock, making vigorous international responses to civil war violence less assured. New constitutions that were a response to the third wave of democracy are being violated by presidents seeking lifelong rule. To be sure, today’s violations reflect a greater respect for democratic institutions — leaders amend constitutions rather than dispensing with them when convenient. But still, genuine contestation and the transfer of power remains the exception in African politics. Vigilance, for those anxious for success, rather than optimism is the best response to Africa’s current situation.

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Index of Authors

Abernethy, D. B. 162, 201

Baaz, M. E. 341

Abraha, F. 302

Banerjee, A. 312, 313

Acemoglu, D. 5, 127, 128, 134, 136–139, 157, 303, 304, 313, 314, 317

Barbag-Stoll, A. 220

Adedeji, J. L. 281

Bates, R. H. 251, 301, 307

Adichie, C. N. 98

Beier, U. 208

Adida, C. L. 159

Bekoe, D. A. 90

Afigbo, A. E. 56

Bendavid, E. 45

Ake, C. 264, 296

Bender, G. J. 135

Albaugh, E. A. 209

Benn, M. 294

Albouy, D. Y. 134

Berg, E. J. 244, 245, 247

Alden, C. 330, 331

Berman, B. J. 146

Alesina, A. 125, 170, 171

Bernal, V. 148

Allen, C. 63

Bienen, H. 51, 52

Annan, J. 342

Blair, R. 46

Annan, K. 326

Blattman, C. 342

Appiah, K. A. 228

Block, S. A. 307

Apter, D. E. 58

Bloom, D. E. 127

Arriola, L. R. 289

Bold, T. 313

Asiwaju, A. I. 167

Boone, C. 90, 130

Asunka, J. 283

Bouey, P. D. 44

Autesserre, S. 340

Bourdieu, P. 223

Awolowo, C. O. 27

Boutros-Ghali, B. 325

Azikiwe, N. 27

Bowen, S. 212

Basset, T. J. 148

Bratton, M. 49, 275

378

A F R I C A N S TAT E S S I N C E I N D E P E N D E N C E

Brierley, S. 283

Dreher, A. 71, 264, 306

Bright, J. 305, 306

Dube, O. 45

Brooks, A. 62

Dubois, W. E. B 228

Brooks, M. L. 253

Duflo, E. 312, 313

Bruton, H. J. 263

Dunning, T. 264

Burgess, R. 307

Dupas, P. 313

Burke, M. 115, 320 East, R. 64 Callaghy, T. M. 83, 189, 253, 259, 260 Callen, M. 283

Easterly, W. 1, 8, 125, 133, 170, 171, 255, 256, 259, 262, 263

Campante, F. 158

Eboussi Boulaga, F. 275

Cederman, L.-E. 76

Egeland, G. 333

Chanock, M. 151

Ekeh, P. P. 202, 349

Chingono, M. F. 329

Ellis, S. 104

Chin’ono, H. 295

Emerson, R. 15

Christensen, D. 45, 128, 151, 303

Engerman, S. L. 134

Christensen, t. 251

Englebert, P. 185

Clark, J. 128

Enikolopov, R. 283

Clemens, M. A. 262

Ensminger, J. 150, 152

Cohen, J. 313

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 198

Collier, P. 7, 78, 115, 128, 265, 301

Everett, G. 311

Cooper, F. 145–147 Couttenier, M. 115

Fall, A. 178

Crabb, C. V. M. 229

Faris, S. 89

Dale, R. 248

Fearon, J. D. 84, 86, 97, 111, 173, 184, 186, 238, 239, 319, 321, 322, 337

Davidson, B. 139

Fengler, W. 37, 214

Dell, M. 126, 150

Ferguson, C. A. 221

Demombynes, G. 262

Finnegan, W. 329, 330

Dercon, S. 91

First, R. 54

Devarajan, S. 37, 214

Foccart, J. 275

de Waal, A. 72, 74, 89, 275, 290, 349

Forson, B. 221

Diamond, L. 271, 296

Fortna, V. P. 327

Dowd, C. 88

Fosu, A. K. 261

Doyle, M. W. 323, 326, 327, 334, 335

Fowler, T. B. 44

I N D E X O F AU T H O R S

Franck, R. 75

Hartman, A. C. 151

Fu, J. 44

Haushofer, J. 45

Fuchs, A. 306

Heaton, L. M. 44

379

Henderson, J. J. 33 Gallagher, J. 168, 191, 194

Hendrix, C. S. 306

Gebreeyesus, M. 309, 315 Geertz, C. 57

Herbst, J. 115, 118, 124, 130, 136, 145, 175, 303

Gennaioli, N. 143

Higgins, C. 212

Gerschenkron, A. 316

Hinshaw, D. 294

Gerth, H. H. 69

Hochschild, A. 137, 138, 163

Gettleman, J. 295

Hodler, R. 306

Gilligan, M. J. 342

Hoeffler, A. 128

Gilmore, E. 128

Hornby, D. 150

Girod, D. 103

Hostland, D. 300

Giugale, M. M. 300

Houngbedji, K. 150

Glaeser, E. L. 134, 314

Hruby, A. 305, 306

Gleditsch, N. P. 128

Hsiang, S. M. 115, 320

Goldberg, N. 313

Hume, T. 39

Golden, M. 283

Hummel, R. 185

Goldstein, M. 150

Humphreys, M. 39, 79, 80, 219, 342

Gollin, D. 145

Huntington, S. P. 163, 271

Good, C. M. 161, 162

Hussein, K. 90

Grundy, K. W. 54

Hyde, S. D. 77, 283

Guiso, L. 157, 158

Hyden, G. 249, 250

Gunning, J. W. 7, 115, 122, 265 Gunther, J. 18

Ichino, N. 283

Gutiérrez-Romero, R. 91

Igue, M. A. 63 Isaacman, A. F. 329

Haber, S. 128

Isaacman, B. 329

Habyarimana, J. 219

Ishemo, S. 147, 149

Habyarimana, p. 39

Izama, M. P. 45, 165

Halasz, S. 39 Hall, R. 150

Jack, W. 39

Hansch, S. 333

Jackman, R. W. 55

Hanson, J. 43, 44

Jackson, R. H. 227

380

A F R I C A N S TAT E S S I N C E I N D E P E N D E N C E

Jedwab, R. 145, 307

Lee, M. M. 45, 124

Jensen, N. 128

Lefkow, L. 89

Jerven, M. 111

Leonard, D. K. 247, 248

Jett, D. 330–332

Leopold, A. 150

Johnson, C. A. 229

Levely, I. 342

Johnson, S. 5, 127, 128, 134, 157, 303, 304, 314, 317

Levine, R. 8, 125

Johnson, T. H. 55

Lidow, N. H. 105

Jones, B. F. 126

Lieberman, E. S. 40, 42, 43

Joseph, R. A. 69, 70

Likaka, O. 148

Leys, C. 250, 251

Lillibridge, S. 333 Kabeja, A. 43, 44

Lin, J. Y. 315

Kariuki, P. 302

Linebarger, C. 90

Karlan, D. 313

Linke, A. 88

Kasara, K. 75

Lo, N. C. 45

Kasfir, N. 249

Loncar, D. 39

Kayirangwa, E. 43, 44

Londregan, J. B. 55

Keita, M. 51

Long, J. D. 283

Kennedy, J. F. 15

Lonsdale, J. M. 146

Kimenyi, M. 313

Lopez-de Silanes, F. 134, 314

Kishi, R. 306

Lowe, A. 45

Kondylis, F. 150

Lowes, S. 149

Korovkin, V. 283

Lujala, P. 128

Kramon, E. 75, 283

Lumumba, P. 26

Kremer, M. 39

Lyerla, R. 44

Kron, J. 287 Kudamatsu, M. 75, 306 Kuwali, D. 344

Macwangi, M. 212 Mahy, M. 44

La Ferrara, E. 125 La Porta, R. 134, 314 Laitin, D. D. 84, 86, 111, 159, 173, 183, 192, 200, 210, 211, 215, 216, 218, 222, 223, 225, 238, 239, 319, 321, 322, 332, 337 Lawry, S. 150

Mamdani, M. 200 Mandela, N. 16 Manning, P. 144, 145 Marinov, N. 77 Mathers, C. D. 39 Matuszeski, J. 170, 171

I N D E X O F AU T H O R S

Mazrui, A. A. 222

Nock, A. D. 160

Mazrui, A. M. 222

Noland, M. 306

Mbemap, M. 248

North, D. C. 133, 157

McCauley, J. F. 166

Norton, B. 212

McCord, G. 261

N’Oueni, R. W. 63

McGowan, P. 55

Nugent, P. 275

Menaldo, V. 128

Nunn, N. 140, 143, 144, 264, 303

Michalopoulos, S. 124, 158, 169, 172, 173

Nussbaum, M. C. 35

Miguel, E. 39, 115, 219, 307, 320

Nyemba, B. 295

Mills, C. W. 69

Nyerere, J. K. 187

Mills, G. 136 Min, B. 76

Obuseng, S. 302

Mistry, P. S. 262

O’Connell, S. A. 9, 301

Mitchell, R. C. 16

Ofosu, G. 283

Mkandawire, T. 7

Olken, B. A. 126

Monga, C. 314, 315

Olson, M. 194

Montero, E. 149

Omondi, G. 286

Moore, G. 208

Onishi, N. 221, 295

Morgan, G. 329, 330

Orogun, P. S. 190

Morjaria, A. 307

Osei, R. 313

Morrison, D. G. 16

O’Sullivan, M. 150

Morse, B. 46 Moss, T. 264 Mtero, F. 150 Munro, W. A. 150 Munyakazi, L. 43, 44 Mvukiyehe, E. N. 342 Mwabu, G. 313

Paden, J. N. 16 Padró i Miquel, G. 307 Papaioannou, E. 169, 172, 173 Parienté, W. 313 Parks, B. C. 306 Petrova, M. 283 Pettersson, G. 264 Ploeg, F. v. d. 127

Naghavi, A. 158

Poole, K. T. 55

Ndiaye, M. 257, 260

Posner, D. N. 75, 219, 288

Ndulu, B. J. 9, 301

Powell, J. M. 55

Ng’ang’a, A. 313

Prarolo, G. 158

Nkrumah, K. 18, 52

Price, R. M. 248

381

382

A F R I C A N S TAT E S S I N C E I N D E P E N D E N C E

Prunier, G. 335

Samatar, S. S. 183

Przeworski, A. 289

Sambanis, N. 323, 326, 327, 334, 335

Putnam, R. D. 125

Samii, C. 150, 151, 342 Samoff, J. 249

Qian, N. 263, 264

Sandefur, J. 313 Sapienza, P. 157, 158

Radelet, S. C. 269

Saro-Wiwa, K. 221

Rainer, I. 75, 143

Schneider, F. 71

Raleigh, C. 88, 306

Schraeder, P. J. 271, 296

Ramachandran, R. 210, 211, 215, 223

Schündeln, M. 283

Ranger, T. O. 162

Scott, J. C. 223, 249

Raschky, P. A. 306

Seddon, D. 90

Ravenhill, J. 260

Selod, H. 150

Reid, R. J. 189, 192, 194

Sen, A. 35

Reno, W. 70–72, 94, 96, 104, 251

Senghor, L. S. 51

Riddell, R. 308

Sengupta, S. 326

Robertson, C. 8

Serlemitsos, E. 212

Robinson, J. A. 5, 127, 128, 134, 136–139, 157, 303, 304, 314, 317

Shapiro, J. 313

Robinson, P. T. 275

Siddiqi, B. 45

Shleifer, A. 134, 314

Robinson, R. E. 168, 191, 194

Sigmund, P. E. 51 Rodrik, D. 257, 258, 260, 299, 300, 304, 307, Smith, D. J. 67, 81 309, 310 Sokoloff, K. L. 134 Roessler, P. 84, 89, 108, 110, 124, 237, 346 Soludo, C. C. 301 Rosberg, C. G. 227 Sonin, K. 283 Ross, A. 295 Soubeyran, R. 115 Ross, M. L. 127 Spiro, H. J. 28 Rostow, W. W. 243 Stasavage, D. 307 Rotberg, R. I. 85 Stearns, J. 341 Ruble, K. 295 Steinberg, J. 274 Stone, R. W. 264 Sachs, J. D. 33, 127, 129, 261, 263 Sala-i-Martin, X. 127 Salehyan, I. 90 Salhi, K. 248

Stover, J. 44 Straus, S. 90 Subramanian, A. 127

I N D E X O F AU T H O R S

Sumberg, J. 90

383

Vollrath, D. 145 Voors, M. 45

Tanku, T. I. 39

Vreeland, J. R. 264

Teller, C. 333 Thiong’o, N. w. 135 Thomas, N. 253 Thomas, R. 64 Thurston, A. 93 Thuysbaert, B. 313 Thyne, C. L. 55 Tierney, M. 306 Tignor, R. L. 52 Tilly, C. 235 Toole, M. 333 Touré, A. S. 25 Tsai, L. 46 Tsassa, C. 211, 260 Tumanjong, E. 294 Udry, C. 150, 313

Wallerstein, I. M. 232 Walter, B. F. 322 Walter, S. L. 215 Wantchekon, L. 128, 140, 143, 144 Warner, A. M. 33, 127, 129 Waterbury, J. 256 Weber, M. 69 Weingast, B. R. 157 Weinstein, B. 223 Weinstein, J. M. 79, 80, 102, 219, 239, 342 White, L. 199 Wilks, A. 311 Wimmer, A. 76 Woo, W. T. 261 Woodberry, R. D. 157, 161, 162

Underwood, C. 212 Yamb, B. 211, 260 Vail, L. 199, 200

Yanagizawa-Drott, D. 121, 158

Valfort, M.-A. 159

Young, C. 1, 2, 65, 167, 189, 199

van de Walle, N. 49, 68, 258–260, 264, 275

Young, D. J. 288

Vansina, J. 224 Verweijen, J. 341

Zakharov, A. 283

Vicente, P. C. 78

Zegeye, A. 147, 149

Viljoen, F. 344

Zingales, L. 157, 158

Voegele, J. 311

Zolberg, A. R. 2, 49, 52, 290, 347

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General Index

A Abacha, Sani, 285 Abgal, 107 Abiola, Moshood, 285 Acheampong, Ignatius Kutu, 59, 64, 65 Achebe, Chinua, 155, 158, 165 Acholi, 60, 61 Action Group, 27 ADOL, see Average Distance from Official Language AERC, see African Economic Research Consortium Afars, 106, 173, 181 AfDB, see African Development Bank African Development Bank, 264, 314 African Economic Research Consortium, 8, 211, 261, 301 African National Congress, 42, 96, 274, 329 African Peace and Security Architecture, 344, 345 African Socialism, 207, 243–253, 329 African Union, 3, 22, 93, 108, 232, 321, 340, 343–345, 349 as security guarantor, 343–345 African Union Mission to Somalia, 108 Afrifa, A. A., 64, 65 Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, 229 Aguiyi-Ironsi, Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe, 58, 98, 99, 284

Ahidjo, Ahmadou, 229, 231 Ahmed, Abiy, 237 Aidiid, Maxamed Farraax, 107, 334 Ajello, Aldo, 330, 331 Akan, 65, 211, 222, 224 Akintola, Samuel Ladoke, 58 Akuffo, Frederick W. K., 65 Akufo-Addo, Nana, 281 al-Bashir, Omar, 109 al-Qaida, 92, 93 al-Shabaab, 108, 264 Algeria, 14, 15, 54, 62, 95, 231 All-African Peoples’ Conference, 229 Amadou, Cheiffou, 277 Amin, Idi, 61, 62, 102, 103, 287 ANC, see African National Congress Angola, 32, 33, 37, 38, 70, 95, 97, 115, 136, 141, 163, 232, 236, 237, 286, 319, 322, 331, 332, 338, 340 Ankrah, Joseph, 59, 64, 65 Annan, Kofi, 92, 106, 325 anticolonial Wars, 94–96 Anya Nya, 180 apartheid, 15, 42, 71, 95, 96, 100–102, 232, 244, 272–274, 328, 330 Arabs, 89, 118, 179 Arden-Clarke, Charles Noble, 17 Armenia, 283 Arusha Declaration, 20 Ashanti, 65, 94, 193 Ashanti Empire, 143, 190

386

AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

Average Distance from Official Language, 210, 211 Awolowo, Obafemi, 27, 57, 58, 99 as charismatic founder, 27–28 Azawad People’s Movement, 185 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 27, 57, 284 as charismatic founder, 27–28

B Babangida, Ibrahim, 285 Baganda, 60–62, 193 Balewa, Abubakar Tafawa, 57, 58, 284 Banda, Hastings, 245, 279 Banda, Joyce, 279 Banyoro, 60, 61 Barre, Maxamad Siyaad, 105–107, 184, 208, 218, 234, 333 BDP, see Botswana Democratic Party Belgium, 25, 26, 137, 138, 148, 167, 168, 174–176, 195–197, 199, 201, 230, 335, 336 Belkiri, Alain, 248 Bello, Sir Ahmadu, 58 Beni, 45 Benin, 55, 62–64, 75, 99, 119, 150, 170, 190, 193, 275–278, 294, 296 coups in, 63–64 Benin Empire, 190 Berlin Conference, 167–171, 173–177, 181, 182, 184–187, 234 effects on development, 170–174 Besigye, Kizza, 287 Biafra, 97–99, 173, 185, 239, 284 Biya, Paul, 259, 286 Black Hawk Down, 334 Boko Haram, 92, 93, 239 Bongo, Omar, 278, 286, 289 Bosnia, 323 Botswana, 4, 31, 40, 67, 78, 119, 128, 133, 136, 141, 164, 245, 248, 289, 294, 302–304, 308, 311, 316, 329 economic miracle in, 302–305

Botswana Democratic Party, 303 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 106, 325, 333 Brazil, 41, 42 Brazzaville Group, 231 Britain, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 94, 95, 99, 102, 107, 139, 146, 148, 151, 157, 167, 169, 177, 179–183, 187, 191, 192, 195–198, 208, 220, 221, 230, 232–234, 244, 247, 273, 278–280, 284, 325, 333 Buhari, Mohammed, 93, 285, 286 Bukharin, Nikolai, 252 bula matari, 189, 195 Burke, Edmund, 18 Burkina Faso, 24, 55, 62, 92, 119, 141, 147, 208, 259, 286, 288, 289 Burundi, 55, 62, 116, 119, 163, 261, 286, 289, 294, 303, 317, 321, 335, 340, 342, 345 Bush, George H. W., 333 Bush, George W., 44 Busia, Kofi, 39, 64

C Côte d’Ivoire, 52, 59, 90, 92, 105, 146–148, 163, 196, 231, 245, 246, 248, 253, 282, 299, 308, 326, 340, 341, 343, 345 Cameroon, 39, 92, 214, 225, 229, 231, 259, 260, 286, 308 Cape Verde, 67, 294 Casablanca Group, 231 Casamance, 130, 173, 177–179, 185 Catholic, 17, 20, 23, 25, 60, 65, 156–161, 165, 177, 254 CDC, see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 46 Central African Federation, 230, 278 Central African Republic, 119, 293, 294, 317, 326, 340

GENERAL INDEX

Chad, 84, 85, 92, 102, 117, 237, 264, 286, 338 charisma, 13–29, 49, 66 Chewa, 170 Chiluba, Frederick, 279, 282, 283 China, 32, 33, 37, 38, 46, 297, 299, 300, 305, 306, 325, 328 Chirac, Jacques, 275 Chissano, Joaquim, 331 civil wars, 71, 83, 84, 86, 87, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 106, 108, 109, 111, 121, 123, 124, 126, 136, 173–174, 179, 181, 185, 191, 196, 225, 236–241, 284, 294, 319–323, 327, 328, 330, 332, 333, 335, 336, 340, 342, 343, 346, 350 termination of, 321–322 climate change, 320 Clinton, Bill, 334, 335 Cold War, 25, 102, 106, 229, 237, 263–265, 267, 279, 321, 322, 324, 325, 327, 330, 346, 350 Common Man’s Charter, 61 Commonwealth of Independent States, 323 Comoros, 34, 53, 62, 294, 345 Compaoré, Blaise, 289 Congo (Kinshasa), see Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo Free State, 26, 137, 162, 168, 228 Congo, Democratic Republic of the, 25–27, 45, 53, 62, 69, 71, 88, 97, 101, 105, 116, 119, 135, 136, 149, 163, 185, 208, 220, 224, 236, 237, 264, 276, 286, 288, 295, 299, 319, 321, 323, 324, 326, 337–341, 345 as difficult political geography, 116–117 institutionalized brutality in, 135–138 Katanga secession in, 174–177 PKO in, 337–340

387

Congo, Republic of, 55, 116, 119, 128, 136, 211, 286, 294 Congress Party (India), 13 Convention People’s Party, 17, 51, 52 corruption, 6, 46, 52, 55, 61, 63, 66–74, 78, 80, 81, 101, 128, 202, 254, 281, 284, 294, 304, 349 corvée, see forced labor coup proofing, 109–111 coups d’état, 49, 52–55, 58, 62, 63, 74, 83, 108, 109, 124, 225, 280, 281, 284, 346 CPP, see Convention People’s Party

D Dahomey, see Benin Dahomey Empire, 143, 190 Danquah, J. B., 17, 50 Darfur, 72, 88, 89, 109, 264, 326, 345 war in, 88–89 Darood, 106 DDR, see disarmament, demobilization and reintegration democracy, 2, 3, 6, 9, 31, 51–53, 55, 59, 64, 66, 78, 81, 91, 93, 104, 157, 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 271–273, 275–281, 284, 286, 289, 290, 293, 296, 297, 307, 316, 338, 348, 350 Africa’s lag in, 49–81 Democratic Alliance, 42, 274 Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, 339 Democratic Party (Uganda), 60 demography, 121 Denmark, 139 Dhlakama, Alfonso, 331 difficult political geography, 115–117 diglossia, 221 Dinka, 198, 239 Diouf, Abdou, 276 disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, 340–343, 346

388

AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

Djibouti, 72, 106, 170, 181, 182, 233, 345 Doe, Samuel, 62, 70, 71, 104, 105, 251 Dos Santos, José Eduardo, 70 DRC, see Congo, Democratic Republic of the Dubai, 314 Dubois, W. E. B., 228

E Ebola, 45–47, 212, 300 ECOMOG, see Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group Economic Community of West African States, 321, 336, 344, 345 Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, 71, 336, 337 Economic Orthodoxies African Socialism, 244–253 financing gap, 253–256 foreign aid, 263–265 import substitution industrialization, 253–254, 256–258 Millennium Project, 261–263 new structural economics, 314–317 policy experimentation, 312–313 Washington Consensus, 254–255, 258–261, 267, 308, 314, 316 education, 9, 20, 24, 28, 31, 34–36, 38, 41, 43, 48, 57, 72, 75, 76, 92, 98, 128, 134, 143, 149, 157, 160–162, 165, 196, 203, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 217, 220, 224, 249, 250, 255, 261, 263, 307, 317, 346 Africa’s lag in, 34–37 Egbas, 170 Egbe Omo Oduduwa, 27 Egypt, 14, 169, 179, 333 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 14 electoral violence, 57, 88, 90–92 ELF, see ethnolinguistic fractionalization

Entente Cordiale, 169 Equatorial Guinea, 119, 286, 300 Eritrea, 72, 119, 182, 183, 237, 308, 346 Ethiopia, 44, 72, 101, 102, 104, 106, 116, 119, 141, 163, 169, 170, 181–184, 192, 231, 233–237, 299, 308, 313, 315, 316, 321, 332, 333, 345 ethnic diversity, 124–127 ethnic power sharing, 76–77 ethnolinguistic fractionalization, 124–127, 199, 226 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 198 Ewe, 65 Eyadéma, Gnassingbé, 54, 278, 286, 344

F Fabian Society, 244 favorable political geography, 119 forced labor, 137, 145–150, 195 Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, 339 foreign aid, 15, 36, 44, 180, 214, 245, 254–256, 263–265, 267, 291, 306, 308 France, 13, 14, 23–25, 51, 54, 95, 106, 138, 139, 146, 148, 167, 169, 177, 178, 181, 182, 193, 195–197, 209, 211, 214, 216, 220, 221, 224, 225, 228, 229, 231, 245, 248, 260, 272, 275–278, 294, 325, 330, 336, 340, 345 FRELIMO, see Mozambique Liberation Front French Community, 25, 229–231

G Gabon, 97, 119, 136, 276, 278, 286, 289 Gambia, 119, 130, 163, 164, 177, 178, 288, 293–295, 345 Garang, John, 101, 102, 104 genuine savings, 311–312 geography, 115–131

GENERAL INDEX

Georgia, 323 Germany, 167, 169, 228, 271, 316, 329 Ghana, 17–19, 50–52, 55, 59, 62–66, 78, 94, 99, 140, 141, 150, 208, 211, 212, 229, 230, 245, 248, 253, 259, 266, 280, 281, 283, 290, 294, 311, 313 coups in, 58–60, 64–66 Gizenga, Antoine, 177 Gold Coast, see Ghana Gordon, Sir Charles, 179 Gowon, Yakubu (Jack), 58, 99, 284 Grunitsky, Nicholas, 54 Guèye, Lamine, 50 Guatemala, 323 Guinea, 24–25, 45, 46, 51, 59, 170, 229, 230, 246, 247, 290 Guinea-Bissau, 95, 105, 179, 232, 293, 294 Gunther, John, 18, 19

H Habr Gedir, 107, 108 Habyarimana, Jevénal, 120, 121, 335, 336 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 1 Hausa, 27, 56–58, 92, 193 Hausa-Fulani, 98 Hawiye, 106, 107, 333 health, 21, 28, 31, 33, 37–48, 57, 72, 74–76, 139, 149, 161, 162, 165, 203, 211–213, 224, 226, 250, 261, 302, 306, 307, 348 Africa’s lag in, 37–47 heavily indebted poor countries, 254 hinterland political geography, 117–118 HIV/AIDS, 37, 40–45, 302 Honduras, 313 Hong Kong, 46, 302 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 148, 231, 245, 248 human development, 31, 47, 48, 135, 207, 211 Africa’s lag in, 31–48

389

Hutu, 43, 120, 201, 264, 335, 336, 339

I Igbo, 27, 56–58, 98, 99, 155, 165, 173, 185, 220 ILO, see International Labour Organization IMF, see International Monetary Fund import substitution industrialization, 253–254, 256–259, 309 income, 31–34, 39, 47, 48, 77, 121, 127, 128, 133, 135, 136, 142, 147, 150, 171, 191, 195, 211, 264, 265, 299, 301, 303, 305, 323, 342, 343 Africa’s lag in, 31–34 India, 13, 15, 39, 182, 271, 299, 313, 321 indirect rule, 8, 56, 151, 195, 200, 202 Indonesia, 14, 15, 229, 283, 321 Inkatha Freedom Party, 42 International Labour Organization, 147 International Monetary Fund, 73, 253, 254, 258–260, 264, 292 irredentism, 173, 181, 233 Isaaq, 106, 107, 173, 184 ISI, see import substitution industrialization Islam, 93, 106, 157, 159, 160, 163, 165, 183, 193 effects on development, 163–165 Islamic Courts Union, 108 Israel, 271 Issas, 106, 170, 181 Issoufou, Mahamadou, 294 Italy, 106, 107, 167, 181–183, 216, 233, 234, 271, 330

J Japan, 271, 314, 316 Johnson, Prince, 104, 105, 284, 289 Jonathan, Goodluck, 93, 285 Joolas, 130, 159, 178, 185

390

AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

K Kérékou, Mathieu, 62–64, 275, 276 Kabaka Yekka, 60 Kabila, Joseph, 136, 286, 288, 295 Kabila, Laurent Désiré, 185, 338 Kagame, Paul, 42, 43, 101, 102, 104, 105, 286, 316, 336 Kakwa, 61, 171, 172 KANU, see Kenyan African National Union Kasai, 116, 173, 175, 177 Kasavubu, Joseph, 26, 27, 175, 177, 230, 231 Katanga, 26, 27, 116, 173–177, 295, 323, 324 Katumbi, Moise, 295 KAU, see Kenya African Union Kaunda, Kenneth, 96, 251, 260, 278, 279 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 14, 100 Kenya, 8, 21–23, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 44, 60, 70, 75, 78, 90–92, 95, 106, 107, 148, 181–183, 202, 212, 216, 219, 220, 229, 230, 233, 234, 247, 253, 265, 280, 290, 292–294, 296, 301, 308, 311, 332, 345 Kenya African Union, 22 Kenyan African National Union, 23 Kenyatta, Jomo, 21, 22, 60, 247, 248 as charismatic founder, 21–23 Kenyatta, Uhuru, 91, 292, 293, 296 Khama, Seretse, 245, 304 Kibaki, Mwai, 91, 293 Kiir, Salva, 239 Kikuyu, 21, 22, 91, 95, 209, 210, 247, 248, 290, 292, 293 Kinyarwanda, 119 Kivu Province, 116, 185, 237, 338 Kom, 214, 215, 225 Kongo Empire, 143, 190 Koroma, Ernest Bai, 76, 343, 344 Kouandété, Maurice, 63 Kpelle, 170

Kuba Kingdom, 224

L Langi, 60, 61 Latitude, 124–127, 157 Leopold II, 26, 135, 137 Lesotho, 4, 40, 119, 141, 163, 293, 294, 317 Lewis, I. M., 198 Lewis, W. Arthur, 52 Liberia, 45, 46, 62, 70, 71, 102, 104, 105, 119, 170, 193, 251, 289, 294, 314, 326, 340, 342 Libya, 62, 102, 237, 343 Limann, Hilla, 65 linguistic innovations, 220–221 linguistic relativity hypothesis, 216 Lord Salisbury, 169 Lord’s Resistance Army, 104, 339 LRA, see Lord’s Resistance Army Lubas, 175, 176 Lugard, Lord Frederick, 56, 98, 200 Lumumba, Patrice, 25–27, 29, 175–177, 230, 231, 324 as charismatic founder, 25–27 Lundas, 176

M Machar, Riek, 239 Machel, Somora Moisés, 100, 331 Macmillan, Harold, 15, 273 Madagascar, 182 Maga, Hubert, 63 Mahdi, Ali, 107 Majertayn, 107, 108 Maji Maji rebellion, 95 Malaria, 37, 126, 129, 303, 306, 313 Malawi, 75, 170, 199, 202, 230, 245, 278, 279, 294 Malaysia, 46 Mali, 24, 51, 75, 90, 92, 117, 163, 185,

GENERAL INDEX

208, 230, 233, 276, 278, 294, 326, 345 Malinowski, Bronisław, 22 Mandela, Nelson, 16, 42, 43, 244, 273, 274 Mandinke, 193 Mareexaan, 107 Marx, Karl, 244 Masire, Quett, 304 Mau Mau, 22, 95, 183 Mauritania, 117, 118, 163, 231, 344 as hinterland political geography, 117–118 Mauritius, 34, 67, 164, 211, 294 Mbasogo, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, 286 Mbeki, Thabo, 42, 43 Mboya, Tom, 247 Menelik II, 169, 182, 234 Mengistu, Haile Mariam, 106, 333 Mills, John, 281 missionaries, 155, 161, 162, 165, 200 effects on development, 158–162 Mitterrand, François, 275, 277 MNC, see Mouvement National Congolais Mobutu Sese Seko, 70, 72, 105, 177, 185, 208, 324, 338 Moi, Daniel Arap, 103, 209, 290, 292, 293 Moldova, 323 Momoh, Joseph, 70 Mondlane, Eduardo, 100 Morocco, 62, 117, 169, 322 Mossi, 147, 208 Mouvement des Forces Démocratique de Casamance, 179 Mouvement National Congolais, 25 Mozambique, 40, 44, 95–97, 100–102, 116, 149, 161, 170, 232, 328–332, 339, 340 civil war in, 100–101 PKO in, 328–332

391

Mozambique Liberation Front, 97, 100, 101, 103, 328–331 Mozambique resistance movement, 97, 100–102, 329–332 Mugabe, Robert, 96, 280, 295, 306 Murdock, George, 170 Murtala Mohammed, 284 Museveni, Yoweri, 42, 101–105, 286–288 Mussolini, Benito, 271 Mutesa I, 193 Mutharika, Peter, 279 Mwanawasa, Levy, 279, 290

N Négritude, 23, 31, 207, 224 Nairay, Guy, 248 Namibia, 40, 67, 95, 116, 163, 232, 286, 294, 338 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 14 national conferences, 275–278 National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon, 28, 284 National Party (South Africa), 273, 274 National Rainbow Coalition, 293 National Resistance Army, 102, 103 Nationalist and Integrationist Front, 339 natural resources, 127–129 NCNC, see National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon neocolonial, 196, 207–226 neopatrimonialism, 68 Netherlands, 129, 139, 157, 273 Ng˜ug˜i wa Thiong’o, 209 Ngilu, Charity, 293 Ngoni, 194, 199 Nguesso, Denis Sassou, 128 Niger, 2, 92, 117, 185, 276, 277, 288, 293, 294 Nigeria, 27–29, 32, 33, 37, 38, 45, 46, 55–58, 61, 66, 67, 70, 72, 78, 90, 92, 93, 97, 101, 116, 119, 128, 141, 155, 159, 162, 163, 170, 185, 190, 193,

392

AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

196, 200, 202, 238, 251, 284, 286, 289, 296, 308 civil war in, 97–100 coups in, 55–58 democratic backsliding in, 283–286 Nkomo, Joshua, 96, 280 Nkrumah, Kwame, 17, 50–52, 58, 59, 208, 244, 245, 253, 266, 280 as charismatic founder, 17–19 Nkurunziza, Pierre, 286, 289 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 323 Northern People’s Congress, 58 NRA, see National Resistance Army Ntaryamira, Cyprien, 335 Nuer, 198 Nujoma, Sam, 286 Nyachae, Simeon, 247, 248 Nyerere, Julius, 19–21, 24, 29, 51, 52, 96, 187, 208, 219, 223, 244, 250, 265, 266 as charismatic founder, 19–21

O Oakley, Robert, 334 OAU, see Organization of African Unity Obasanjo, Olesegun, 284, 285 Obote, Milton, 60–62, 103, 287 Odinga, Raila, 91, 92, 296 Ogaadeen, 106, 183, 233–236, 332, 333 Ogoni, 221, 285 Ojukwu, Odumegwu, 99 Olympio, Sylvanus, 53, 54 Ondimba, Ali Bondo, 289 Operation Turquoise, 336 OPO, see Ovambo People’s Organization Organization of African Unity, 187, 227, 232–238, 240, 320, 321, 329, 343, 344, 346, 349 Oromos, 173, 233 Ousmane, Mahamane, 277 Ovambo People’s Organization, 96 Oyo Empire, 143, 189, 190

rise and fall of, 190–192

P PAFMECA, see Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa Pan-African Congress, 228, 233 Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa, 230 Pan-Africanism, 31, 227, 228, 233 Paris Club, 254 PBM, see political business manager Peacekeeping Operations, 240, 321–340 PEPFAR, see President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief Peru, 150, 313 Peul, 23, 117, 208 PNDC, see Provisional National Defense Council political business manager, 73, 77, 108, 109, 290, 293 Polity, 53, 197, 272, 279, 281, 296 Portugal, 95, 100, 101, 136, 139, 149, 161, 167, 179, 196, 208, 220, 232, 271, 304, 328–331, 347 Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, 258, 259 prebendalism, 69–70, 74, 75, 80 President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 44–45 Protestant, 25, 60, 156–158, 160–162, 165 Provisional National Defense Council, 281 public goods, 70, 74–76, 80, 124, 125, 134, 145, 150, 152, 160, 162, 165, 171, 194, 218–220, 225, 226, 282, 320, 323

Q Qaddafi, Muammar, 102

R

GENERAL INDEX

Réunion, 67 Ramaphosa, Cyril, 274 Rawlings, Jerry, 62, 65, 66, 78, 259, 281, 283 RENAMO, see Mozambique Resistance Movement Rhodesia, see Zimbabwe RPF, see Rwandan Patriotic Front Ruto, William, 91 Rwanda, 42–44, 67, 101, 116, 119–121, 123, 141, 200, 201, 237, 286, 315, 316, 335, 336, 338 as favorable political geography, 119–121 PKO in, 335–336 Rwandan Patriotic Front, 101, 102, 120, 336, 337

S Saïbou, Ali, 277 SACMEQ, see Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality Salafi, 88, 92, 93, 108 Salafist attacks, 92–93 Sall, Macky, 276 Sankara, Thomas, 62, 208 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 221, 285 SARS, 46, 47 Sassou Nguesso, Denis, 128, 286, 294 Savimbi, Jonas, 322, 332 Selassie, Haile, 183, 231, 233, 234 Senegal, 23–24, 50, 51, 75, 90, 116–118, 159, 163, 177–179, 185, 193, 207, 233, 260, 276, 277, 294 Casamance separatism in, 177–179 Senghor, Léopold, 23, 24, 29, 50, 177, 207, 208, 244, 276 as charismatic founder, 23–24 Serer, 23, 159, 177 Seychelles, 34 shadow state, 70–72, 80

393

Shagari, Shehu, 284, 285 Shaka, 192–194 Sharmarke, Abdirashid Ali, 106 Shona, 96, 280, 329 Shonekan, Ernest, 285 Sierra Leone, 45, 46, 70, 71, 76, 102, 105, 119, 134, 208, 221, 263, 294, 299, 300, 336, 337, 340, 341, 343 PKO in, 336–337 Singapore, 46, 302, 314 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 289 Sirte Declaration, 343 slavery, 3, 46, 136, 139–145, 147, 152, 153, 165, 191, 227, 303, 346 Soglo, Christophe, 63 Soglo, Nicéphore, 276 Sokoto Caliphate, 193 Somali National Movement, 102 Somali Youth League, 183 Somalia, 8, 28, 72, 84, 85, 92, 95, 102, 105–107, 116, 163, 170, 173, 181–184, 198, 208, 233–236, 239, 264, 321, 332–335, 345 irredentism in, 181–184 PKO in, 108, 332–335 test of linguistic relativity hypothesis in, 216–218 warlord politics in, 106–108 South Africa, 15, 40–44, 67, 71, 90, 95, 96, 102, 164, 230, 232, 236, 272–275, 281, 294, 296, 308, 328–330 addressing HIV/AIDS in, 40–44 South Korea, 32, 33, 37, 302 South Sudan, 102, 104, 179–181, 198, 239, 311, 326, 346 South West Africa, see Namibia South West African People’s Organization, 96 Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality, 36, 213, 214

394

AFRICAN STATES SINCE INDEPENDENCE

Soviet Union, 25, 27, 87, 176, 184, 229, 230, 237, 240, 244, 252, 262, 271, 283, 323–326, 328, 330 Spain, 271, 324 Ssuuna II, 193 Stalin, Joseph, 244, 252 Sudan, 61, 72, 84, 85, 88, 89, 97, 102, 109, 116, 119, 148, 169, 171, 179–181, 198, 340 South Sudan secession in, 179–181 war in Darfur, 88–89 Sudan People’s Liberation Army, 102 Suez Canal, 14, 179 Sukarno, 14, 17, 229 Swahili, 20, 208, 210–213, 218, 219, 223, 225 SWAPO, see South West African People’s Organization Swaziland, 40, 119, 141 Switzerland, 314

T Taiwan, 46, 302 Tanganyika, see Tanzania Tanganyikan African National Union, 20, 51, 52 TANU, see Tanganyikan African National Union Tanzania, 4, 19–21, 36, 51, 95–97, 100, 103, 116, 149, 162, 163, 187, 193, 202, 208, 219–221, 225, 230, 233, 249, 250, 253, 255, 259, 265, 266, 280, 335 ujamaa villages in, 249, 266 Taylor, Charles, 70, 71, 90, 105 Temne, 76 Thailand, 8, 124, 265 Tigrean People’s Liberation Front, 101 Tippu Tip, 193 Togo, 53, 54, 90, 119, 163, 170, 261, 276, 278, 286, 337, 344 Tolbert, William, 104

Touadéra, Faustin Archange, 294 Touré, Sékou, 24, 29, 51, 244 as charismatic founder, 24–25 True Whig Party, 104 Tshombe, Moïshe, 175–177, 324 Tsvangirai, Morgan, 280, 292 Tswana, 303 Tuareg, 173, 278 Tumbuka, 199, 200 Tunisia, 62 Turi, Samori, 193 Turkana, 90 Tutsi, 43, 102, 120, 201, 261, 335, 339

U Uganda, 36, 42, 44, 55, 60, 61, 70, 79, 101–104, 116, 120, 171, 180, 193, 202, 230, 233, 237, 253, 286–288, 321, 335, 338, 345 coups in, 60–62 PKO in, 335 Second Liberation War in, 102–104 Ugandan People’s Congress, 60 Ukraine, 326 UN Operation in the Congo, 324 UNESCO, 36 UNIDO, see United Nations Industrial Development Organization Union of Congolese Patriots, 339 Union Progressiste Sénégalaise, 50 United Nations, 1, 39, 40, 73, 80, 81, 105, 107, 108, 120, 121, 127, 176, 177, 183, 187, 227, 229–232, 234, 238–240, 243, 255, 257, 264, 275, 321–328, 330–340, 344–347, 350 United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 314 United Nations Security Council, 73, 106, 108, 264, 321, 323–326, 330, 333, 335, 337–339, 344, 350 United States, 15, 16, 27, 28, 39, 93, 108,

GENERAL INDEX

127, 211, 229, 233, 238, 239, 244, 264, 294, 301, 324–326, 334 UNSC, see United Nations Security Council UPC, see Ugandan People’s Congress Upper Volta, see Burkina Faso Uthman dan Fodio, 193

V Vietnam, 14, 15, 46, 95, 310, 335

W Wade, Abdoulaye, 276 Wahid, Abdel, 72 Wamalwa, Michael Kijana, 293 Weber, Max, 16, 49, 69, 70, 136, 156–158 West African pilot, 28 Western Somali Liberation Front, 106, 184, 234, 333 WHO, see World Health Organization Williams, Henry Sylvester, 228 Wine, Bobi, 287 Wolof, 23, 177, 178 World Bank, 1, 73, 118, 243, 253–255, 258–261, 276, 300, 311, 314, 340, 347

395

World Health Organization, 37, 43, 46, 47

Y Yar-Adua, Shehu, 285 Yoruba, 27, 28, 56–58, 98, 170, 190, 191, 200, 220, 285

Z Zaire, see Congo, Democratic Republic of the Zambia, 40, 75, 96, 97, 170, 230, 251, 253, 260, 278, 279, 282, 283, 290, 293, 294, 300, 308 ZANU, see Zimbabwe African National Union ZAPU, see Zimbabwe African People’s Union Zenawi, Meles, 101, 104 Zimbabwe, 40, 78, 90, 95–97, 100, 101, 119, 230, 232, 278, 280, 290, 292, 295, 303, 308, 328, 329, 338, 344 Zimbabwe African National Union, 96 Zimbabwe African People’s Union, 96 Zuma, Jacob, 42, 274