Easily Distracted

In her op-ed on Robert Mugabe, Heidi Holland portrays him partially as a wayward child of Western civilization who has his nose pressed against the glass, hoping to be invited back in from the cold from whence his “heathen granny” came. In her interview with him, Holland writes, Mugabe “expressed almost tearful regret at his inability to socialize with the Queen of England”.

It’s easy to laugh this portrait off as a product of Holland’s own naivete. I know that I no longer accept the view that Mugabe was once committed to national reconciliation after 1980 and somehow lost that commitment along the way, a trope that Holland recycles in her essay. Looking back, what I see instead is Mugabe’s typically hard-nosed assessment of the power available to him at the time. He and the core of his party needed time to gain control of the mechanisms of the state they had inherited, to consolidate national power. I do not think it was an accident that he turned on rival nationalists before dealing with other potential opponents, including the white farmers, trade unionists and the tattered remnants of a liberal civil society that the Rhodesians had done their best to destroy before Mugabe ever took power. I think the Mugabe who ruthlessly took control of his own party before independence, stalled with reconciliation tactics after independence, and flushed his nation’s economy down the toilet are pretty much the same person, acting with similar underlying impulses in all those situations.

That said, I think Holland is also right that he wants the respect of the West and inclusion within the contours of what colonial society in Africa defined as “civilization”. Mugabe has put his personal stamp on this desire: the steely Jesuitical temperment, the fastidiousness and relative minimalism of his public presentation, the building of a strong state apparatus that centers on his personal authority but is not reducible to a cult of personality. (Whatever else its problems might be, Zimbabwe does not suffer from a failure of state capacity or a weak sovereignty: the state has real, persistent power throughout most of its territory, very much including a monopoly on violence.) He doesn’t exhibit the romantic Europhilia of Leopold Senghor, or the eccentric Homburg-wearing hippiephobia of Hastings Banda. Mugabe doesn’t indulge in the kid-in-the-candy-store splurges of the most vulgar of postcolonial African leaders (though he has plenty of ill-gotten gains from his time in power), or hanker to build a reputation for being a reliable subscriber to the Washington Consensus like Museveni or Rowlings, so as to get an invitation or two to Davos from time to time.

One of the basic problems in studying modern African history is that African experience is most copiously represented back to knowledge-making by people who were the most transformed by colonial rule and the most conflicted about that transformation. In some ways, this is the same reason that identity politics within Western societies often finds its most tenacious adherents not among the most marginal or excluded subjects but among middle classes and aspirants who are both trying to preserve fragile and hard-won access to professional or bourgeois life and secure further pathways for aspiration through arguments about identity, history and social justice.

Just observing that African nationalist politics came into being out of frustration and rage by nationalist elites or evolues at their racially-based exclusion from the ranks of “civilized men” is not a critique. It’s boring and simple-minded to write this history off as hypocrisy or contradiction. However, African nationalism has tended to regard such an analysis as an attack precisely because its usual mythological reinventions after post-independence consolidations of power describe African nation-states as the product of the massification of nationalism in the march to independence. Calling attention to the social history of African nationalism, its historical particularism, is a rebuke to African nationalism’s ideology whether we wish to make that rebuke or not.

Scorning or mocking the nationalist’s earnest desire for inclusion in some aspect of the “civilizing mission” is just another kind of hating the hybrid, the cosmopolitan, the miscegenated, the “man of two worlds”. Mugabe is not distinguished from other African elites, or modern political classes in general, in his desire to be taken seriously by Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair, to be authenticated not just as a been-to but a have-become. When Chief Munhuwepayi Mangwende was deposed by the Rhodesian government in 1960, at least one of the reasons was the bitter jealousy of a local white district officer who resented that the chief had access to high British society while the white bureaucrat did not.

One of the most interesting things I’ve ever read in an archive is a letter from David Gurupira to the Chief Native Commissioner of Southern Rhodesia in 1938. As I read it, Gurupira isn’t a simple collaborator, motivated by calculating self-interest. Instead, I think he’s someone who has assessed and imagined aspects of the colonizer’s world and power and wants to selectively include himself within some of what he envisions it to be. He hasn’t lost himself, or forgotten his history. His mind hasn’t been colonized. He isn’t slavish or empty. The officials who received his letter were not the imperial buffoons that we often see in stereotypical accounts, either. They understood what Gurupira was saying: “his facts are substantially correct”. The tragedy of colonialism is that they could only offer to him the right to bear arms, rather than acknowledge his claims or open up their own power to his gentle demands.

This might sound as if I’m agreeing with Holland that the West need only embrace Mugabe and give him his due, invite him into the social apparatus of global power, grant him the cultural capital to which he is entitled. By no means. When we condemn Mugabe harshly, when we make of him a pariah, we are including him. The most condescending, exclusionary option would be to pat him on the head like a good little non-Westerner and say, “Well, he doesn’t know any better, the little tyke. He can’t help being an authoritarian. Besides, isn’t it our own fault anyway that he is? We did promise to help out with land reform, chaps.” As long as we’re even-handed in demanding liberty everywhere always, as long as we don’t hold Mugabe accountable for actions that are forgiven of reliable authoritarian clients, as long as we don’t excuse fraud, corruption, cronyism and the concentration of unaccountable executive power when it is expedient for our own purposes, then the harshest attacks on Mugabe’s conduct as a political leader are just as welcoming as a royal reception with Queen Elizabeth II.

I had two separate reactions to Heidi Holland’s op-ed about Robert Mugabe, so I’ll blog about it twice.

Holland argues that Western nations should make peace with Robert Mugabe, partly on the grounds that a punitive approach has accomplished nothing and left no avenues for wheedling or persuading Mugabe to act differently than he does. On one level, this is just the old merry-go-round of sanctions or shunning versus “constructive engagement” taking another spin. That’s an argument that I find bitterly futile when it’s voiced in terms of absolutes: it is always a situational question. I find Holland’s take on Mugabe accurate enough (that’s my other reaction, see the next essay), but I don’t think that a sympathetic or constructive approach to Mugabe is any more likely to persuade him to do the right thing.

On a deeper level, though, Holland’s argument makes me think about another class of interminable debates about how outside powers should construct incentives that encourage authoritarians to give up power and discourage kleptocrats from robbing their own countries blind. In Zimbabwe, the MDC has started offering assurances to military leaders that they will not be prosecuted for their actions under the Mugabe regime, and that the MDC will not confiscate property they may have acquired in the last decade except under pre-1997 rules of land reform. Before the general seizure of commercial farms, the Zimbabwean government reserved the right to redistribute farms that were run by absentee owners, or that were left fallow for lengthy periods of time, or in cases where a single owner controlled multiple commercial farms. I don’t think that will necessarily reassure generals or party bigwigs, since many of them now own multiple former commercial farms that they leave largely fallow and on which they are absentee owners.

In any event, I don’t think it will be long before political scientists, economists and policy wonks outside of Zimbabwe start debating whether or not a public assurance to kleptocratic elites that they will be allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains sends the wrong incentive signals or creates a moral hazard or conversely, uses incentives properly to resolve an otherwise intractable situation. This is the same discussion that has been running for a while about whether genocide tribunals or other attempts to prosecute deposed dictators and military leaders for crimes against humanity help to discourage future incidents by promising that there will be consequences, or make authoritarians even more doggedly determined to hold onto power and more inclined to view all outside mediation as hostile or dangerous.

In the comments on a previous entry, Peter55 quite rightly wonders whether I really mean to be talking in this way about decision-making processes within Mugabe’s inner circle. I don’t mean to, because I largely dislike this entire conceptual framework. As Peter observes, it is frequently involves a misapplication of abstract models of human action and motivation to the real world. I find Freakonomics an interesting set of thought-experiments, but when we have to roll up our sleeves and deal with the fullness of human life as it is lived in any given time and place, we find that real people aren’t perfectly playing Prisoner’s Dilemma, aren’t weighing incentive structures, aren’t universal machines for maximizing utility, aren’t clearly running through the information available to them. They’re bound by the specificities of culture, by the inheritances of time, by limits of space, but also individuals can act in idiosyncratic, whimsical, creative or indeterminate ways. Models are an attempt to preemptively discount human unpredictability and invention and then to post-facto explain it as something which we always knew would happen anyway.

Perhaps even more importantly, however, I find the hubris of debates about whether or not this or that set of signals about incentives should be sent, or whether this or that action will have predictable futureward effects a kind of distasteful self-crowning by a transnational class of policy-makers and academic experts. When such a group sits down and asks, “Should we prosecute deposed dictators for their crimes against humanity in order to discourage future dictators, or should we avoid prosecuting them so as to give dictators incentives to leave office peacefully”, they’re imagining themselves as the philosopher-kings of a shadow state that is actually able to make those kinds of dispensations, actually able to calibrate incentives reliably. Sure, most of these kinds of experts will agree that we’re not there yet, but many see these kinds of conversations as the building blocks of that future global order.

So even if we understand people like Mugabe and his inner circle as calculating, incentive-evaluating, rational deciders, I think there is every reason for them to laugh behind closed doors at the hubris of the experts and activists, whatever the latest policy nostrum on tribunals, interventions, sanctions, golden parachutes or so on might be. Because what anyone outside of the rarified settings where generic 12-point plans for peacemaking and incentivizing prosecutions for genocide are composed knows is that every such action is and will be sui generis. The sand castles that the experts build today around one case will be washed away by the tides of history in short order. What happened in the end to Charles Taylor or Auguste Pinochet or Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic has little implication for tomorrow’s dictator and mass murderer. Because the people who play with constructing the machinery of incentive aspire to a kind of reliable managerial authority that they will never have, they are writing blank checks that no one will ever cash. Whether or not someone like Robert Mugabe dies peacefully in his bed, lives out his last years far from his home country, ends up in a pleasant prison while the United Nations dithers for a decade over his fate, is shot by an up-and-coming rival, or ends up torn to shreds by a mob is a matter of particular circumstance. That’s probably something most authoritarians know already, having ridden the vissitudes of history as far as they have.

I spend a lot of time in my classes and my scholarly writing trying to explore the legacy of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade in Africa. I think these are wide-open questions. Depending on my mood, I can argue that the ongoing influence of that history is relatively minimal or that it is omnipresent and overwhelming.

When I have to commit to an argument, I tend to settle on a handful of practices and institutions that I think represent the most powerful and self-sustaining transformative effects of colonial government. Most of these I associate with the concept of “indirect rule”. In my view, some of the lasting impact has been lasting because of a fusion between local or indigenous practice and the colonial state. So, for example, the colonial state significantly transformed the political and institutional meaning of ethnic identity, but the substance of ethnic consciousness in many parts of the continent also drew significantly on precolonial political history in the 18th and 19th Centuries, on established languages and cultural repertoires, and so on. In contrast, the sillier or more delusional initiatives of colonial states faded quickly, or were wholly ignored from the outset by both imperial officers and local subjects.

I think we’re beginning to see the broad outlines of the longer-term impact of the U.S. presence in Iraq, whether the draw-down of U.S. forces starting in 2009 is relatively rapid or extremely prolonged. Some of the absurdities of the occupation before the surge will always be a good exhibit of folly and hubris for historians to investigate, but many of them have already proven ephemeral. On the other hand, the political accomodations that underlie the U.S. presence are, in my view, very much like the improvisational compacts and understandings between rural African elites and colonial bureaucrats that I believe formed the basis of British and French indirect rule in the early 20th Century in Africa. Shi’a, Sunni and Kurdish identity has been given new political meaning and new forms of expression within local, regional and national governance, and whatever happens next, I believe some of that change will have a lasting structural legacy. Partly as a consequence, interstate relations in the region are now fundamentally different, in ways which are arguably far more disadvantageous to U.S. interests than they were in 2001.

Another thing to consider is the physical landscape. Many African cities today are still profoundly structured and crippled by the common approach of European colonial rulers to urban development: reserve the central core of the city for administration and business, put a light manufacturing district near to the core, create a white or elite residential district not too far from the core, and put townships for African residence very far away from the core, separated from each other by large areas of vacant space and with little or no permanent infrastructure in order to discourage urbanization. Late in the colonial area, governments began to reverse these policies during the economic boom and rapid urbanization of the 1950s, but the physical layout was already set. The legacy of this approach to urbanization is serious: providing infrastructure, including transport, in many African cities combines the worst challenges of high-density urban development and suburban development in many other parts of the world.

In Iraq, perhaps the most lasting legacy of the surge may turn out to be the comprehensive reconstruction of the residential landscape of the major cities. It isn’t just that neighborhoods are now segregated by religious and ethnic identity, but that this segregation has been strongly reinforced by massive blast walls that allow military authorities to control and survey movement in and out of residential neighborhoods. This is going to be the idiom of urban life in Baghdad for decades to come, in all likelihood. Not one Berlin Wall, but many. It is hard to foresee the Iraqi state to come which will remove these walls, because they both express the new political reality of identity and because they are an available technology of control. In fact, should the Iraqi state become stronger rather than weaker in the future, it will probably see the walls as a more and more attractive method for maintaining its control, much as the isolation of many low-income, high-density neighborhoods from one another in much of urban Africa makes it easier for autocratic regimes to contain urban unrest, often a serious potential threat to the regime’s survival.

The United States bought itself and its client regime some political breathing space by control over violence during the surge, but the troop numbers on the ground only have been a small part of what has changed. The cost to Iraqis of that change is difficult to estimate because it involves changes whose full impact will likely not be clear for a long time to come. Much of the U.S. occupation may turn out to be ephemeral in many respects, remembered most potently by those who lost lives, health and sanity in its crucible. I think it’s important now to look past the surface incidents of violence and the debates about troop withdrawals to ask what kinds of structural transformations are taking hold, and whether any of them are still potentially malleable for good or ill.