Political Order and Political Decay (47 page)

A final measure of state weakness concerns the human capital of postcolonial African governments, something that translates directly into poor public policies. Unlike East Asia, Africa had no long-standing tradition of bureaucratic government, and no trained cadre of state officials who were capable of taking over the administrative systems left behind by the departing colonial governments. For example, the Congo had fewer than a dozen university-educated administrators at the moment that the Belgians departed in 1960.

Newly independent governments, operating without administrative expertise, made a series of huge policy errors. One of the most significant was the use of agricultural marketing boards that artificially depressed prices paid to farmers under a mistaken view that this would promote capital for industrialization. At a moment when export agriculture represented the most promising path for economic growth, it went into a sudden decline throughout the region.
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Cocoa production in Ghana, for example, fell from 560,000 tons in 1965 to 249,000 tons by 1979 as a result of these perverse incentives. The Zaireans who took over operation of the Gécamines mine—at the time constituting 70 percent of export earnings—diverted its earnings into a special presidential account, failing to invest not just in new capacity but also in maintenance of existing operations, and thus oversaw a collapse of the mine's output from 470,000 tons per year at its peak to just 30,600 tons by 1994.
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The great institutional deficit that distinguishes sub-Saharan Africa from East Asia is not democracy. Even though democracy had a rocky history in Africa, the region overall was more democratic than East Asia in the period between 1960 and 2000. Nor was the deficit so much in the rule of law, either. Many of Asia's star performers in the early postcolonial period, like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Indonesia, were authoritarian states with relatively weak judicial systems whose rulers could skirt the law whenever they chose. What East Asia had that Latin America needed more of and that Africa lacked almost entirely were strong, coherent states that could control violence and carry out good, economically rational public policies.

THE ORIGINS OF STATE WEAKNESS

The African deficit in state capacity must of course be traced back to the legacy of colonialism, as well as to the nature of African societies prior to the onset of European colonial rule. In this respect, Africa's inheritance was totally different from that of Latin America. In the latter region, Spain and Portugal succeeded in wiping out the indigenous regimes and reproducing their own authoritarian, mercantilist political systems on the soil of the New World. Old World class hierarchies were amplified by the racial and ethnic differences that appeared as the Europeans extracted resources from their colonies. Latin America was bequeathed what I characterized as “weak authoritarian” states, which then failed to develop into either strong authoritarian or strong democratic states in the nineteenth century.

Africa had another legacy. Due to the late start of colonialism and its short duration, the colonial rulers succeeded in undermining existing traditional sources of authority while failing to implant anything like a modern state that could survive the transition to independence. Europeans discovered that they could extract very little from sub-Saharan Africa (with the exception of South Africa) and found the climate of the tropics highly inhospitable. As a consequence they invested minimally in terms of settlers or resources in their colonies. Colonialism on the cheap left Africa with very little by way of modern political institutions when the Europeans decided to leave in the decades after World War II.

Africa was intensively colonized only in the period after 1882, in what David Abernethy labeled the third phase of European colonialism. Phase one had begun with the Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the New World, and phase two was a period of contraction from the revolt of the North American colonies to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Phase three began with the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 and culminated in the “scramble for Africa” that began in the last decades of the century.
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There were a number of important differences between the earlier and later phases of expansion. By the nineteenth century, the technological lead of Europe over the non-Western world was even greater than it had been when the Spanish encountered the New World. Europe was industrializing; inventions like the steamboat and the Maxim gun gave small groups of European conquerors huge advantages over their adversaries. The factor of disease, which had severely limited European expansion and settlement in earlier years, was itself reduced in importance by European medicine and the introduction of drugs like quinine. Abernethy points out that while thirty-nine of forty-eight Europeans died in Macgregor Laird's expedition up the Niger in 1832, not a single one did during an expedition on the same river in 1854.
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These differences had profound consequences. The first wave of colonization in the New World produced economic surpluses for the metropolitan powers in the form of gold, silver, sugar, cotton, and other commodities that could be expropriated to the benefit of the colonizers. Many Europeans during the nineteenth-century expansion hoped to duplicate the Spanish achievement in Mexico and Peru, and some did so on a small scale. The Congo was colonized as a personal project of King Leopold II of Belgium, who succeeded in personally enriching himself by establishing a brutal regime that plundered the region's resources. But the new colonies, and particularly those in tropical Africa, did not yield, overall, a new El Dorado. Theorists of imperialism like Vladimir Lenin and J. A. Hobson argued that Europe's surplus capital needed an outlet and new markets outside Europe. But Africa's output of groundnuts, cocoa, ivory, and palm oil hardly constituted a bonanza that would save global capitalism, or even pay for the costs of its own administration. Indeed, Europe largely lost interest in what Africa could produce after the abolition of slavery and the end of the triangular trade in slaves, sugar, rum, and manufactured goods that had been so critical in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It wasn't so much resource extraction as the intensifying European Great Power rivalry that drove the second wave of colonialism. There were a number of new actors on the scene, particularly a newly unified Germany after 1871, and an expansionist Russia, which the older Great Powers sought to balance and contain, even as they played out their own rivalries. Italy, Belgium, Japan, and the United States entered the game, pushing the competition into previously unoccupied parts of the world. David Fieldhouse argues that the scramble for Africa was triggered by the announcement by Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of its long-term goal of establishing an overseas empire. Germany's ambitions led directly to the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, at which the European powers agreed on general rules for carving up the hinterlands of their coastal beachheads. Between 1878 and 1914, Europe added 8,653,000 square miles to its colonial possessions, claiming a staggering 84.4 percent of the land surface of the earth as under its control.
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This latest wave of European conquest was legitimated by novel theories of race. When the Spanish colonized the New World, they debated whether the indigenous people they found had souls; the Catholic church, at least, concluded that they did and tried—ineffectively—to prevent the worst depredations of the local settlers. In the nineteenth century, the situation was different. The scramble for Africa occurred after the publication of Charles Darwin's
Origin of Species
and the rise of a doctrine of “scientific racism” asserting that the existing hierarchy among the world's races was the result of the inherent biological superiority of white Europeans over everyone else. These views emerged despite the steady spread of democracy and representative government in Europe and North America, and they legitimated the use of force against nonwhite people. As a result, settler populations were granted an expanding set of political rights completely denied to Africans, setting up a sharp dichotomy between citizens on the one hand and subjects on the other.
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Once the scramble for Africa got under way, it unfolded with extraordinary rapidity. There were several specific characteristics of Africa that made this possible. Foremost was the fact that indigenous African societies themselves did not possess strong state-level institutions, in sharp contrast to East Asia. Prior to the scramble, state-level societies existed in only about half of the continent; the rest was populated by acephalous tribal societies based on kin ties.

Jeffrey Herbst has provided a penetrating analysis of why so few strong state-level societies existed, despite the fact that the human species originated in Africa and inhabited the region for some fifty thousand years (see Volume 1, chapters 3–5). In the first place, population densities were low. Although Africa today has some of the highest birth rates in the world, the continent was one of the least populated in the late nineteenth century. It was only in 1975 that Africa's population density reached the level that Europe enjoyed in the year 1500. While Japan had a population density of 118.2 persons per square kilometer and China 45.6 in 1900, sub-Saharan Africa's was only 4.4.
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As noted in the first volume, while technological innovations like higher-productivity agriculture allowed populations to expand, the economist Ester Boserup and others have argued that the reverse was also true, with larger populations spurring the need for technological change by increasing demand and permitting a greater specialization. Whichever direction causality ran, the level of technological backwardness of precolonial Africa was striking: the plow had not been adopted in agriculture, which everywhere remained rain fed rather than irrigation based, and sophisticated metalworking was not developed. The latter had huge political consequences: in contrast to the Japanese, who had a long-standing metalworking tradition and could manufacture their own guns shortly after coming into contact with Europeans, the Africans remained dependent on imported firearms until well into the nineteenth century.
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A second factor limiting state formation in Africa was physical geography. As noted above, political consolidation depends on the ability to project military power and exert a monopoly of force. Large, powerful states were formed in Europe and China because relatively flat land bounded by rivers and mountain ranges could be easily traversed by horses. Projecting military power in this fashion was of course critical to the establishment of centralized states. In Africa, the only flat, open land lies in the empty Sahara desert and in the savanna belt running just below it. It is therefore not surprising that those parts of the continent possessing state-level structures tended to cluster in these regions where horses and camels could be used.

The tropical forests south of the savanna belt proved to be an enormous obstacle to state formation, unless one went all the way down to South Africa where larger political units like the Zulu kingdom existed in precolonial times. Although Africa has large rivers, few of them are navigable for long stretches. (The Nile is of course an exception, and it did facilitate the growth of a large state-level civilization.) It was for this reason that early European settlements on the coasts, created for the slave trade or as trading entrepôts, remained cut off from their hinterlands. Maps of the interior were not available until the explorations of Richard Burton, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, and John Hanning Speke in the later part of the nineteenth century. Road construction, which was critical in knitting together empires as diverse as those of the Romans and Incas, is enormously more difficult to accomplish in the forested tropics.

In the first volume I noted the theory of Robert Carneiro that circumscription was an important condition for the transition from tribal- to state-level societies.
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In open, unconstrained geographies, tribal units coming under pressure from a centralized political authority have the option of simply moving away. This in fact was the situation throughout much of tropical Africa, where land was always abundant and the bush close by. This was why, according to Herbst, political authority was not seen in territorial terms in much of Africa. Since it was so hard to project physical control over long distances, authority was exercised more over persons. Rulers did not have precise maps of their domains, as feudal lords in densely populated Europe did; rather, they saw webs of authority radiating out through networks of tribute-paying clients.
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What Herbst is describing is less, it seems to me, an alternative concept of stateness than societies that were at the boundary of the tribal-to-state-level transition and that remained more at the tribal end. In this respect they resembled Chinese society during the Western Zhou Dynasty in the first half of the first millennium
B.C.
, or Europe in the time of Clovis in the fifth century. In such societies, social organization remains based on segmentary lineages, which can aggregate upward into very large units when they come under attack as a group. But lineages can fracture very easily back into much smaller ones as circumstances dictate (see Volume 1, chapter 3). Power can occasionally be concentrated into chiefdoms, which have statelike characteristics but which, unlike states, cannot prevent the departure of subunits and do not exercise territorial control.

It is important to note that when I speak of political organization in precolonial Africa being “tribal,” this has a very specific meaning that is different from the way the word is used (or misused) in contemporary politics. Kenya today, particularly since the contested presidential election of 2007, is fractured along ethnic lines that have pitted groups like the Kikuyu, Luo, Kalenjin, and Maasai against one another. The politics of countless other African countries is built around similar ethnicities, like the Tutsis slaughtered by the Hutus in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. An ethnic group like the Kikuyu is sometimes loosely spoken of as a “tribe” and ethnic politics as a form of tribalism. There is a tendency to believe that modern African politics is simply an extension of ancient cultural patterns.