South Africa’s rulers still cling to the notion that they ought to have hospitals and universities and roads and affordable housing and arts funding and monuments, but it is a half-hearted clinging, the reflex of old habit rather than holding on to something dear and irreplaceable.

You can’t get at the president’s chicken coops or the minister’s elegant hotel room. There’s no way to occupy a Swiss bank account. The money’s being made far away or right under your nose, but it’s behind walls and razor wire. If you’re inside, you either need your little share to keep from drowning, or you’re getting your big share and have some payments to make on your BMW.

You can get at the university and not just because the people inside the walls are willing to push it outside and let it take its chances. You can get at it because the university’s own aspirations compel it to vulnerability. It is by nature and design a porous system. Not “open” but fissured, not without hierarchy but neither a highly hierarchical system. Students are regulated and governed, but they also must be present, speaking and consenting at the heart of the institution’s life, in its classrooms and buildings. The oil well can operate without anyone present but the workers and the managers. The Parliament can operate without citizens. But the university has to have students, and students cannot be made mute and compliant even in the most spoon-fed, lecture-driven, exam-assessed course.

The university has to have faculty, and even in the most neoliberal and managerial institution, it has to believe that faculty are its primary source of value, that their assent on some level to its operations is important. To undo that would require a new kind of institution: it is baked into the form as it appeared at the end of the 19th Century.

So the university is the soft spot, the place that can’t be hidden and can’t be behind walls. It is where those who are right to be furious at the poisoning of the commons are already gathered, the young whose inheritances are being stolen. It is the place that has to listen, however reluctantly and truculently, and it is the place that the powers-that-be will allow to be a site of turmoil, for a time. A march to the President’s farm is if nothing else a logistical nightmare even if one had tens of thousands ready to go, but it is also a place where there would be no hesitation before guns were fired and people died. The ministries are all behind high walls, and the guns would fire there too. The people ready to march and confront are already at university: it is readily at hand.

The problem is that the university, and all its possibilities for reform and transformation, is one of those inheritances. The problem is that the people behind the walls might be glad to be rid of it altogether. Ministers’ sons and daughters will still find their places at the LSE, the Sorbonne, Harvard.

The problem is that the university is fragile. The properties that make its managers at least hesitate to shoot, that at least act willing to consider negotiating, that allow it to be paralyzed for a time, that permit harsh critics to remain on staff or enrolled, are fragile. This is not the first time since 1950 that universities in the world have been pushed to breaking by an insistent politics of martyrdom, or used as the first target in a long struggle. When the furrows are salted enough, little will grow for generations to come. When the soft place becomes a hard one, that’s usually involved bringing academia inside the fortress: expelling students, firing staff, enforcing hierarchies, defining some knowledge and some ideas as forbidden. Think of universities in authoritarian states: they are there for show, not to fulfill their real mission. They are mausoleums. Maybe in this neoliberal moment, even hardening the university will be little more than a haphazard gesture of indifferent violence from an order that is increasingly without shame, and the real move will be to treat the university like Biafra: surround it and starve it. Dispense with it.

Struggle often uses at least the metaphors associated with military conflict. So think about wars and ask yourself what kind of war you’re in when a side that has an entirely just cause but that lacks the force to attack a well-defended enemy decides to attack the least-defended targets because it’s the only thing they can get at. Ask yourself what comes next in a war like that, and how often a war like that ends up achieving the aims of the just.

But I also do feel that it’s important in some sense not to have a dispute that is both scholarly and political completely overwhelm the possibility of giving useful guidance to J.K. Rowling and other creators who work with fantasy or speculative fictions. In general, I would like to see specialists in African history and anthropology be prepared not only to provide useful, digestible knowledge to fiction writers but also to non-specialists. Which means, I think, showing how it could be possible to draw upon specific African histories and experiences to create and imagine fictions and stories that incorporate African inspirations rather than to treat Africa as a zone of exclusion because it’s too difficult or touchy.

So: a bit of fanfiction, intended to demonstrate how to subtly rework what Rowling has already said about her wizarding world.

—————————

#PrefectusMustFall
A MANIFESTO

For a month now the instructors at Uagadou have dutifully assembled to ward off attempts by students, particularly those in Ambatembuzi House, to cast kupotea on the statue of Peter Prefectus that has been at the foot of the Great Stairway for the past sixty years.

Prefectus’ own nkuni spirit has joined the teachers in defending his statue, though as always it is hazy and distracted, only half here, half wandering indistinctly in the halls of England’s Ministry of Magic. We say that they must allow the spell to be cast: let him go home once and for all. There are few left in Prefectus House, anyway. The white wizards who still live in Africa go to Hogwarts, Ilvermorny or Durmstrang, as do some number of Africans.

Prefectus Must Fall. Though we students love Uagadou and what we learn here, it is time for this school to be a truly African school. Not the “African” of silly affectations like using hands instead of wands that a few teachers introduced forty years ago in an attempt to get away from Prefectus’ wholesale importation of the curriculum of Hogwarts! Let us rediscover the real history of African magic, of the many magical styles and ways of learning from Africa!

We know the truth now. This old, rotting, half-real castle shivering in the mountains isn’t a thousand years old, it’s 110 years old. Or more to the point, it’s a thousand-year old school that was stolen and stuffed inside an imposter’s cheap recreation of the school that never let him be a teacher. Peter Prefectus was a fourth-rate wizard stuck in a basement of the British Ministry of Magic who decided that if he couldn’t teach at Hogwarts, he’d go off to Africa just like the Muggle officer Harry Johnston and make a Hogwarts there.

There was a school here once, back before the kingdom of Bunyoro rose. It wasn’t for all Africans everywhere, but Swahili and Ituri and Khoisan wizards from the coast and the jungle and the forests all came. People from the shores of the big lakes came, people from the hills and savannah came. That’s where Peter Prefectus built his fake Hogwarts, where that old school was. The leaders of that ancient school foolishly let him and helped lift the stones and cast the spells. They felt they needed to understand what was happening, and to learn the magics that Prefectus offered, but all they did was sell out our heritage!

They don’t tell you when you get sorted that Prefectus was an incompetent who had the cheek to believe that his teachers and pupils were incapable of any real magic anyway. He never learned an African language, not one, but made the students learn spells like “expelliarmus” and “impedimenta”. He hired other European wizards and let them bully and hurt and even kill the Africans who came there. We had wizards like Grindlewald and Voldemort here too, but they were in charge and no one came to the rescue, not for us.

We know the truth. Prefectus must fall.

Prefectus stole two schools! The ancient one of the lakes and then he had the cheek to try to steal a name from near to another old African place of magical learning, the school which today still exists at Kumbi Saleh in the ruins of Ghana. Hard times for it now, harried by sinister wizards hiding in the Sahara who believe that all magical schools should be destroyed. That is another reason Prefectus must fall: it is time for Uagadou to do its part in helping other African wizards in their struggles. Kumbi Saleh should not have to wait for a half-hearted delegation of wizards from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang to save it from attack. We should not hear any longer from our headmaster and teachers that it is “against tradition” for Uagadou to play a role.

Uagadou, even in disrepair, is still wealthier than our real comrades at the ancient academies in Kumbi Saleh and Axum. We should help them and work with them and learn from their wisdom about wizarding. We should be working with the “moving school” of Eshu, the secret society of West African wizards who have no castle or building, but who move tirelessly from one site of ancient power to the next, from Old Oyo to Benin to Kumasi, walking the ways that they know. We should talk to the small schools that meet all over the continent, and reach out to wizards too poor or endangered to think of coming here. Uagadou should train far more Africans than it does, and stop just being for a small handful of families made powerful by their dealings with the European wizards.

Prefectus Must Fall! Unite to liberate our school and our peoples! Leave off the lies, cast away the glossy brochures that arrive by Dream Messengers to entice you here. Face the truth!

Let’s start from the very beginning, with Rowling’s expansion of her world-building in Harry Potter. When she recently imagined what the whole world in her fantasy universe looks like, what did she say about it?

1. That most nations in her world do not have their own wizarding schools. Most wizards are “home-schooled”.
2. That distance education (“correspondence courses”) are also used to train wizards.
3. That the eleven wizarding schools that do exist in the world share some common characteristics that derive from the common challenges and affordances of magic. They tend to be remote, often in mountainous areas, in order to insulate themselves from Muggles, in order to attempt to stay out of wizard politics as much as possible, and to maintain some independence from both Muggle and wizard governance.
4. That there is an International Confederation of Wizards to whom a budding wizard can write (via owl) to find out about the nearest wizard school.
5. So far, Rowling has announced that there are three wizarding schools in Europe, one in North America (on the East Coast), one in Japan, on in Brazil (in the rainforest), and one in Africa called Uagadou, pronounced Wagadu. As far as I know the others aren’t announced yet.

What of Uagadou?

1. It’s pronounced Wa-ga-doo. Farrell and Blattman take this to be a reference taken from the place of the same name associated with the ancient empire of Ghana. (Which was located in what is now Mali and Mauritania in West Africa.)
2. There are smaller wizarding schools in Africa, but Uagadou has an “enviable” international reputation and is a thousand years old.
3. It enrolls students from all over the continent.
4. Much magic, maybe all magic, comes from Africa.
5. Wands are European inventions; African wizards just use their hands.
6. Uagadou doesn’t use owls for messages, it uses Dream Messengers.

In response to Twitter complaints that this is just more “Africa is a country” thinking, where the entire continent gets one school that is an undifferentiated mass of African-ness, without specific location, Rowling has responded first to say, “Students from all over” and second, that Uagadou is in Uganda, in the “Mountains of the Moon”, by which she probably means the Rwenzori Mountains in northwestern Uganda.

——

Farrell and Blattman set out to defend Rowling, saying that it is plausible that all of sub-Saharan Africa would only have one wizarding school. (I’m guessing that before she’s done, there will be a wizarding school in Egypt or otherwise near to North Africa, so let’s leave that aside.) Farrell and Blattman do so by saying that Sub-Saharan Africa didn’t have a “state system”. In an initial tweet, I expressed my irritation by noting that there were states in Africa, to which Farrell replied that their article concedes that there were. Just that material environments “conspired against” state development until colonialism, and that the fewer states that existed were far apart, and thus that there was no state system, no competitive relationship between states, and thus that states did not become strong through such competition, unlike in Europe or Japan, where there were more rivalrous relationships between states because of the relative scarcity of land.

I think I am right to say that Farrell and Blattman’s acknowledgement that there were states is essentially prophylactic, meant to head off precisely the kind of Twitter objection I offered. The substance of their piece is still this: Africa had an absence of something that Europe had a presence of, and that this is what makes Rowling’s fantasy a historically plausible one, that rivalrous states that form a state system that is about control over a scarce resource (land) could lead to having multiple wizarding schools, and that Africa’s absence of these things means that having only one makes sense too. “There has been a relatively solid state” in England for a thousand years, they say, so of course Hogwarts. Uagadou, in contrast, must have formed in the absence of a state. And maybe it shares a name with a place that was thousands of miles away because perhaps “the school began in a faraway territory, before it hid itself in the remote mountains of central Africa, fleeing slave raiders and colonial powers”.

———-

I have on occasion expressed frustration with Africanists for insisting that non-specialists must go deep inside the particulars of specific African histories in order to win the right to talk about them. And the similar inclination of many practicing historians to view large-scale comparative history or the more universalist aspirations of many social scientists with suspicion. But this is a case where some of that suspicion is warranted, I think. Partly because Farrell and Blattman insist on the tangible historical plausibility of Uagadou in Rowling’s fantasy world and they then toss in just enough history to be tangibly wrong.

Here’s the thing. First, if I were going to construct what is essentially a fantasy counterfactual of a relationship between the place Wagadu and some other place in sub-Saharan Africa, that a group of wise and knowledgeable wizards moved from an important trading community in the empire of Ghana to somewhere else in Africa, I’d at least stick to historically plausible routes of movement and connection. Wagadu and the eastern side of the Rwenzori Mountains is roughly like imagining that an ancient group of Irish wizards relocated to Ukraine in order to get away from British landlords. It’s very nearly random, and that’s the problem. It’s exquisitely well-meaning of Rowling to want to imagine Uagadou in the first place, and to respectfully draw out of African history for the name of the place. But it doesn’t make sense in terms of very real histories that can be described for what they actually were, not in terms of some abstracted absence in comparison to Europe.

Equally, I’d wonder at the counterfactual that has Uagadou moving a thousand years ago, before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and at the height of state-building (even state system building) in the upper Niger and Sahel. It’s not as if the idea of great institutions of learning and teaching built through the revenues of trade are fantasies in that region of West Africa at that specific time: there were real institutions of that kind built in Timbuktu and Gao at exactly that moment which depended on very real long-distance connections between Muslim polities in Egypt and North Africa and the major states and polities of the West African interior. Why would Uagadou want to get away from all of that in 1016 CE? Even if Farrell and Blattman want Africa’s supposed lack of state systems to be the magic variable that produces more than one wizarding school, Uagadou’s birthplace has exactly that. And if even the wise wizards of Uagadou decided they had to leave, why the east side of the Rwenzori mountains, to which the peoples of their home region had no links whatsoever?

But hey, at least Farrell and Blattman’s defense is intact in the sense of western Uganda not having a state system, right? That would have made Uagadou different than other wizarding schools coping with state systems! Except that the region between western Lake Victoria and the Rwenzoris was another place in sub-Saharan Africa where multiple states and polities with sometimes rivalrous relationships go back at least three or four hundred years. If Uagadou was really trying to move to a place where there weren’t very many human beings or there weren’t states or there weren’t state systems (or it arose in such a place, if we discard the relationship between the name Wagadu and Uagadou), western Uganda isn’t the place to put the imaginary school.

———

Ultimately this is why I think Farrell and Blattman’s defense of Rowling is more problematic than Rowling herself. I think Rowling is trying to do the right thing, in fact, to include Africa and Africans in her imaginary world, and she’s not just reaching for lazy H. Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs tropes of cities in jungles and excitable natives yelling Ungowa! Bwana! But the fact is that the way she picks up a name to stand in for a more respectful conception of Africanity still underscores the degree to which the history of African societies is a kind of generic slurry for most people. If I had imaginary Scots-named people running around in an imaginary Pomerania dotted with imaginary Finnish place names, most readers of my fantasy would understand that I was doing some kind of mash-up, and if I didn’t have some infodump of an alternate history at some point to explain it, they’d likely regard what I was doing as random or incoherent.

Farrell and Blattman are trying to provide a kind of scholarly imprimateur for that same sort of mashup, but the histories of the places that come into view in Rowling’s imagination are knowable and known. If you ask me to provide the fictional background of a wizarding school in western Uganda and why it is the only one in sub-Saharan African and admits pupils from all over a very large continent, the last thing I’m going to do is start farting around with gigantic generalizations about states and state systems that immediately frame Africa as a place which has a lack, an absence, a deficit, that is somehow naturalized or long-running. I’m going to build my plausibility up from the actual histories of African societies.

So maybe I’m going to talk about the historical world of western Uganda for what it was, for which I have a more than adequate scholarly literature, and try to imagine what a wizarding school there looks like that makes sense in that history. And the first thing I think is that it isn’t a castle in the mountains if it’s a thousand years old and it isn’t distinguished from European wizarding just by using hands rather than wands. I start to think about what magical power in western Uganda might be like, even in a world full of magical power.

If I start to think about why there’s only one school, and why the whole continent uses it, I stop thinking about a thousand years and start thinking about two hundred. I stop messing around with giant social scientistic abstractions and start thinking about colonialism. Which, to head off Farrell and Blattman’s likely objection, they do too–but not as an explanation for Rowling’s fantasy Africa being in a state of relative global deprivation. I start thinking about why Uagadou is in fact like Hogwarts, physically and otherwise. Perhaps why the University of the Witwatersrand is not wildly different from Oxford in the generalities of its institutional functioning. I think about the world in the last three hundred years, and why institutions in modern nation-states resemble each other in form even if they don’t in power or privilege or relative resources or impact. And then I wonder why Rowling doesn’t simply go there too.

The answer would in some sense because Rowling’s descriptions of the wizarding schools wants to retain some whimsy and some friendliness to a young-adult sensibility. But you can imagine African magics in a globalized fantasy from within their imaginary histories rather than from outside and even stay friendly to a young adult sensibility: as Vicki Brennan noted, that’s a good description of Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch. And Rowling’s Harry Potter books inscribe the history of World War II into the wizarding world, and racism and fascism into the conflicts wizards face today. Why isn’t colonialism Dark Magic of a particularly troubling sort–the kind that suppresses many African ways of learning wizardry and then leaves behind a single, limited institution for learning magic that is built on a template that comes from somewhere else?

There’s a plausible history for Uagadou right there, but it can’t be a thousand years old if that’s the case. This is the basic problem.

You can tell a story that imagines fantastic African societies with their own institutions arising out of their own histories, somehow protected or counterfactually resistant to the rise of the West. But you have to do that through African histories, not with an audit of African absence and some off-the-shelf environmental determinism.

You can tell a story that imagines that imaginary wizarding schools arise only out of histories with intense territorial rivalries within long-standing state systems, but then you have to explain why there aren’t imaginary wizarding schools in the places in the world that fit that criteria rather than frantically moving the comparative goalposts around so that you are matching units like “all of Sub-Saharan Africa” against “Great Britain”. And you have to explain why the simultaneous and related forms of state-building in West Africa and Western Europe created schools in one and not the other: because Asante, Kongo, Dahomey, and Oyo are in some sense part of a state system that includes England, France and the Netherlands in the 17th and early 18th Centuries.

You can tell a story about how many different ways of learning wizarding in an imaginary Africa were suppressed, lost, denigrated, marginalized or impoverished, leaving a single major institution built on an essentially Western and modern model, and write colonialism into your world of good and evil magic. If you have a faux Hitler in the Dark Wizard Grindlewald, why not a faux Rhodes or a faux Burton as another kind of dark wizard?

That’s not what Rowling has put out so far. And it’s definitely not the kind of thinking that Farrell and Blattman offer in an attempt to shore up Rowling. All they offer is a scholarly alibi for Africa-is-a-country, Africa-is-absence, Africa-can-be-mashup-of-exotic-names.

I had to acknowledge that there was potential risk. When I teach Ellen Hellman’s classic sociological study of African urban life, Rooiyard, I point out to the students that she learned (and disclosed) enough about how women carried out illegal brewing to potentially help authorities disrupt those activities, which is one of the reasons (though surely not the only one) for the degree of suspicion that Hellman herself says she was regarded with.

But I thought this shouldn’t be an issue for the group because I believed (and still believe) that the men being studied could make up their own minds about whether to participate and about the risks of disclosure. Several of the anthropologists on the panel disagreed strongly: they felt that there was no circumstance under which these non-Western men in this impoverished society could accurately assess the dangers of speaking further with this researcher (who already knew the men and had done work with them on other aspects of their social and cultural lives). The disparities in power and knowledge, they felt, made something like “informed consent” impossible. Quite explicitly, my colleagues were saying that even if the men in the study felt like it was ok to be studied, they were wrong.

Now this was long enough ago that on many campuses, Institutional Review Boards were only just getting around to asserting their authority over qualitative and humanistic research, so in many ways our committee was providing that kind of oversight in the absence of it existing on individual campuses. Over multiple years of participating, I only saw this kind of question come up three or four times, and this was the most “IRB-like” of all these conversations.

I was alarmed then and have remained alarmed at the potential for unintended consequences from this perspective. Much as we might like to blame those consequences on bureaucratic overreach or administrative managerialism, which today often functions as all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card for faculty, the story at least starts with wholly good intentions and a generative critique of social power.

From a great many directions, academics began to understand about forty years ago that asymmetries of power and wealth didn’t simply disappear once someone said, “Hey, I’m just doing some research”. There were a great many critical differences between an ethnographic conversation between an American professor and an African villager on one hand and a police interrogation room on the other, but those differences didn’t mean that the former situation was a frictionless meeting between totally equal people who just decided to have a nice conversation about a topic of mutual interest.

The problem with proceeding from a more self-aware, self-reflexive sense of how power pervades all social relations and interactions to a sense that everyone with less power must be protected from everyone with more power is that this very rapidly becomes a form of racism or discrimination vastly more objectionable than the harm it alleges to prevent. What it leads to is a categorical assertion that entire groups of people are systematically less able to understand and assess their self-interest, less able to understand the consequences of their actions, less able to be trusted with their own agency as human beings. The difference between this view and the imperial and racist version of colonial subjects is small to nonexistent. Yes, there may be contexts like prisons or the aforementioned interrogation room where it takes specific attention to protect and recognize moments of real consent and communication, but it is important that we see those contexts as highly specific and bounded. There are moments where it is strategically, ethically, and even empirically important to defend universals, and this is one of them. Subjectivity has difference, but the rights and perogatives of modern personhood should be assumed to apply to everyone.

A good researcher, in my experience, knows when something’s been said in a conversation that it’s best not to translate into scholarship. Much as a good colleague knows when to keep a confidence that they weren’t directly asked to keep. We’re all sitting on things that were said to us in trust, sometimes by people who were trying to impress us or worried about what we might think, that we never use and often consciously try to forget that we heard. The problem occurs when this kind of sensitive, quintessentially situational judgment call gets translated into a rule, a committee, a structure, a dictum because we’re afraid of, and occasionally encounter, a bad researcher (or a good one who makes a bad judgment call).

I accepted my colleagues’ call in that long-ago conversation though I thought and still think they were wrong, because it was one project being evaluated in one discussion for one organization. I don’t accept it when I think I think the call is being made categorically, in whatever context. If you want an example of what can happen when that sort of view of human subjects settles in to stay and becomes a dictum, I think a distinction between an American doctor being judged capable of making informed consent to taking an experimental drug for ebola and a Sierra Leonean doctor being judged of not being capable of informed consent.

I think there’s a less-told but equally important trope in the American imaginary: the loophole. The finding of the trick, the turning of the fine print back on the lawyer who wrote the contract. The victimless crime of cheating the government or the big company out of something it mindlessly and wastefully demanded of the little man. The free money, the thing that your friend fixed up for you. Topsy-turvy, the quick score that makes the smart and the sly rich without distress to anything. The beads-for-Manhattan.

It’s that last I’m thinking about when I think about King Jeremiah Heaton, who became Internet-famous for a few days when he travelled to southern Egypt to plant a homemade flag on a small area of land that he believed was unclaimed by any existing sovereign state and therefore his for the taking. All for the sake of his 7-year old daughter, who wanted to be a princess.

There’s a lot to say about the story, most of it properly accompanied by much rolling of the eyes. But I do think Heaton is a canary in the coal mine of sorts, a window into a psychic cauldron seething inside the consciousness of a fading empire. Heaton himself invoked history in the coverage: what he did, others had done, he acknowledged, but they did it out of greed or hatred. He did it for love, he says, love of his daughter. But if ever first time tragedy, second time farce applied, this is it.

The basis of Heaton’s claim is the rarely-invoked principle of terra nullius, which as several analyses point out, was one (though not the only) justification invoked by Western colonizers in their land claims after the 17th Century. The hard thing about Heaton is that I can’t tell if he thinks this is a joke or not. He’s aware, in part because the press has queried him, that a flag and terra nullius mean precisely nothing if the claim is unrecognized by other states. I’m not sure he’s aware that Bir Tawil is terra nullius because Egypt and Sudan are still fencing with each other about their postcolonial border, that to claim Bir Tawil cedes a claim to another far more valuable unresolved territory to the east.

But even as a joke, it’s a very telling one, and pursued at a level of earnestness in terms of cost and effort that it seems a rather elaborate joke for an age where a silly YouTube video generally is as far as one need go. There are so many other things available in the treasure chest of American popular culture for a princess and her patriarch: the home-as-castle (another legal doctrine, even!), the imaginary kingdom in the backyard or the woods, constructing an elaborate heritage fantasy complete with family crest and lost inheritances in the auld country. Americans make utopian communities and religious movements all the time. They go out into the wilderness that their own internal empire secured and made for them and make retreats and hermitages, towns and communes, pilgrimmages and wanderings. What’s wrong with all that?

To say instead, “I shall go to Africa, plant a flag, claim a country, and as long as I’m at it, it will be a very nice kingdom that has some good agricultural development policies”? Well, that is not exactly a random idea, though I don’t get the sense that Heaton knows exactly who and what the other members of the club he’s trying to join actually are. But once upon a time this was the kind of fantasy that got people killed and maimed, and not just by aspiring Kings and their Princesses. For every Leopold of Belgium, there was a Leon Rom whose principality was small and short-lived. Some of the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century men (and a smaller handful of women) who flocked to Africa looking for land they could imagine to be empty then demanded that new colonial states do just that: empty the land of human beings and return them as obedient laborers. Most of the new settlers were delusional in some way or another, but they wandered through a world where their dreams could spur nightmares.

That’s not going to be Heaton, but that’s not by any great understanding on his part. It’s just that in dreaming his little dream of a kingdom for his princess, he’s managed in a little, inexpensive way to show what it has otherwise taken the United States billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives to demonstrate: that we are slipping into the fever-dream stage of superpowerdom, in a Norma Desmond haze so deep and foggy that we don’t even know any more what we don’t know. All we think is that somehow out there, there must be a trick that gets it all back. A law, a loophole, some fine print. Some Manhattan that we can have for a few beads and a couple of pamphlets on using irrigation in agriculture.

The way the course is going to work is that the syllabus will be something of a work in progress, especially after the first five weeks or so.

I’ve identified two major questions that will drive the course: why did the Atlantic slave trade happen to West and Central African societies, and what were the consequences of incorporation into the Atlantic system for West and Central African societies? We will spend time in class sessions breaking down those questions into more manageable subquestions that have purchase in the existing historiography. During class, and sometimes outside of class, as an assignment, we will be locating relevant scholarship or other materials to help us work with these questions, and we will then read some of that work together in class, taking collaborative notes on a shared document.

I’ll have another shared document called “Lecture Requests” open during class where students can semi-anonymously request that I spend some time talking about a subject that is either confusing in the scholarly literature or that seems both important and too diffuse for us to fully grasp from the readings alone. Sometimes I’ll try to lecture as soon as I see a request, other times I’ll wait and do it in the next class, especially when I feel the need to prep a bit on that particular subject.

We’ll also keep a spreadsheet “reading log” that I will eventually export into Viewshare so we can create visualizations from our reading (say, a map of places in West and Central Africa that we read about during the semester). We’ll have a few other docs open during most class sessions (one for harvesting good specific search terms for further use in locating appropriate materials, for example).

I’m doing this because I’d like to see if there’s a better way to both produce more consistent command over a body of knowledge than my usual pedagogy does and at the same time do something more powerful or lasting in terms of showing students how to learn, how to build knowledge out of reading and note-taking. I’m fairly convinced by Randy Bass, Cathy Davidson, Douglas Thomas and others that if we want to make the case that maintaining the high quality of intensive face-to-face teaching requires and thus justifies hiring expensive, highly trained professionals, we need to find ways to make sure that the time we spend in classrooms is the best use of that time that we can think of within the information-rich, profoundly-networked world that we actually inhabit.

A lot of the class will be visible in public (and I’m linking it to Hastac’s #FutureEd initiative), so I invite curious onlookers and helpful kibitizers to take a look now and again and see what they think about how it’s going.

It is 1985 and I’m speaking at a student rally against apartheid, as one of two student representatives to the Board of Trustees who have been pushing for divestment. Somewhere the Special AKA’s song “Free Nelson Mandela” is playing.

It is 1988 and I’m a graduate student starting to focus my interest on southern African history, attending a conference in Canada that has numerous participants from South Africa whose presence was financed in part by the Canadian government as a sign of its commitment to the anti-apartheid movement. Many of the speakers and attendees had been members of the United Democratic Front, which had been the key driver of internal struggle against apartheid during the 1980s. Some of them have recently been in jail. The mood at the conference is pessimistic, even despairing. Activists have been murdered, beaten and tortured with increasing frequency and boldness and the state seemed to have successfully suppressed the momentum of mass protest. One speaker says, “This phase of the struggle is over. Our children may see the end of apartheid, but we will not.” Mandela has been involved in secret negotiations with the apartheid leadership for years but no one at the conference knows that or at least could say that they knew it.

It’s 1990 and I’m working on my dissertation in London. Mandela is going to walk free of prison that day and I’m watching it on the TV and damn if I’m not crying freely. Not long after I arrived in London in October 1989, the Berlin Wall had begun to crumble. Suddenly everything impossible is happening.

It’s 1991 and I’m visiting South Africa for the first time, taking a break from my research in Zimbabwe. My dissertation topic had been imagined in 1988 with South Africa in mind at first, but I decided due to the academic boycott that I should work in Zimbabwe instead. My friend’s house is full of the excitement of exiles returning and friends being released from jail. I have a great conversation with a sweet, gentle physicist who tells me about how his complicated plan to set off a small symbolic explosion in a famous building (avoiding casualties) landed him in jail when he told the wrong person about it. I’m told gleefully that one of my circle of friends in my graduate program actually helped to write an iconic line in Mandela’s 1990 speech about the violence in Natal.

It’s 1998 and I’m in South Africa again. I’m in the first trembles of a long slide into middle-age regret and re-examination, and confessing to one of my South African friends about how embarrassed I feel by some of my more romantic and naive perceptions of the struggle against apartheid and African nationalism in general. (I’ve just been in Zimbabwe again, which was a very different place in 1998 than in 1991.) I confide that I’m not sure I have any heroes any longer, and feel stupid that I ever should have had them. My friend, who had been involved directly in the internal struggle of the 1980s and has spent time with some of the political leadership of the new South Africa, says, “It’s foolish to have heroes. Though it’s perfectly fine to have people you like and don’t like, people you trust and don’t trust.” You could like Walter Sisulu or Cyril Ramaphosa, you could hate Ronnie Kasrils, says my friend. Mandela is too remote and protected for my friend to think of as someone you like or don’t like, though there was a warmth, charm and humility there too real to be faked.

————–

Like many of us, perhaps more than some if less than others, I’ve grown up with Nelson Mandela somewhere in the frame of my life. Which is why it seems important to me to get him right now as everyone scrambles now to claim that they always were on his side and he was always on theirs. That claim is not just a preoccupation of outsiders. That scramble has been underway in South Africa for years, arguably ever since his presidency ended. And for the most part, people, including some of his heirs, get him wrong, and usually because they can’t afford to get him right.

They get him wrong because he offered in his life to be gotten not-quite-right. To be just enough the man and leader his possible and committed allies needed him to be, to throw a rope to those who needed him to be revolutionary, to be a saint, to be a moderate, to be a nonracialist, to be a nationalist, to be angry or sad, to be statesmanlike. To throw that rope and let any who would climb on board.

That speaks to something I suppose we could call pragmatism. But that implies a kind of insincerity, a manipulator’s willingness to tell people what they want to hear. Mandela had his eyes all the time on his goals, and what he said and did were not just a means to that end but the end itself.

So he was a strategist. This, too, is a commonplace thing to say about Mandela. More than a few of the well-prepared obituaries that have been circulating since yesterday afternoon have repeated Ahmed Kathrada’s oft-told tale of a three-day chess game that Mandela played against a new detainee on Robben Island, until his opponent surrendered. But this too isn’t quite right, if it’s meant to confer superhuman acuity on Mandela. As he himself was quick to say for much of his life, he made a great many mistakes as both leader and man. The ANC’s approach to the political struggle in South Africa, whether under the active leadership of Mandela and his circle or not, has been full of bone-headed moves. Mandela’s commitment to the armed struggle was a strategic necessity and a political masterstroke, but the actual activities of MK were mostly a sideshow to the real revolution fought in the townships after 1976. It’s not as if Mandela sat down and said, “Ok, so now I go into jail for 27 years and come out a statesman”. His life as both revolutionary and president was, as any political life is, a series of improvisations and accidents.

His improvisations were far more gifted than most, in part because of his disciplined approach to political selfhood. That’s the thing that made Mandela’s strategy and his adaptations stand out. All of his selves and words and decisions were an enactment of the enduring nation he meant to live in some day. I think that is the difference between him and many of his nationalist contemporaries who ascended to power in newly independent African states between 1960 and 1990. (This, too, needs remembering today: Mandela came to nationalism in the same historical moment as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Kenneth Kaunda, and so on.) The difference is that Mandela was always looking through the struggle to its ultimate ends, whereas most of the nationalists could see little further than the retreat of the colonial powers from the continent and the defeat of any local political rivals. Perhaps that was because Mandela and his closest allies, even during the Youth League’s insurgency against the old ANC leadership, could see that the endgame of apartheid could never be as simple as making a colonizer go back home. Perhaps it is just that he was a better person, a bigger man, a greater leader than most of them.

Or indeed, most of all the leaders of his time in this respect: to keep a long view of the world he ultimately thought his people, all people, should live in. He is the head of his class on a global scale, standing tall not just above his African contemporaries but above most other nationalists and certainly above the neoliberal West, whose leaders seem almost embarrassed to have ever thought about politics as the art of shaping a better future for all.

I suppose as a historian that my knee should jerk at any invocation of the great-man theory and cite the masses and parties and structures that brought Mandela to power. And as a lightly depressive middle-aged man attached to my comforts, I should embrace my friend’s warnings against having heroes. At least Mandela can no longer disappoint anyone who lionizes him, not that he ever did. That is perhaps most of all what we all admire about him: that with every opportunity in the world, structural and personal, to stumble on feet of clay after 1990, he never did. (Winnie Madikizela-Mandela begs to differ, I know.)

But that knee won’t jerk and perhaps I can still have a hero or two. The problem with the wave of admiring appraisals of Mandela as hero and great man is not that he was not a hero or great man. The problem with those celebrations (even before Mandela’s death) is that few of them oblige the people offering them to rethink anything at all about their own times, their own lives, their own mistakes. At best, they occasion the grudging admission, “I thought he was a terrorist or a revolutionary, but it turns out he was a great man.” But put one foot in front of the other and soon you’ll be walking out the door: the next step might be to recognize that he was a terrorist and a revolutionary and a great man.

A characteristic weakness of empires is that they have a hard time telling friends from enemies. Nations have to work to turn citizens within their borders into dehumanized outsiders. Empires, on the other hand, hardly know how to distinguish between grifters who are just taking the empire for whatever it’s willing to give and friends whose autonomous, authentic pursuit of their own political ends happens to coincide with the long-term interests and values of the empire. So the United States and England and France, for example, dumped treasure and spilled blood for Mobutu and Banda and Bokassa and Houphouet-Boigny in all the years of Mandela’s ANC leadership and then imprisonment. And all the while in its secret counsels and whispered conversations, the West was mostly content with its conclusion: Mandela was or would be a dangerous man, and the ANC a dangerous party. From the 1960s on, the U.S. and U.K. wanted apartheid gone (at least until Reagan, when anything that was not communism was good, and perhaps even better if it was sufficiently authoritarian to hold the line) but there were few in those governments seeing the great man in Mandela.

So of course it sticks in the craw to hear those who would have condemned Mandela (and those who did condemn him through word and deed) now speak of his greatness. But again, the point is not to say, “You were wrong this once, because this man”. It is to say, “You are often wrong, and not just because your judgement of individual greatness is wrong.” You are wrong when you can’t be bothered to hear from people who would have been, who were, your friends when they come to testify about how your drones killed their families, wrong when you spy on anyone going into a mosque in New York City, wrong when you let some mid-rank bureaucrat or think-tank enfant play the role of policy-wonk Iago who whispers to you which friends to murder or neglect. You are wrong when you pretend that from Washington or London you can sort and sift through who ought to be allowed to win desperate struggles for freedom and justice and who should not, and wrong when you arm and forgive and advise the same kind of grifters who take your money and laugh all the way to the torture chambers.

You were wrong then and now because you won’t let yourself see a Mandela. But also because you think that the privilege of making a Mandela belongs to the empire. This in the end is his final legacy: that he, and his closest colleagues, and the people in the streets of Soweto, and maybe even a bit (though not nearly so much as they themselves would like to think) the global allies of the anti-apartheid struggle, all of that made Mandela. Mandela made himself, much as he in his humility would always insist that he was made by the people and was their servant.

When you say, “He was a great statesman”, credit what that means. It means that he looked ahead, kept his eyes on the prize, and tried to do what needed doing, whether that meant taking up arms, or playing chess, or making a friendly connection with a potentially friendly jailer. If you’re going to say it, then credit first that there might be great leaders (and great movements) where you right now see only terrorism or revolution or disorder. That so many people were wrong about Mandela should at least allow for that much.

Don’t forget that it wasn’t just the Cold War leadership of the West that was wrong. Other African nationalists were wrong: many forget that for a time, the PAC had a serious chance of being taken as the legitimate representative of the aspirations of South Africans. Of course, some of them were perfectly right about Mandela and that’s why they hated him both early and late, because he had a far-sightedness and a realistic vision of a world that could be that they lacked. For someone like Robert Mugabe, the most unforgiveable thing about Mandela is that having power, he gave it up. And those on the left who just want to remember Mandela the revolutionary have to remember that Mandela the neoliberal was largely the same man, with the same political vision.

What no one really wants to see is Mandela the builder, because nowhere in that sight can we find our own reflection.

That’s why he seems like such a lonely giant, mourned by all, imitated by none. Because who now can boast of a long-term view of the future? Who is looking past the inadequacies of the moment to a better dispensation? Who really works to see and imagine a place, a nation, a world in which we might all want to live and then plots the distance between here and there? Some of us know what we despise, we know the shape of the boot on our neck or the weight on our shoulders. Some of us know what we fear: the shadow of a plane falling on a skyscraper, the cough of a bomb exploding, the loss of an ease in the world. We know how to feel a hundred daily outrages at a stupid or bad thing said, how to gesture at the empty spaces where a vision once resided, how to sneer at our splitters and wankers, how to invest endless energies in demanding symbolic triumphs that lead nowhere and build nothing. Our political leaders (and South Africa’s, too) have no vision beyond the next re-election and their retinues of pundits and experts and appointees are happy to compliment and flatter the vast expanses of their nakedness in return for a share of the spoils.

Mourn the statesman and the revolutionary and the terrorist and the neoliberal and the ethicist and the pragmatist and the saint and don’t you dare try to discard or remove any part of that whole. Celebrate him? Sure, but then make sure you’re willing to consider emulating him.

Contemporary departments at the college deal with the labor-intensive challenge of teaching numerous small seminars for juniors and seniors going for Honors in different ways, and set their ambitions of the program somewhat differently. A fairly substantial number of Honors seminars operate more or less as proto-graduate courses, and often the students who go through the seminars report that they feel very strongly prepared for graduate work as a result.

This is one of my subtle dissatisfactions with teaching an Honors seminar, though. I want to offer a course which is intensive, challenging, and unusual but potentially useful or inspiring to students who may have no further interest in Africa, in the discipline of history, or in academia. (Which still being equally useful and inspiring to those who are interested in such things.)

The other problem I’ve always had is trying to teach a loosely or idiosyncratically composed overview of some of the major scholarship on modern African history while trying to handle students with widely variant knowledge of African societies. All the students taking Honors have to have demonstrated general academic skill and specific facility with the discipline of history to get into our seminars, but I can’t (and wouldn’t) require any prerequisite knowledge of Africa or modern imperialism.

I’ve mulled over ways to refocus my seminar for years and I think I’ve settled on something. It’s still going to be about the historiography of modern Africa but I am going to build the class much more extensively around learning to dissect, interpret and operate large bodies of citation, information and reference when the aim is primarily to understand the state of scholarly and intellectual conversation about a subject rather than to produce a work of research on a specialized topic. I want to show my students how to become active agents in parsing and reassembling historiography.

I’m going to build each week around selections from 2-3 major readings that I think represent an interesting “cluster” of scholarly or intellectual work, mostly recent. I have a bit of a chronological and thematic structure in the syllabus so we’re reading about earlier events first and we’re covering some of the “major” or “classic” issues in the historiography, but much less so than I have done in past versions of the course.

The major emphasis this fall will be on dissecting each reading’s bibliographies and citations to construct a map of its relationship to its sources and to its peers, and in locating each work within strains of analytic and methodological practice. We’ll spend time in each class session working together to use existing databases and indices so that I can model some of the techniques and tricks available to students and so that they can work together to strengthen their mutual understanding of the historiography.

To give some sense of how I hope this will work, in week 1, the students will be looking at three very recent books (David Gordon’s Invisible Agents, Emily Osborn’s Our New Husbands Are Here, and Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke’s Abina and the Important Men. All very new books, so I doubt that by fall there will be any scholarly book reviews or much in the way of citational usage of the texts to track. So I want to show the students first how they can mine each book’s references and bibliography to track their relationships to older bodies of scholarship (the Getz and Clarke is very explicit about guiding readers along those lines), how they can use tools like Amazon’s “People Who Bought” or Google Scholar to (sometimes misleadingly) map a bit of the associational domain around each book, and how they can read public information about the authors for additional clues and hints.

In contrast, when we roll around to Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject , a canonical work published almost twenty years ago, they’ll find almost 900 citations in Web of Science and many others in Google Scholar, a very large number of rather interestingly contentious book reviews, and so on. So the job in this case is not to build a profile of expected usage and guess at a placement in various strains of conversation, but to develop good heuristics for sifting through a very large informational space to find the relevant or high-value references.

The way I’ve set the class up is complicated but I’m feeling pretty good about the structure and the driving idea behind the class. I also think this gets me out of the position of being the all-knowing sage who is trying to transfer an intact body of historiographical mastery to the students and instead puts me much more squarely in the position of being a faciltator or curator. I’m also looking forward to seeing what we can build in terms of some kind of publically shared visualization of the associations and keywords that the students underline or note as the semester proceeds.

———-

History 140
The Colonial Encounter in Africa
Fall 2013

This Honors seminar focuses on the establishment of formal colonial rule by European states in sub-Saharan Africa from the mid-19th Century to decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s and on the subsequent history of postcolonial African societies.
This seminar is built around clusters of major works, mostly recent, that I feel have some significant or exciting historiographical relationship to one another. Some are on similar topics, use related methodologies, or convene an important debate or argument within the field; others are related in ways that are more idiosyncratic.

The seminar does not provide a single clear narrative or thematic summary of modern African history, though students are encouraged to construct such a summary for themselves over the course of the semester. Participants in the seminar are expected to carry high levels of responsibility for their own learning as well as supporting the learning of other participants, which should certainly include asking the seminar facilitator for additional guidance or information.

The main emphasis of student work in the seminar is what I am calling ‘hacking the historiography’: we will be reverse-engineering the construction of this field of specialized knowledge and building an impressionistic, in-practice understanding of its character based on the use of a variety of contemporary digital databases and search techniques.

Students in the seminar are not just responsible for identifying major arguments or lines of analysis in the assigned works and coming prepared to discuss those arguments. They are also responsible for dissecting the footnotes and bibliographies of assigned works to understand the evidentiary and historiographical character of these works. Working together, we will build a partial map of the historiography as it is practiced in the field of modern African history, the ancestral lines of reference and methodology that different works derive their arguments from.

Each week’s course meeting will be broken into three major parts.

a) In our first 90 or so minutes of discussion, we will review the major assigned readings for that week, evaluating their major arguments, claims and methodologies. To prepare for this portion of the class meeting, students should read the assigned works carefully and thoughtfully. In many instances, we will only be reading portions of the assigned work, sometimes as selected by members of the seminar in advance.

b) In our second 45 minutes, students will discuss papers about the previous week’s meeting. Each student is responsible for writing 4 papers during the semester. These papers should be a critical review of the historiographical character of an assigned reading from the previous week, based on the following in addition to the reading itself: 1) at least two scholarly reviews or review essays about the assigned reading; 2) a general impression of the citational or associational patterns visible around the assigned reading; 3) relation of the assigned work a single other reading found through an analysis of content, bibliography, citations and the intellectual genealogy of the author. (In the case of very new works, there may not be reviews or citations, so this will be an especially important part of those papers.) Paper writers need to relate the work to one of the following additional types of reading (which the student must actually locate and read): a primary source; a similar work on another region, country or era; a preceding work cited by the reading as a major influence; a work which markedly disagrees with or opposes the original reading.

We will discuss both the assessments of the paper authors and how their assessments change or modify our discussion from the previous week.

c) In our final 45 minutes, we will discuss the citations, bibliography and assessments of readings from this week as an aid to the students writing papers in the coming week, using Tripod or other databases. We will also briefly discuss next week’s major readings and try to make strategic decisions about which portion of the reading to tackle based on our evolving interests.

Over the course of the semester, we will be building several data visualizations (titles, authors, possibly themes or subjects) of our impressionistic understanding of the historiography, which we will make available for online public scrutiny. We will also be building similarly a shared glossary of important recurrent terms, places and people. Students will be required to contribute to both projects.

Week 1: Hack the Historiography, A Primer

In this week, we will take apart three interesting new books in the field, trying to understand not just their arguments but the historiographies and methodologies that they draw upon.

David Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History
Emily Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here
Tevor Getz and Liz Clarke, Abina and the Important Men

Week 2: Survey Histories
A. Adu Boahen, ed., UNESCO History of Africa, Volume VII (abridged)
Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940

Week 3: General Interpretations of Colonialism in Africa
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject
Olufemi Taiwo, How Colonialism Pre-Empted Modernity in Africa
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Jan Vansina, Being Colonized

Week 4: Narrative Histories and the Scramble for Africa
Roger Levine, A Living Man From Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary
Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost

Week 5: Names and Voices
Osumaka Likaka, Naming Colonialism
Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name
Luise White, Speaking With Vampires
Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon

Week 6: Boundaries and Belonging
Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens
Jonathan Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones
David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation

Week 7: Narratives of Colonial Authority
Ahebi Ugbabe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria
Michael Crowder, The Flogging of Phineas Macintosh
Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale

Week 8: Constructing Gender
Stephan Miescher, Making Men
Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa?
Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb

Week 9: Expressive Culture and Colonialism
Karin Barber, ed., Africa’s Hidden Histories
Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present
Marissa Moorman, Intonations
Derek Peterson, Creative Writing

Week 10: Nationalism and Anti-Colonialism
James Brennan, Taifa
Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses
David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged

Week 11: Narratives of Nation and Society
M.G. Vassanji, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
Binyavanga Wainaina, Someday I Will Write About This Place

Week 12: Postcolonial Conflict
Gerald Prunier, Africa’s World War
Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers
Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa
Ismael Beah, A Long Way Gone

Week 13: Postcolonial Africa
Michaela Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat
Nicolas Argenti, The Intestines of the State
Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa
David William Cohen and E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge

Week 14: Neoliberal Africa and the Future
Jennifer Cole, Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar
Charles Piot, Nostalgia for the Future
Brenda Chalfin, Neoliberal Frontiers
Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement and the Delusion of Development

Oh, dear.

As with everything else that has come to pass which actually matches the science-fictional imagination, the reality seems so banal and inevitable that we scarcely pause in our everyday lives to consider its implications. The imaginary electronic clipboards and pads in various incarnations of Star Trek were always bristling with fetishistic futurosity, always signalling that a far future had arrived. The iPad I use every day has quickly become about as exotic as a toaster or a ballpoint pen.

That doesn’t stop us from having furious debates about the generality of the changes that actually-existing future technology brings. The overall idea and reality of drone warfare is getting some attention, just as the sweeping consequences of digital technology have. But the debate over drones is so far either about the abstractions of moral philosophy (is ok to kill a combatant who has no chance to kill you back?) or it is about a particularized kind of ‘numbers game’ (do drones cause more civilian casualties than we’re being told? more civilian casualities than other kinds of bombing?) A few folks are also beginning to think more carefully about what might happen if there is further automation of drone strikes.

All of those conversations matter. But I’m also struck at how much this nascent public conversation doesn’t include the possibility of proliferation and retaliation. In many ways, drones are being treated as the Maxim gun of 21st Century hegemony: something the hegemon has than its subjects have not, and that is being assumed to be a stable part of the overall picture.

Among the many explanations for Europe’s sudden assertion of imperial control over most of Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia in the second half of the 19th Century, the importance of a brief moment of stark asymmetry in the relative ability of polities and elites to mobilize military power has sometimes been pushed aside or downgraded as a self-sufficient explanation, even in ‘technologically determinist’ interpretations. In some measure, that might be because European colonial propaganda, when it addressed military advantages, tended to push that advantage back in time all the way to the 16th Century and treat it as a single manifestation of some overall Western superiority in technology and science. Either that or European colonizers engaged in ridiculous self-puffery about the cultural and organizational superiority of their militaries as opposed to the relative disparity in their armaments.

The asymmetry, if it was an important factor, was incredibly brief. At the beginning of the 19th Century, European-controlled militaries had very few systematic advantages in their ability to enforce administrative power and overwhelm local military resistance in Africa, South Asia or the Middle East. They could win single battles or conflicts but not persistently maintain a presence or capacity that could meet any attempt at military resistance. That wasn’t just about their armaments, of course, but also about the financial capacity and political organization of their sponsoring nation-states. For a brief time at the end of the 19th Century, however, industrially-supplied European mass armies with guns and munitions could generally overwhelm non-Western military power (though the latter were often armed with guns as well: William Storey’s new history of gun trading and ownership in southern Africa makes clear how complicated the local picture often was.

The thing is, by the end of World War II, that era was comprehensively over, which I think means that asymmetry in force capacity is as much a contributing explanation of decolonization as it is of the spread of 19th Century imperialism. By the 1960s, insurgencies all around the globe were capable of fighting occupying Western armies to a standstill, if not capable of winning in a straight-up battlefield conflict between nation-states. And this has become more and more the case over time. Whatever doctrines or surges or equipment the US or its allies may bring to bear to support an imperial occupation or administration, they can’t succeed in doing more than what Russia did in Chechnya: turning a territory into a wasteland and keeping it under a harsh authoritarian regime. And even the most determined 21st Century hegemon can’t afford to project that kind of military power in more than a few small territories proximate to its national borders, nor can it count on that power to pacify such an opponent for any substantial length of time.

Drones clearly seem to some American military planners like the answer to their prayers in such a world, with a lot of other collateral budgetary, technological and political benefits. No pilots exposed to enemy fire (and no human limitations to the speed and mobility of a flying weapons platform). Cheaper by far than modern warplanes. Much easier to keep their operations secret, much more deniability about consequences. Much easier to extend operations into airspace of unfriendly or uncomfortable sovereignities. Nearly impossible to defend against with existing anti-aircraft technology and imposes serious limitations on the freedom of movement of enemy combatants and leaders. Explicit legal sanction from all three branches of the US government for the unilateral use of drones to kill specific targeted individuals, including American citizens, coupled with grudging acquiescence to this practice by most other nations.

And as with the Maxim gun, they have none.

But that is not going to last. So before we get into the moral philosophy of the general idea, or the morality of their current use, just consider for a moment what is going to happen in a world where:

a) Drone warfare is an exceptionally active domain of rapid technological progress due to continuous investment by the United States and other major national and transnational actors.
b) Drone warfare is normalized legally and geopolitically as a domain of unrestricted unilateral action by hegemonic or dominant powers (much as the unrestricted use of military force against non-Western societies was briefly something that went almost entirely unquestioned in Europe and the US from about 1870 to 1905).
c) The use of drones by the US and other major actors proliferates on a global scale rather than stays confined to a few unusual theaters.

With a), investment in technological progress, consider also:

a1) that drones with lethal capacity will almost certainly get smaller, cheaper, and harder to detect both as they seek targets and at their points of origination and operation
a2) that drones will almost certainly be given more sophisticated systems for automatic navigation, target selection and decision-making over time
a3) that integrating the cheap, improvised lethality of explosives used against international forces in Iraq and Afghanistan into drones will become readily possible in the future

Think about that for a bit. Now imagine a world where non-state actors of all kinds, at all scales, can with relative ease unleash many automated or semi-automated drones armed with enough explosives to kill a few people or damage local infrastructure, in a way that may be as hard to trace back to the individuals responsible as it is to find someone who made a computer virus or malware today.

The moment I lay that scenario out, many people doubtless think, “So that’s going to happen, it’s inevitable”. But I don’t think it is. There are cases in modern world history where national militaries and their civilian administrations have thought twice about the wisdom of proliferating the use of weaponry or technology that gave them enormous short-term advantages after the long-term implications of their generalized use became clear. Chemical and biological weaponry is perhaps the best example, since nuclear weapons may be a special case. National militaries still have this capacity, it’s occasionally been used by repressive regimes against civilian opponents, but sufficient effort has been poured into making their use moral anathema and cause for serious coordinated global action that there are very powerful inhibitions against their use.

The appallingly causal and short-sighted use of drones right now by the US military bothers me for all sorts of reasons. But first and foremost, it bothers me because no one in authority is giving any public consideration to the consequences of legitimating their unilateral, undisclosed and unreviewed usage, or the consequences of becoming so reliant upon drone strikes that we vastly accelerate their development. If there is any hope of avoiding a world where small remotely (or automatically) guided explosive drones routinely pose a danger at almost any location or moment, that hope is in this moment, this time, and no other. By the time the AK-47 went into mass production in 1949, it was far too late to ask whether it was a good thing or not for almost any organized group that wanted automatic rifles to have automatic rifles, even if it took some time for the weapon to disseminate at a global scale.