Stationary Bandits in the DRC

There is a theory of state formation, associated with people like Mancur Olson and James Scott, in which which early states are modeled as parasitic predators. Matt Yglesias: 

A settled farming community can produce more food than it needs to survive, which means that raiders can profitably steal it. But as Mancur Olson pointed out in his later work, as profitable as banditry may be, a skilled group of warriors might decide that it’s even more profitable to act as “stationary bandits.”

Instead of sporadically raiding farming communities, stationary bandits live nearby and tax them — they are, in other words, the government. 

As a generalized model of state formation, I find this lacking; in particular I do not think it applies to the earliest states we know anything about, in Sumer and Egypt. But there certainly are cases in which conquering elites have acted in exactly this way. As Yglesias puts it, this view is "cynical about government, but not entirely negative."

One of Olson’s points is that stationary bandits, unlike roving ones, have some genuine interest in encouraging the communities they govern to prosper. They need to protect their victims from other bands of bandits. If they provide things like law and order, basic infrastructure, and other growth-oriented public services, then there’s more tax revenue to secure. 

So they may end up being pretty good governors; a famous example here might be Tamerlane, who was a brutal conqueror but under whose rule the cities of central Asia thrived like never before.

In a fascinating paper, an American professor named Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra uses the chaotic eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a laboratory for considering stationary bandit theory. The most valuable products of this region are two minerals, gold and coltan. The prices of both have fluctuated dramatically over the past twenty-five years. When the price is high, the returns to controlling the trade are very high in local terms. So those high prices lead local armed groups, whether militias or units on the Congolese Army, so set themselves up as stationary bandits:

The first result is that, in response to an increase in the price of coltan, armed actors create monopolies of violence; that is, they emerge as “stationary bandits” (Olson 1993), create illegal customs to tax mining output, and provide protection in the mines where coltan is produced— thus creating Tilly (1985)’s “essential functions of a state.”

Sánchez de la Sierra also found that price spikes in the two different materials led to different behavior by armed groups:

A positive demand shock for coltan, a mineral whose bulky output cannot be concealed, leads armed actors to create illicit customs and provide protection at coltan mines, where they settle as “stationary bandits.” A similar shock for gold, easy to conceal, leads to stationary bandits in the villages where income from gold is spent, where they introduce illicit mining visas, taxes, and administrations. 

They also set up courts that adjudicate disputes, punish thieves, and other judicial functions.

The hardest part of the study, and the one that raises the most questions for me, concerns the incomes of people in these areas. The methods used are described in detail in the paper, but for me they did not inspire confidence; basically, Sánchez de la Sierra and his assistants did a lot of interviews. But, anyway, this is his finding:

Having a stationary bandit from a militia or the Congolese army increases welfare. These findings suggest that armed actors may create “essential functions of a state” to better expropriate, which, depending on their goals, can increase welfare.

Very interesting.

Santo Stefano degli Abissini

Santo Stefano degli Abissini, Rome

In Vatican City, right behind St. Peter's, is a small church. The current facade dates to around 1700, but the Romanesque stonework around the door hints that this is a much older building. The first church here was built around 450 by Pope Leo I, and it evolved over the years into the modern structure. This is Santo Stefano degli Abissini, St. Stephen of the Ethiopians.

The existence of this church in such a prominent location, and its survival when most of the Vatican was rebuilt in the 1500s, hints at a mostly forgotten bit of history: the Papacy's determination to make allies of Christian Ethiopians, and their welcoming of a small community of Ethiopian monks within the walls of their city.

The sixteenth-century papacy was besieged on several fronts: the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, the Protestant revolt, growing nationalism in France, and the huge power of the Hapsburgs' globe-spanning empire; Spanish determination to dominate Rome led to their troops sacking the Eternal City in 1527. One of the ways the Popes sought to reassert their power was through scholarship; another was by seeking allies across the globe. The ancient Christian kingdoms of Ethiopia were perfect partners for these initiatives. They might, at least in theory, outflank the Ottomans militarily, and their ancient monasteries maintained traditions of learning to which no one else in Europe had access.

The leading Ethiopian churchmen were not shunted aside but welcomed into the church's inmost councils:

After the death of Pope Paul III on 10 November 1549, the Sacred College of Cardinals of the Catholic Church entered an unprecedented two-month conclave. As the faithful waited, the secluded cardinals produced sixty inconclusive ballots. Their protracted deliberations reflected the divisions within the College, which encompassed disagreements over the response to the Protestant Reformation as well as rivalries between supporters of the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of France. After five fruitless weeks, one participant reported in his diary that on 7 January, an agitated African emerged at the balcony of the Sistine Chapel and looked down upon the assembly, exclaiming, “Very Reverend Lords, the conclavists have shut the doors, and thus now you must either starve or arrive at a decision about choosing a pope!” For some of the gathered princes of the Church, the outburst was surely a shock. But for the Roman Curia, the interlocutor was a familiar figure: it was abba Täsfa Ṣeyon (1510–1553), the Ethiopian cleric also known as Pietro Abissino or Indiano. No interloper, he was a conclave sacrist, client of the deceased pope, and adviser to the Tridentine Catholic elite, and his proximity to Paul III was such that he attended the latter's funeral wearing the ceremonial black cloth reserved for the friends of the pontiff.

Church door, said to be unchanged since the 1200s.

Täsfa Ṣeyon was a fascinating character, and we know an amazing amount about him. From a courtly family, he went into exile around 1530 after getting caught up in one of Ethiopia's many wars, journeying first to Jerusalem and then to Rome. There he joined the small diaspora of Ethiopians centered on St. Stephen's and soon became their leading spirit. He was a remarkable linguist, working in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and multiple Ethiopian tongues; among his accomplishments was preparing the first New Testament in Ge'ez. He also translated Ethiopian texts into Latin, helping lay the foundations of serious European scholarship about Ethiopia. Among his friends was Leo Africanus, a Catholic convert born in Muslim Spain who wrote a famous Description of Africa (1526).

The connection between Rome and Ethiopia also had impacts in Ethiopia:

Ethiopian emperors were keen to acquire European were keen to acquire European goods, craftsmen and artists. And this exchange bore fruit: Portuguese musketmen fought alongside Ethipian armies and Ethiopian embassies graced European courts; Ethiopian monks attended the Council of Florence in 1441, and masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance made their way to the highlands of East Africa – one of the more impressive boasts in the autobiography of the sixteenth-century Ethiopian aristocrat Seme'on is of owning an icon pained by the Venetian painter Nicolo Brancaleon. (TLS 14 Feb. 2025)

I love these global connections, the people who moved huge distances and found ways to live in foreign lands, the friendships that grew up between people from very different lands.

Doing Honor to African History

These days most American and European historians of Africa want to do honor to Africans. But they take very different approaches to doing this.

One school hopes to lift up Africans by blaming all their problems on outsiders. If Africans participated in the slave trade, that must have been because outsiders somehow forced them to. If their politics were a mess, that is because Europeans (or, earlier, Arabs) ruined them. For example, one theory holds that Europeans got Africans to sell so many of their people abroad by creating an arms race that forced all African leaders to spend heavily for imported weapons.

John Thornton thinks that such theories are first, wrong, and second, make Africans out to be much weaker and stupider than they really were. In Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (1992) he set out to show that Africans were not overmastered by Europeans in that period, but chose to do what they did for their own reasons. He is, in one way of putting this, restoring agency to Africans in the slave trade era.

Thornton points out that when Europeans tried to conquer pieces of mainland Africa in this period they almost always failed. European ships and canons allowed them to seize offshore islands but taking even coastal islands was beyond their capability. The one exception was the Portugese seizure of part of Angola, and that only happened because they intervened in an African civil war, helped one side win, and got a substantial territory as their reward. Their attempts to extend that territory in the 1600s were defeated.

Thornton notes that in the period he covers European manufacturing was not much more advanced than it was in Africa. Europe's most valuable exports in that period were cloth, metal goods, and horses. Horses, of course, were hardly any kind of European innovation; they just happen to breed more readily in cooler places. European cloth was valued in Africa, not because it was better, but because it was different, and the African elite liked to have new and different ways to show off their status. The Portuguese also made money by carrying African cloth from one region to another, and to Brazil, so they certainly saw African textiles as something worth dealing in. And, says Thornton, European exports never amounted to more than 5% of the African market, even in coastal kingdoms. 

As for metal, African smiths could make crucible steel, so they could equal the finest European products; not until after 1750 or so did European metallurgy acquire any real technical advantage over the rest of the world. Africa did have something of a metal shortage, because they were short of charcoal for smelting, but even so European imports did not control a large share of the market until the 1800s. 

Nor did the traditional, trans-Saharan trade routes ever die out. For horses in particular the cross-Sahara route remained viable, and Thornton says some African merchants positioned themselves to be able to draw on whichever source had more and better product that year. African merchants, both native and creole, were big operators who could deal on equal terms with European traders.

One major advantage the Europeans did have was in certain weapons, notably canons and armor. But the pope forbade selling weapons to Africans, and the European powers do seem to have been reluctant to sell advanced weapons for the first few centuries. Even when they began to acquire muskets in the 1600s, African armies did not make much use of them; our accounts of African battles in this period show the use of a few canons for attacking forts, but otherwise a lot of spears and swords. (Even so, they regularly defeated European forces, for example by swarming ships with bowmen in canoes.) So, says Thornton, there was no sense in which Africans were forced to trade with Europeans.

Unfortunately Thornton's book ended just when the worst period of the slave trade was getting going, so I don't know what he has to say about the 1680 to 1750 period. But it certainly remained true that African kingdoms and African merchants were independent operators who made their own decisions and defied Europeans who tried to boss them around.

My favorite part of this book was the short chapter on Christianity in pagan Africa. Thornton says that Africans and Europeans Christians easily understood each other's religious ideas, because they were similar: both posited a spiritual world to which certain people had access, and from which revelations might come. The biggest problem many Africans had with Christianity was that its key revelations took place too long ago and far away; they wanted messages closer to themselves in space and time. Thornton says Africans were more impressed by immediate signs. For example, the Jesuits drew large audiences when they used Christian divination to decide which saints to dedicate their new churches to. In the period Thornton covers many Africans "converted to Christianity" to the extent that they attended Christian services and consulted priests for magical aid, but without giving up other sources of spiritual assistance.

Thornton's book is also eye-opening on the vast scale of the documents available for the study of African history in this period. Most of them were written by Europeans, but they were written by a wide variety of men working from a dozen nations, giving us a rich potraryal of these lands at least as they related to trade and coastal governance. The number of African polities Thornton was able to map and describe frankly astonished me. The African trade was highly politicized and always required managing local governments and local power brokers, so European traders made very careful notes on who those people were and how best to deal with them.

African history is intimidating because the space is so huge, the number of independent states so great (hundreds), the vocabulary so strange and varied, the sources scattered across two continents in dozens of languages. Most of us also lack the basic framework for understanding that we acquired in school about the European past. Getting entrance to this mysterious kingdom of the past is not easy, but after a dozen books I feel like I am at least starting to idle around the threshold.

Coca-Cola in Africa

There's a new book about Coke in Africa by Sara Byala, and I just read the review by Barnaby Phillips in the TLS. According to this book, Coca-Cola is the largest private employer in Africa; it and its bottlers, distributors, etc. provide 750,000 jobs. 

During the intense politicking that led up to the end of Apartheid, Coke played both sides, working with the existing white government but also reaching out to the ANC; the first time Nelson Mandela came to America he flew in a jet provided by the Coca-Cola Company. Mandela was among other things a gifted flatterer, and he thanked Coke by writing, "When the history of our struggle is reviewed, the world will fully understand your catalytic role." From the review:

South Africa is one of the most straightforward countries in which to do business, thanks to its (until recently) reliable infrastructure and relative wealth. But Coca-Cola has flourished just about everywhere on the continent. The Coca-Cola factory still operated in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, during the most lawless periods; likewise, in the ruined city of Huambo during the worst days Angola's civil war, the Coca-Cola factory was pretty much the only remaining building without a single bullet hole. So too is Asmara, at the end of Eritrea's war of independence. For Coca-Cola, "Political unrest does not preclude money-making."

African French

Interesting article in the NY Times by Elian Peltier about how West Africans are changing French. Right now about 60 percent of the people who speak French daily are in Africa, along with 80 percent of the school children studying in French. African French is fascinating partly because most Africans don't grow up speaking it at home. They learn it in school, sometimes as the only language of instruction and sometimes alongside the local tongue. They use it as adults because most West Africans now live in cities where people from many different ethnic groups mingle. In a city like Kinshasa or Abidjan, the people in one company or government office might speak three different African languages, so they use French with each other.

What has happened over the past twenty years is that French has become the language of the booming urban youth culture. While the populations of Europe and Asia are graying, that of Africa is getting more youthful, and the cities are exploding. But people don't speak the "correct" French they learned in school. Instead they use a free-wheeling new tongue full of African words and made-up expressions. The leaders in creating and spreading the new dialects include rappers, comedians, and gangsters, the demimonde of the new cities.

To speak only French, “c’est zogo” — “it’s uncool,” said Marla, whose real name is Mariam Dosso, combining a French word with Ivorian slang. But playing with words and languages, she said, is “choco,” an abbreviation for chocolate meaning “sweet” or “stylish.” . . .

In Abidjan this year, people began to call a boyfriend “mon pain” — French for “my bread.” Improvisations soon proliferated: “pain choco” is a cute boyfriend. A sugary bread, a sweet one. A bread just out of the oven is a hot partner. At a church in Abidjan earlier this year, the congregation burst out laughing, several worshipers told me, when the priest preached that people should share their bread with their brethren.

French is thriving in African cities despite what is in many ways a turn against the old colonial power. Rebel military leaders in Mali and Burkina Faso and have stripped French of its official status and are trying to use only African languages in their communications. Several prominent intellectuals have sworn off writing and speaking French. Polls show that a majority of young Africans harbor a lot of resentment against France.

But the momentum of French is too strong for governments to do much about it. It spreads via social media, over the radio, on television, but especially it spreads from person to person in the markets and nightclubs of the cities. Some people Peltier spoke to said they had to use French beause it was the only way to keep West Africa from being dominated by English-speaking Nigeria with its thriving film industry. 

Some of this has even spread back to France, as slang words that originated in African cities appear in Paris and even in French dictionaries.

The world moves on, whether the old grouches at L'Académie française like it or not.

Illuminated Manuscripts from Medieval Ethiopia

The Met has two remarkable illuminated manuscripts from medieval Ethiopia, which I just discovered this week. This one contains the four canonical gospels in Amharic, along with twenty full-page illuminations. It was compiled and illuminated at a monastic center in northern Ethiopia some time around 1400.

Ethiopian art was obviously influenced by Byzantium, but it also drawns on local traditions.

I find in these works a fascinating mix of the familiar and the strange, of sophistication and naivete, that draws my eye and charges my imagination.

I love what the artist did with the standard ancient trope of the arched table. 

And then there is this strange work, an illustrated copy of a devotional poem called The Organ of Mary.

This looks much more African to me, especially the textile-like colors and patterns of the decoration. The scribe of this work signed his name, Baselyos.

The illuminator also signed his name, using a mark that has been found in other manuscripts. This used to be interpreted as a night heron, and thus our painter was dubbed The Night Heron Master. These days people think the bird is the ground hornbill, so now we have the Ground Hornbill Master.

Under whatever name, a fascinating fusion of classical and African traditions.

Tyler Cowen Interviews Stephen Jennings about Development

Stephen Jennings, former economic official in New Zealand, now leads urban development projects in Africa, notably the Tatu City special economic zone in Kenya; I found this whole interview fascinating; some of it is economics, Cowen's speciality, so he asks great questions, but it gets beyond economics into societies, cultures, people.

Here is Jennings, in response to a question about the literature on development:

I think I’ve read just about everything in development. There’s nothing I really like very much. Development is a black box. I don’t think there’s anything that has much predictive power. There’s a lot of ex post explanations, whether they be policy settings, location, culture. I think 90% of them are ex post; very few of them are predictive. Some of them are just tautologies. I really like factualization.

It’s descriptive more than analytical, but it just makes it clear that most of the world has been on a very similar development trajectory. It’s just not sequenced. Sweden started early; Ethiopia started late. But the nature of the transition and the inevitability of that transition, other than very extreme circumstances, is kind of the same. . . .

I don’t think we really understand development at all, because if we could, we could predict it. We can predict virtually nothing. It’s just too complicated. It’s too connected with politics. I think there’s a lot of feedback loops and elements of development that we don’t understand properly. We certainly can’t quantify them because the development’s happening in such a wide range of settings, from communist dictatorships through to very liberal systems and with all different kinds of industrial — on every dimension, there’s a huge range of variables.

In terms of his Kenya project, Jennings identifies the biggest obstacle as finding the right people:

Biggest constraint we face is human capital. We’re obviously not land constrained. We’re unleveraged, we have very good cash flow, we have very, very good financing partners. We’re absolutely not capital constrained in any way. We’re trying to do some world-class infrastructure, world-class execution, world-class buildings, world-class technology. And by definition, a lot of the human capital to do those things doesn’t exist in this market. City scale, landscaping, urban realm — these schools don’t exist. You either have a lot of foreign consultants fly in, fly out; they’re not particularly focused; they’re not necessarily the best consultants in the world; and it’s just extremely inefficient. The constraint is embedding world-class technical people within a Kenyan team.

The issue in creating a modern economy is changing how people live, usually from a peasant or herder way of living to one focused on acquiring new skills and getting a steady job. The biggest obstacle to building a city in Kenya, says Stephens, is the lack of people who know how to plan and build a city.

I am doing a little work these days on a project to build a new light rail line through an older city, and the amount of knowledge needed to do this makes my head spin. To take just one example, the proposed line crosses a pipeline that carries aviation fuel to a nearby airport, and I thought relocating this pipeline might prove to be a major obstacle. But there are people on this team who know how to do that: how to approach the pipeline owner, how to get regulatory approval, how to overcome the engineering challenges involved in moving a mile of active pipeline without any major interruptions in flow, what kind of measures have to be taken to make sure the operation of the rail line never damages the pipeline, or that a pipeline leak doesn't stop the rail line. etc., etc. 

To picture the team involve in this project, imagine that knowledge base multiplied by a thousand: people who can convene and run a public meeting about a new transportation project, who design the project web site, who keep local political leaders up-to-date on developments, who know the price of land in this market, who know the electrical demands of a light rail line or a station and whether the local grid will support it, who know how to drain stormwater away from a rail station or a tunnel, who know what the impact of a busy train line will be on old bridges nearby, and so on and so on.

 Development means producing people with all of those skills; and yet, who would go to school to get those skills until the economy exists to provide them jobs? And how can they acquire experience? That is the challenge of development.

Here is Jennings on how he recruits people – I think he is talking about non-Africans here – to work on his project:

Interviews are a very inaccurate way of selecting and evaluating people. . . . We’ll check their prior work in a lot of detail, and we’ll spend a lot of time with them, and we’ll put them in a lot of situations without their actually knowing that we’re deliberately doing that, to see how they will react with our local staff or without. It might be a dinner after a long day when they think it’s time to relax, but we’re actually looking to see how they interact with our clients. Do they listen? Are they respectful?

Are they really interested, or are they just going through the motions? A lot of the recruitment information comes [when they’re] away from the interview process. How do they behave when you’re actually negotiating their deal? Are they timely? Are they honest? Do they play games? Do they change their position? We rely on a lot of those kinds of data points.

So, you know, never relax around a potential employer.

Evan Mawarire on Freedom

Evan Mawarire is a Zimbabwean pastor and opponent of the Mugabe government:

When you are pressed hard by a dictator, you don't sit down. You stand up! You keep speaking, you keep rising, because the freedom we ask for is not what they give us, but what is inside us. . . .

We are freedom in every moment that we refuse to be silenced. We are freedom every time we refuse for the handcuffs convince us that we have lost hope. We are freedom every time we are arrested and we leave the jails and the courts and go right back to demanding the very thing that they arrested us for.

The Ikom Monoliths

In the Cross River State of Nigeria, among a people now called the Ejagham, are 295 stone monoliths between 1 and 2 meters tall. They are carved of a basalt that is variously described as "hard" or "moderately hard," and while they resemble each other, each is unique. 

Most are arranged in circles, one circle to a village, and these circles are considered spiritually important places; in a book published in 1926, a colonial administrator described the "enormous veneration" accorded to the monliths. 

And that, right there, exhausts all certain knowledge about them.

These are not obscure; there are thousands of photographs online, and outsiders have been asking local people about them and writing down what they said for more than a century. That just hasn't led to much certain information, or even agreement about probabilities.

While the stones are quite important to the people in these villages, the locals do not agree on what they represent. "Oral traditions," the British Museum tells us,

associate numerous meanings with the stones. For example, stone circles are used as places of sacrifice and community meeting places. They were created as memorials of departed heroes or beloved family members and represent powerful ancestral spirits to whom offerings are still made. In addition local community leaders also ascribed religious significance of the stones whereby particular stone are dedicated to the god of harvest, the god of fertility and the god of war.

Via the magic of JSTOR – don't we live in an age of wonders? –I found an interesting 2015 paper by Sandy Onor, a Nigerian historian, published in the Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, which notes that in one village the people say the monoliths represent past chiefs and can tell you the name of each chief.

Incidentally the most common word for these in Ejagham is Akwasnshi, which means "dead people in the ground." But there is no evidence that they are grave markers.

Just as with the Pictish symbol stones in Scotland, there is a strong suspicion that the various shapes carved on the stones are symbols, possibly a form of "symbolic communiciation," i.e., writing. But, if so, nobody has any idea what they mean.

How old are they? Nobody knows. The main point of the Nigerian paper I just mentioned was to try to date them by comparing the various possible methods and seeing if they could be lined up. The only archaeology the author could find was a single study that involved digging one trench, finding one hearth, and getting one radiocarbon date, which came out around 200 AD. Which is fine, so far as it goes, but there isn't any particular reason to think that hearth was associated with these stones, I mean, people often set up their stones in places that have long been considered spiritually potent. (e.g., Stonehenge)

Since people in one of the villages insist that their stones represent chiefs, he tried using lists of rulers as a chronology, using a figure of 13 +/- 5 years for the average reign that he says is widely used in west Africa. That got him to around 1500 to 1600 AD.

Then he tried using genealogies, which are particularly good for the Ejagham since they count by both mothers and fathers, giving two generation counts for each person. Those get you back to around 1800, and, he says, there is other evidence that the Ejagham people migrated to the Cross River region between 1740 and 1820. (The intense period of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1700s badly shook up west Africa, leading to many migrations.)

So, you know, good luck sorting that out. One possibility, which nobody I have found seems to have considered, would be that the Ejagham didn't make these at all, but found them in place when they came to this region. Certainly nobody ever observed an Ejagham man making one of these, so their manufacture had ceased by 1900.

In many of the online photographs, the stones are painted; it took me hours to find a reference explaining that this is done for the annual yam festival.

Like this.

Anyway, what a fascinating thing, a collection of marvelous stone statues still venerated, but by people who may not have made them and do not agree with each other about how old they are, what they represent, or what the symbols on them mean.

Some Facts about Kenya

Lots of optimism from economists about Kenya, where the economic growth has averaged around 5% per year for more than 20 years running. (Michael Power, Tyler Cowen) A few facts:

The population is about 55 million, with a growth rate of 2.1% and a total fertility of 3.17; the UN projects that the population will top out at around 95 million in the 2050s, but other recent studies show birth rates declining faster than that. 

The government is a democracy; there are tribal tensions but since the largest ethnic group makes up only 17% of a very diverse population, no group can dominate and coalitions are inevitable.

Kenya has a thriving tech sector; the most-used mobile money Ap in the world is Mpesa, developed in Kenya.

Kenya has a long history of trading with India, and there are substantial Indian and Pakistani communities in Indian cities; Cowen said the best food he ate in Kenya was at Indian restaurants.

More recently Kenya has been developing strong ties with China, which has invested in Kenyan roads and railroads; there are also Chinese communities in Nairobi and Mombasa and many Chinese restaurants.

There is much small-scale manufacture done everywhere: "On a drive into the City Centre from Nairobi Airport — now much faster thanks to a Chinese-built highway — you can see roadside manufacture of beds, buckets, furniture, tin trunks, lamps, kitchen pots, jikos (ovens), coffins… you name it."

Kenya currently generates more than 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and has an official goal of reaching 100% by 2030. This is a mix of solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal, drawing on the volcanic area of the Rift Valley; Icelandic companies are using state-of-the-art technology to help expand Kenyan geothermal plants. Off-grid solar powers hundreds of villages, and Power notes that from the air you can see the glitter of solar panels across the Kenyan bush.

Something Happening in Sudan

More than 20 US military cargo planes have flown to Djibouti since April 19, and all the OSINT folks on Twitter think this is preparation for US military intervention in Sudan. At least one of those flights went well out of its way to avoid European airspace, so this might be something our allies aren't on board with. And they aren't there just to bring Americans out, since most of the planes unloaded and immediately went back to the US. This observer noted that several flights came from places where special forces are based. Of course, this might be a "just in case" mission that Biden ordered to make ready in case the Sudanese government looks about to fall, so they might not actually cross the border. We'll see.

Witchcraft Persecution in Africa

Across much of Africa, the persecution of witches is still a terrible problem. Estimates of the number of accused witched murdered with or without trial go into the hundreds of thousands, although as I will explain these numbers beg a lot of questions. The persecution of witches draws on a range of problems: belief that misfortune can be causes by black magic; suspicion of anyone who "gets ahead" by means that seem mysterious to the neighbors; fear of mental illness; sexual jealousy; distrust of the government and its ability to provide justice; occasional encouragement by ambitious political leaders or ministers.

One of the strange offshoots of this problem is the phenomenon of "witch camps." When I first read about these I thought it must be a lie, or maybe a mistranslation, but no. Here is wikipedia's description of the camps in Ghana:

Witch camps are settlements where women in Ghana who have been accused of being witches can flee for safety. Women in such camps have been accused of witchcraft for various reasons, including mental illness. Some camps are thought to have been created in the early 20th century. . . . There are at least six witch camps in Ghana, housing a total of approximately 1,000 women.

From what I have been able to read, mostly news articles, it seems that the protectors of "witch camps" are exploiting the women as cheap labor, making them an odd sort of protection racket.

I have written here about this problem before, noting that some witch hunters have claimed protection for their activities under "freedom of religion." But what got me started on it again this week was my discovery that the Catholic Church is trying to right one of its historic wrongs by fighting the persecution of African "witches":

Those accused of witchcraft have now found a perhaps unlikely charity ally in their fight for justice: the Catholic missionary society missio, which is part of the global Pontifical Mission Societies under the jurisdiction of the Pope, has declared August 10 as World Day against Witch Hunts, saying that in at least 36 nations around the world, people continue to be persecuted as witches.

While the Catholic Church encouraged witch hunts in Europe from the 15th to the 18th century, it is now trying to shed light into this dark practice. Part of this might be a sense of historical obligation — but the real driving force is the number of victims that witch hunts still cost today.

Historian Wolfgang Behringer, who works as a professor specializing in the early modern age at Saarland University, firmly believes in putting the numbers in perspective. He told DW that during these three centuries, between 50,000 and 60,000 people are assumed to have been killed for so-called crimes of witchcraft — a tally that is close to being twice the population of some major German cities at the time.

But he says that in the 20th century alone, more people accused of witchcraft were brutally murdered than during the three centuries when witch hunts were practiced in Europe: "Between 1960 and 2000, about 40,000 people alleged of practicing witchcraft were murdered in Tanzania alone. While there are no laws against witchcraft as such in Tanzanian law, village tribunals often decide that certain individuals should be killed," Behringer told DW.

Other counts of the number of witches killed during Euroupe's witch hunts go as high as 200,000, but the number cited by Behringer is probably close to the average of what historians think, so I have no issue with it.

It is equally hard to get a good count of the "witches" killed in contemporary Africa. This is because in many places "witchcraft" is an accusation thrown around so much that it's hard to get a handle on what it means. Sometimes it seems like a justification for trying to cut a relative out of an inheritance, or something to throw at unfaithful women, or at crazy people, or religious heretics, and many other such cases. So when you read that someone was persecuted as a witch you can't easily tell if people really think sorcery is involved or if they are just very angry and using the worst insult at hand. But if you take all the accusations seriously, you indeed get numbers in the tens of thousands per decade.

African witchcraft persecutions are the sort of problem that gives some leftists fits. On the one hand, the persecutions are brutal, sexist, patriarchal, and oppressive, falling most heavily on poor women. On the other, the people opposing them do so almost exclusively in the name of either western ideas about science and human rights, or else modern, western notions of Christianity. For the Catholic church to fight witchcraft in Africa is about as neocolonial an act as you are ever likely to see, besides being open to accusations of hypocrisy. If you really believe that Africa's problems were mainly caused by westerners and that we should back off and let Africans run their own lives, then the Catholic church is making a mistake. But I disagree, because I don't think it matters at all if beliefs are European or African, black or white, colonial or anti-colonial; I care only if they are true or false, just or unjust, good or evil.

Gold in the Dark

Kimon de Greef's piece in the February 27 New Yorker, "After the Gold Rush," is the most eye-opening thing I have read in years.

The basic story is this: the small city of Welkom in South Africa was built when mining companies opened a series of deep gold mines in the 1950s. Around 1989, those mines ceased to be profitable. This was partly because the global price of gold fell, and partly because the growing power of South African blacks and their unions meant that they were not as exploitable as they once were. So the mines were closed; across this region, 150,000 miners were laid off.

Many of them responded by sneaking back into the mines and continuing to mine illegally. These men became known as zama-zamas, which means something like "risky-risky." One event that brought illegal mining to the attention of the companies happened during a routine inspection of what was supposed to be a closed shaft:

To assess the mine's condition, a team of specialists lowered a camera down the shaft with a winding machine designed for rescue missions. The footage shows a darkened tunnel, some thirty feet in diameter, with an internal frame of large steel girders. The camera descends at about 5 feet per second. At around eight hundred feet, moving figures appear in the distance, travelling downward at almost the same speed. It is two men sliding down the girders. They have neither helmets nor ropes, and their forearms are protected by sawed-off gum boots. The camer continues its descent, leaving the men in darkness. Twisted around the horizontal beams below then —at 1600 feet, at 2600 feet—are corpses: the remains of men who have fallen, or perhaps been thrown, to their deaths.

It seems that thousands of men were carrying on this very dangerous work. Although the big companies considered the mines unprofitable, enough money was being made to attract the attention of organized crime. By the 2000s, the mines were taken over by violent gangs from Lesotho, who fought underground battles with uzis and shotguns.

The town of Welkom was not in much better shape:

Welkom is surrounded by enormous flat-topped mine dumps that rise from the plains like mesas. The roads have been devoured by potholes. Several years ago, zama-zamas began breaking open wastewater pipes to process gold ore, which requies large volumes of water. They also attacked sewage plants, extracting gold from the sludge itself. Now untreated sewage flows in the streets. In addition, zama-zamas stripped copper cables from around town and within the mines. Cable theft became so rampant that Welkom experienced power failures several times per week. . . . This past November, a clock tower outside the civic center, considered one of Welkom's landmarks, displayed a different incorrect time on each of its three faces.

Eventually, in the 2000s, all the mines around Welkom fell under the control of one mob boss, a man from Mozambique known as Khombi. Khombi created his cartel by taking control of food supply to the mines; miners lived underground for months or even years at a time, all their necessities supplied from above by Khombi's gang. When they struck it big, they ordered buckets of KFC. Khombi played the part of any truly successful boss, building a mansion, corrupting the local government, making generous donations to favored charities, even bailing out the town when it fell so far behind paying for electricity that the electrical company threatened to cut off the whole community.

Just a few years ago, things began to change again. New mining technologies and the rising price of gold made it possible to resume working the mines officially, and those around Welkom were all bought up by one company. The government moved against the zama-zamas and Khombi's gang, bringing in outside police since those in Welkom were all in the pay of the gangs. Hundreds of people were arrested, including more than 50 local officials. Khombi was eventually convicted of murder. De Greef meets people who believe that when the gangs were broken up, hundreds of men were trapped underground and starved to death.

It's an astonishing story, and one still going on. De Greef says there are still zama-zamas under Welkom, besides many other places in South Africa. It is crazy in itself, and one small part of the craziness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where democracy has not led to anything that most people would call justice.

Against Decolonization

The word "decolonization" has radically changed meanings since African nations achieved independence. During the independence struggle it meant throwing off European rule and creating new, African nations. Now it means somehow cleansing the mind and the culture of dubious European ideas and asserting the primacy of African languages, ideas, and institutions. This seems like it might be an extension of the earlier meaning, but I think it demands rejection of the actual words and ideas of the revolutionary generation. Men like Nkrumah, Julius Nyere, Jomo Kenyatta, and Nelson Mandela did not reject European thought. Most of them were Marxists, Nationalists, or both; many at least said they believed in the full equality of women; they all made use of European languages to spread their message across the world; and they explicitly rejected many parts of African culture, such as tribalism and fear of scorcery. What the woke are pleased to call decolonization is actually quite controversial among African intellectuals:

One of the most ambitious counterarguments to this movement is presented by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò in his provocative new book, Against Decolonisation. Táíwò, a professor of African political theory and philosophy at Cornell University, laments how a concept that once referred to escaping political and economic subjugation by powerful states has come to mean something far less precise. According to Táíwò, “because modernity is conflated with Westernism and with ‘whiteness’—and all three with colonialism—decolonisation (the negation of colonialism) has become a catch-all idea to tackle anything with any, even minor, association with the ‘West.’” Táíwò argues that such undisciplined uses of “decolonization” have a perverse effect, stymieing attempts to understand, let alone improve, the situation of formerly colonized peoples. 

In Against Decolonisation, Táíwò’s focus is on Africa. He traces the origin of a prominent strand of decolonization theory to the writings of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan novelist and author of Decolonising the Mind (1986), a book whose thousands of citations attest to its global influence. It memorably recounted Ngũgĩ’s experience as a schoolboy in 1950s Kenya. Being caught speaking his first language, Gĩkũyũ, anywhere near school resulted in canings, fines and being made to wear signs saying “I am stupid” or “I am a donkey.” Given this history, Ngũgĩ argued that one of the most effective political acts of African writers is to publish in their indigenous languages. When it came to his novels and other literary works, Ngũgĩ had already switched from English to Gĩkũyũ. “This book,” he wrote in Decolonising the Mind, “is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings.” Henceforward, both his fiction and nonfiction would be available to English-speaking readers only in translation.

Ngũgĩ’s condemnation of Western languages as vehicles of African expression is representative of a larger African decolonization project, which goes beyond Mills’s comparatively mild version, and which sometimes characterizes engagement with Western concepts and values as a form of “epistemicide” or “mental de-Africanization.”

But, of course, writing in a language like Gĩkũyũ cuts the writer off from the huge audience he or she might have in English or French, and from most of the international debate about Africa's future. This review goes on to point out that while Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has indeed published all his fiction in Gĩkũyũ since 1986, most of his non-fiction has appeared first in English. Trying to earn your living as an intellectual comes with certain burdens.

Táíwò is also irritated by a tendency to see all of African history as dominated by its relations with Europe:

In opposing this view, Táíwò invokes a vast command of African philosophy and history. Against Decolonisation ranges over everything from Africans’ enthusiastic embrace of Christianity in the pre-colonial period of “informal empire” to the Fante Confederacy of nineteenth-century Ghana, whose founding document “ranks alongside the Polish constitution of [1791] as one of the earliest attempts at liberal constitution-making in the world.” These and other details are marshalled to support an alternative reading of African history, one that considers European colonialism “an episode, not an epoch.” Táíwò’s historical framing emphasizes the role Africans themselves have played in shaping contemporary Africa, a theme reflected in his subtitle, “Taking African Agency Seriously.” To exaggerate the influence of colonialism, Táíwò charges, can itself show disrespect to Africans.

But the real issue concerns what we might call modernization. In throwing off colonial chains, is Africa also supposed to dispense with western science, engineering, and thinking about human rights? In some parts of the world we have seen calls to teach native wisdom in parallel with western science, which seems like a dubious path toward modernity. Many activists have also dismissed European ideas about democracy and rights because Europeans did not practice them in the colonies, and they have sought to build free societies on an indigenous basis; but this has failed everywhere it has been tried. 

Táíwò is at pains to distinguish two different meanings of “decolonization.” The first, which he considers illuminating, refers to a colony achieving self-government. The second refers to the goal of avoiding any idea, practice or institution that “retains even the slightest whiff of the colonial past.” This broader understanding of decolonization is the one Táíwò opposes. Where the first definition identifies a crucial step toward African societies becoming fully modern, home to liberal-democratic governments that follow the rule of law, respect rights and ensure the well-being of their people, the second undermines that unfinished project by rejecting modern political goods as artifacts of colonialism.

Indeed African dictators have often insisted that things like elections and a free press are remnants of colonialism that Africa must leave behind, with predictable results. Not, mind you, that I think Parliamentary democracy is necessarily the best system for every African nation right now, but neither is cynical Afrocentrist dictatorship. In recent decades many African thinkers have drawn from European apostles of freedom, from John Stuart Mill to Bakunin, to argue for their own rights.

To me it seems obvious that the way forward for humanity is to take the best from every part of the world, or the parts we like best, and build a future from all those blocks. Rejecting the vast heritage of the west is not going to help anyone move forward.

Ekow Nimako's Lego Afrofuturism

Ekow Nimako was born in Ghana and lives in Toronto. He has made a splash with his Lego visions of Afrofuturism, all in black. More here and here.

Above and top, Nimako. Below, Kumbi Saleh 3020 CE

John Reader, "Africa: A Biography of the Continent"

If you're looking for a one-volume introduction to Africa and its history, I suggest John Reader's 680-page epic, published in 1997. It is readable, rich, and full of fascinating information. But especially, and most impressively, it is coherent. Until I read this book my knowledge of African history was highly fragmentary, with nothing but the borders of the continent holding it together. Reader's book made it more unified for me than anything else ever has. 

Reader's argument in the first half of the book is that Africa lagged behind Europe and Asia because Africa is a really tough place for people to live. Until after 1950 Africa's population density was much lower than those of the other continents, because a combination of disease, poor farming conditions, and shifting weather patterns kept it that way.  You have often heard about some plant or animal that exploded after migrating to a new place because it lacked natural enemies; Reader thinks this applies to humans as well. Africa, where we evolved, has the most predators of various kinds that evolved to trouble us. The most important is malaria, but there are many others. Between this, lousy geology (see below), and then the enormous tragedy of the slave trade, Africa entered the nineteenth century far behind the European powers that proceeded to divy it up and loot its various valuable commodities.

Reader's map of the fertility of African soils

Reader's book begins in the Precambrian, laying out Africa's geological origins. This sounds random, but with Reader everything ties together. Through the course of the book he refers several times to the bedrock of Africa, which explains why agriculture remained so primitive across most of the continent (above) and also the presence of gold, diamonds, and other minerals that radically changed African history in the 19th century.

Reader gives some attention to human origins and the Paleolithic, but the book really gets going in the Neolithic. Obviously a book on a whole continent can't give equal attention to every area, and Reader's eye wanders around. For the Neolithic he focuses on the Nile Valley and the adjacent parts of the Sahara, which was much wetter in some periods than it is these days. During periods when the Sahara was wet enough it was inhabited by three different groups of people: hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and farmers, who seem to have lived fairly peacably side by side and traded with each other. In fact our first evidence of herding in the region is cattle bones found on the camp sites of hunter-gatherers.

I already wrote here about the remarkable society that developed in the Interior Delta of the Niger River, which I found fascinating. Otherwise much of Reader's attention during the Classical and Mediaval periods is focused on Ethiopia. A rich Christian civilization emerged there, with productive agriculture based on a combination of Middle Eastern and African plants (wheat, teff); among other things it produced sub-Saharan Africa's only native script. The Ethiopians carried out diplomatic relations with the Byzantines, trying but never succeeding to ally against Muslim enemies. There isn't much on the medieval empires of the Sahel (Songhai, Mali), partly because Reader thinks the sources about them, almost all Arab, are suspect. Reader has an excellent section on the spread of the Bantu peoples, who developed their system of mixed agriculture, cattle raising, and iron making in the area of modern Nigeria and then migrated across all of Africa's southern cone.

The slave trade gets a very long and rich section. Reader lays out slavery's early roots in African cultures, the trade to the Middle East via the Indian Ocean, and then the European trade in the Atlantic. Reader thinks slavery became a major part of many African societies because agriculture was so difficult. He cites calculations showing that in many areas the labor of two adults was not enough to reliably feed a family. (Even when they were healthy, which in Africa they often were not.) In much of western Africa there was no ownership of land, because land was effectively valueless without enough labor. Everyone was constantly struggling to find workers. The wealth of prominent families was measured entirely in terms of how much labor they could command; hence, various forms of slavery were well entrenched by the time of our first records and probably since the origins of agriculture. Even so, the profit earned by an agricultural worker was so low that when traders appeared offering valuable goods, the temptation to just sell people instead of working them was too great. But the export of millions of people only made the labor shortage worse; this, Reader argues, kept Africa from developing in the slave trade era. The curse spread to all of sub-Saharan Africa, since raiders working inland from the Atlantic coast eventually penetrated so far east that they ran into raiders working for Muslim traders on the east coast. Reader thinks that many of modern Africa's ethinc groups were created by people who fled from slave raiders into highland zones, or banded together to fight them. The whole continent was shaken up, and all its other industries wrecked, because of the profits those strong enough could earn by stealing people and selling them to the ships. 

By way of an alternative, Reader has a chapter on the island of Ukara in Lake Victoria. On this small island, highly fertile soils, the absence of mosquitos and tse tse flies, and the availability of markets accessible by boat created perfect conditions for high-intensity agriculture. The 16,000-18,000 residents (all free) responded by creating a system that would make Dutch gardeners proud, with extraordinary crop yields wrung from small plots. Ukara is also an exporter of people. Under the right conditions, Reader is saying, Africans could create efficient agricultural and other systems, leading to high populations and technological progress. It's just that the conditions were mostly terrible.

Reader lived for several years in South Africa, and he has a long section on the development of white settler societies in that region. It is a thoroughly sordid tale of land theft and enslavement, made even more nauseating by the cloak of do-gooding language nineteenth-century Europeans felt compelled to cast over their wicked deeds. When African communities were attacked, their men killed or driven off, the women and children brought to labor on white farms, this was called "Christianization." Again, the driving force behind many of these crimes was the need for labor. Europeans trying to farm in southern Africa constantly needed more workers, and the trickle of European immigrants was never enough. Various plans to separate the races (leading eventually to Apartheid) always failed, because there were just not enough white people to do the necessary work. 

Then the whole region was shaken up by minerals, first the astonishing riches of the Kimberley diamond mines and then the gold of the Rand. I very much enjoyed Reader's account of the early days of Kimberley in the 1870s, when many whites and even a few blacks got rich from 3x4 meter plots of ground. At Kimberley the diamond fever phase lasted a decade, before the mines got too deep for solo work and a consortium of investors led by Cecil Rhodes took over the whole shebang. And proceded, as you would expect by now, to employ a labor system little different from slavery. The greed of our species never ceases to amaze me. Kimberley was such a rich place that the company could have paid good wages and still made vast profits, but instead they used their political clout to get the government behind schemes of vicious exploitation that earned them a return of nearly 50% per year for decades. The same system of compounds and labor passes was then extended to the gold mines, becoming a fixture of 20th-century South Africa.

From there Reader's attention moves to the Belgian Congo, where King Leopold II's mad desire for colonies set off the "Scramble for Africa." The Belgian Parliament refused to support the king's schemes, so he had to finance his venture himself, which led to intense pressure to harvest wild rubber to cover the payments on the massive debts he ran up. Rumors about the brutality of the rubber trade made it back to Europe, but Leopold managed to deflect them until photographers made it to the Congo and brought back images so grisly they forced the King to give up his colony. But by that time the European powers had already divvied up the rest of the continent, except the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, launching the colonial era.

The depressing thing to me about this period is the minimal resistance offered by Africans. As Reader shows, this had a lot to do with the aftermath of the slave trade. Slave raiding taught Africans hate and fear each other, so there was no chance they could work together. In fact many kingdoms and peoples welcomed European overlordship, seeking protection from slave raiding states. The slave trade had also created a demand for foreign goods that was hard to satisfy without other exports; hence, many African leaders were eager to support colonial development schemes. Resistance mostly erupted later, after Africans came to understand that they had been lied to. But by that time the colonial powers were entrenched, and their mostly African, machine-gun equipped armies easily put down revolutionaries armed with muskets.

To me the most interesting part of the colonial chapters concerned education. Various government boards in Britain, France and Germany kept finding that Africans should be given an education appropriate to their own situation. This was easy to implement at the elementary level, but once students had learned to read and write, nobody knew what African things to teach them. So the elite secondary schools that all the powers set up taught European literature and history, including a heavy dose of the classics. The leadership of Africa's revolutionary generation was drawn largely from the attendees of these schools, and many of them had also attended university in Europe. In their memoirs they all wrote about the divided self that this experience created; they tried to lead Africa, but they understood full well that they were no longer entirely African. When educated Africans wrote about the "colonial experience', this is what they meant: not just oppression, but the weird psychology of being torn between the art and science of Europe and love of their homelands. Many ended up living in Europe, especially those who lost out in the power struggles that followed independence.

A few random things I learned from Reader:

• The shortage of people that Reader documents at such length explains, he thinks, the obsession with sex and fertility in western African art and society that shocked western visitors.
• The first Italians visited Ethiopia in the early 1400s, but this was a century later than the first Ethiopians to visit Italy, who are recorded in 1316.
• One reason that cities did not develop across most of Africa was that the areas suitable for farming kept moving around with changes in the weather. In most of Africa, any place that was reliably wet was infested with malaria, so farmers worked on the margins between wet forests and dry deserts; as the climate changed, these areas shifted, and the people had to move with them.
• Monarchical stability was not an African speciality; in the BaGanda language, "the closest thing to a word for reign is mirembe, which means a period of peace between succession struggles."
• Across much of Africa human settlement was limited by a constant war with elephants; "for centuries, much of Africa's potential farmland was a continuously changing patchwork of mutually exclusive human and elephant occupation zones, with the elephants limiting opportunities for agriculture."
• The usual accounts of the reign of Shaka Zulu (1816-1828) are misleading – this includes the one at wikipedia – because they ignore the events that created the chaos within which Shaka acted. Turmoil was created by a resurgence of slave trading through the Indian Ocean port of Delagoa and the eastward expansion of white settlement from Cape Colony; according to Reader, British accounts emphasized Zulu violence to cover up their own part in destabilizing southern Africa.

If you want to know more about Africa – and really, how many Americans or Europeans really know very much about Africa? – Africa: A Biography of the Continent is the best thing I know.

Asante Gold Weights

The Asante Empire, more or less modern Ghana, lasted from 1701 to around 1900. The most common currency in the empire's markets was gold dust. This required weighing, so everyone doing business carried around a set of scales and weights. 

The earlier examples were just geometric shapes, but by 1800 most of them were tiny scupltures around the size of a Monopoly piece.

You could buy anything with gold dust in Asante, so there were special tiny "wind scales" for weighing out a few grains of dust, and tiny weights to match.

These became a lot less useful after the British introduced their coinage in 1896 and required that taxes be paid that way. The gold dust economy gradually disappeared, and many of the now useless weights were bought by Westerners, Now there are thousands in museums and private collections around the world.

Some of these are said to represent folk tales or proverbs. For example, the two-headed crocodile is from a proverb about family squabbles. The two heads squabble over who gets to eat even thought they have only one belly, just like family members squabble even though they have the same interests.

I just discovered the tiny objects today, and I find them delightful.