Threat Economies and Armed Conservation in CAR

I've been working on several articles that explore threats as a kind of performative speech act. The first, looking at threats and hiding in the case of armed conservation, is now published. (A second one, on threats and rebellion, is in review-process purgatory.) It's available here; if you don't have access to the journal, email me and I can send a copy. 

The gist is that critical academic accounts of conservation often emphasize its coerciveness in relation to people living in and around parklands. And while that's an important point to draw out, my research in northeastern CAR complicates that picture. Because even though CAR has arguably been among the places where conservation has been most violent, a wide range of people -- including peasants -- were able to effectively threaten each other in order to claim entitlements, particularly entitlements to the status of an income. 

Read it, and tell me what you think!

Full abstract follows...

This article, based on ethnographic and archival research in the northeastern parklands of the Central African Republic (CAR), explores the area’s history of armed conservation. Critical scholarly accounts of armed conservation practices and projects often starkly contrast the people involved in them: there are agents of the state, or state-like actors, who seek to dominate, territorialize, and discipline, often using violence to do so, and there are local populations who are dispossessed of their lands and resources without compensation and forced into new kinds of poverty, despite rhetoric and practices meant to inculcate “local participation”. The case presented here forces us to re-think these accounts. Rather than pursuing authority in the sense of expanding control over other people, people in northeastern CAR (whether putatively in favor of or opposed to conservation) are working to create and maintain access to the status of an income. To do so they engage in practices of threatening and hiding. While the means to use physical force are not equally shared, capacities to threaten and hide are widely held, and organizational and other hierarchies are unstable, making it difficult to describe any of this as a matter of domination and resistance. Expanding on literature that examines processes of green militarization (Lunstrum, 2014), the article focuses on the interactional dynamics of armed conservation to show that threats are as important as acts of physical violence, and that hiding—whether in the bush or plain sight—is critical to understanding armed conservation in an area where the state is largely seen as absent.

Penis-snatching returns to Tiringoulou (in Written Form)

About six hours after returning to Tiringoulou, a town of a few thousand people in far northeastern CAR where I did research in 2009 and 2010, a resident asked if I was the one who had written an article about thepenis-snatching incident there. He turned his laptop to show me the web page. Yes, I replied, that’s me, simultaneously surprised and curious how he’d ever come across it. He then showed me the transcript of the Facebook chat he’d had about the article with his cousin in Canada, back when the article came out in 2013.

We were both cadging Internet from an international medical NGO in town, which had a fickle solar-powered satellite connection. At first I thought everyone working on computers under the paillotte was strangely lazy, as they spent long minutes staring into space, typing nothing. But they were just waiting to see if a webpage would load. Mostly, it never did. There is no cell phone network in Tiringoulou. Prominent people – the many generals of the town’s armed group, a few of the NGO staffers – carry bulky Thuraya satellite phones in their breast pockets, the antennas poking out the top. If a call comes in, the person must run out to a spot with good sky access or else the call drops. Even then, many times the call will drop, or it won’t be possible to hear. Communication with far-away places feels tenuous, the result of answered prayers rather than an entitlement.

(At the same time, there are unexpected sources of technological resilience: when the generator got temporarily fixed everyone rushed to charge gadgets. The watchman’s radio started emitting a steady stream of smoke and we could smell its innards on fire. And yet when he turned it on, it still got the same couple of stations it had gotten before.)

But here, too, people had followed articles I had written, as well as radio interviews I’d done. Several of the people I’d gotten to know on my earlier visits said they had heard me on RFI and appreciated my analysis. “You got it all right. You really understood things,” they said, which made me feel good but also wonder if perhaps I hadn’t been quite critical enough. These guys are members of armed groups, after all, and are responsible for a lot of destruction and violence.

In the olden days of anthropology, the first half of the 20^th century, anthropologists could largely expect to do their research among some remote people and write books and articles that their subjects would never read. In recent decades communication technologies and other developments have shattered this illusion of distance between the people we once called informants and the products of our research. Many anthropologists have tried newly collaborative methods as one way of profiting from these changes.

And yet I had still felt like since I mostly write in English about a francophone area that has only very slippery access to long-distance communication I was somehow stuck in that older model: the solo anthropologist separated from her interlocutors. Until this return to Tiringoulou, I hadn’t fully appreciated how wrong I was, and I hadn’t fully appreciated the loneliness accompanying the misguided conception I’d had. This time, eating grilled chicken dipped in Chadian chili powder with General Tarzan, I discovered another nebulous layer of meaning in the anthropological project. I’m not quite sure what it is. It’s not new solidarity, exactly, in that while I empathize with guys like him and appreciate his analysis, I don’t have sympathy for the violence he and his fellows have perpetrated. Maybe it’s simply the sense that people in Tiringoulou know what I’m doing and see value in it. At least as much value as a (delicious) grilled chicken, anyway.

The Wealth of the Prosperity Gospel

I arrived at Mission Rhema two hours into the four-hour Sunday morning service. An usher helped my friend Henri, who lives nearby but is not a member, and I to find seats in the full but orderly semi-enclosed space that the church rents from the Central African Women’s Organization. Bright pink and yellow cloth draped from the ceiling gave the place a festive, circus-like feel. From the front, a woman spoke into a microphone, her voice intense yet a bit flat, trance-like, in its cadence.

She told of how she’d had nothing and had no idea how she could give the church anything, but somehow she managed to give more than she ever thought she could. And lo, she was immediately rewarded: for her job, she was supposed to go en mission but when her boss saw her he didn’t even greet her. He just said, “You have been given a promotion!” And that promotion came with a huge raise, of course.

We had arrived in the midst of testimonials, the heart of the service at this evangelical church. One by one, men and women, most of them between the ages of twenty and forty, came up to recount how they had been destitute, or unlucky, and then gave some huge amount of money (referred to as donner les voeux, or handing over one’s wishes) to Mission Rhema. Having given to God so much “that it hurt,” he then provided for them.

One woman recounted how she had been scammed out of a house (she purchased the house not knowing that the person she bought it from was not the owner) and then, after having given her wishes to Rhema, she was rewarded with not one but two houses, each far larger than the one she had lost. Each testimonial was precise in the amounts of money spent, lost, and gained, the value of the houses acquired, as well as the terms of the “appels d’offre” and the “droits d’exploitation” received in return and so forth. The frankness with which those bearing witness rattled off these sums unnerved me, both because I’m not used to discussing personal finances so forthrightly in public and because I couldn’t quite understand how people with so little could give so much – on the order of a thousand dollars or more.

Everyone (except the young kids, many of whom napped) listened, rapt, to the tales. The entire body of a young woman sitting near me and wearing the sash that marked her as a church stalwart was joyful: she leaned forward in her chair, her expression open, as if ready to leap up at any moment. The stories were as satisfying as good Hollywood films. I could empathize with people’s tragedies all the more knowing that things would inevitably turn out better than ever in the end.

And yet they also made me uneasy. The helping hand these people received from on high after they handed over money to the church was more helpful than I could quite believe. Wasn’t this really some kind of pyramid scheme, in which people with very little give it all away and receive none of the expected material benefits in return? The witness accounts couldn’t possibly be true, could they? They must have been embellished. The whole affair seemed exploitative. And yet that was clearly not the experience of the congregation, which was, in a word, joyful, even despite the paucity of song that is usually my favorite part of a service.

Eventually the pastor recovered the microphone. He had laryngitis but told us not to feel sorry for him. And it was easy to do as he said – he was funny and had an easy rapport with the audience, teasing us about God catching us unawares in our bathrobes. He too had tales of having given far more to the church than he ever thought he could, and how it had so obviously paid off. He told of the Mission Rhema bus that had recently been purchased and was en route from Cameroon, of the parcel of land purchased for the Mission Rhema conference center, plantation, and school they were starting.

As things we winding down, the pastor began calling up the couples who would soon wed at the church, sweet-looking young pairs who he ribbed in a good-natured way, telling only-slightly embarrassing stories of their arrivals at the church. The clock showed that we were an hour and a half past the stated end time for the service, but I’d have gone on listening to him for a good while longer – the pastor made me laugh, and I liked him.

We had an appointment to chat after the service, so I made my way to the front and waited while he received people. He knew everyone’s name, and he inquired after their families and their affairs. When I’ve seen ministers or other Central African dignitaries interact with the populations they are meant to serve, the encounters have been marked by a profound sense of hierarchy, as if the big person and the supplicant are not just from different classes, but are rather different kinds of people, almost as if they are different species. That was decidedly not the case in the way the pastor interacted with his congregation. He was a kind, fun, and yet also wise uncle.

I was shown a chair to wait in. From behind me I sensed people busy with some task, and I turned to look. A man held a black plastic bag (the kind offered at the Lebanese grocery stores in town – thin but not ultra-thin) as wide as he could, and a woman reached into a blue barrel (the kind people use for rainwater catchment, larger than an oil drum) and scooped out fistfuls of cash and coins. The plastic bag was by now bulging, impossibly full, and as they closed it and moved on to the next I heard the faint tinkle of coins settling amid the bills. They noticed me noticing them, and I turned away.

As the pastor and I walked to his office one of the women who had witnessed during the service came over to say hello. The pastor asked how she was doing and she replied that she had never been better. Her face radiated joy. The pastor explained as we walked away that the woman had been poor but started a sewing business around the time she joined the church. Now she had eleven employees and supported an even larger circle of relatives.

The pastor could not find his key so we settled in the shade outside his office and chatted for the next forty-five minutes about how he had gotten into this line of work. After obtaining a university degree, he had expected to be integrated into the public service, but he graduated just a few years after structural adjustment ended the policy whereby all graduates received state jobs. He worked as a commercial lawyer for the Central African oil company, and when they were bought by Total he was told he could keep his job but the salary would be cut by 75%. So he returned to another interest: evangelical Christianity, which he had been active in while an exchange student in Romania. He was accepted into the Haggai Institute, a program that trains people to be missionaries in their own countries, and upon return to CAR founded Mission Rhema.

He claimed not to take a salary from the church and instead to live off the proceeds of his livestock businesses. (He raises goats and chickens, growth industries in this city of people who love meat, especially since the supply of cattle has declined now that the Muslims involved in that market have by and large left.) His attire seemed to back this statement up. It was fancy, but it was Central African fancy, not the kind of international fancy of someone who lives much of the year in France or Dakar, like so many Central African politicians. He explained that he wanted to help Central Africans learn practical business skills (investing, planning, accounting) so that they can succeed in the private sector and not see working for the government as their only option. Through the church, he would provide various services traditionally associated with the state to the congregation: transportation, jobs, health clinics, schools.

When I left, I didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, I was still uncomfortable with the idea of people giving so much money in the hopes that doing so would cause God to bring them vast material benefit. And yet I’d quite enjoyed the experience and was inspired by much of what the pastor had to say. Mostly I appreciated the rapport he had with his congregation, which violated what I think of as the norms of comportment governing relations between important people and the hoi polloi, which dictate formality, supplication, and a decided power imbalance (the supplicants have no recourse if they are in the end ignored). I’ve written articles about this political divide. And yet this church compound provided the experience of a different world, one in which God provided agency and efficacy for all.

Mostly, visiting this church was a chastening reminder of the fallacy of thinking about politics in Central Africa like a secularist, cordoning off politics and religion as if they were entirely separate realms. It also reminded me that however much mistrust and uncertainty I see in social life in CAR, there remain public places where you can leave a handbag unattended and not have to worry about it being stolen. Admittedly, that might be partly because all the money inside has already been handed over. But it’s not the only reason.

Boomtown on the Oubangui

Recently back from a quick trip to Bangui, allow me to share some impressions. What surprised me most was the traffic and general bustle.

Even despite the fact that many taxis and minibuses were stolen during “the crisis,” as many in Bangui refer to the violence of the past two years, never have I seen so many traffic jams in the city. (I’d have said too that never has it been so hard to cross the street, except that I was mostly not on the street – for the first time, instead of hoofing it from place to place and hitching a taxi where I could, I hired a private taxi, for safety. Things were calm during my visit, but it hasn’t been long since a flare-up, and the general sense is that thieves still abound.) Vendors with gaudy Christmas gifts – balls that look like they’ll stay inflated for about as long as it takes to bring them home, neon-colored tinsel – as well as the usual boys balancing towering pyramids of boiled eggs and women expertly carving the green peel off oranges to reveal fragrant, glowing-white/yellow orbs crowded the sidewalks and spilled out into the streets. For their part the streets are more potholed and rutted than ever, the effect of no maintenance and the constant stress of peacekeeper tanks and armored vehicles.

Being in Bangui during such a not-yet-post-conflict purgatory reminded me of another time I was in the capital under similar circumstances. It was June 2003, my first visit and just three months after Bozize’s successful coup. Then, the roads remained empty. Much of the downtown remained shuttered after the pillaging and looting. The only sign of playfulness amid the tension was a statue of the ousted president that was each day dressed in colorful drag. There were few restaurants open, and as I recall the mobile phone service was poached from towers across the river in DRC. (To meet people for interviews, I called landlines! That, more than anything else, makes it feel like long, long ago.) A grand total of four INGOs worked in the country then: Oxfam-Quebec, COOPI, MSF-Spain, Handicap International. Today, there are fifty or so. Even with the unofficial curfew, never have the posh cafes and restaurants done such brisk business. A new(ish) Lebanese-run “fast food” (by Bangui standards) joint is packed every day for lunch, both because it serves up decent burgers and falafel and because it suits the temporality of humanitarian work: always in a rush, if only to write the next report.

I’ve read about booming wartime economies before – Carolyn Nordstrom has written about then evocatively, and a bit polemically – but I wasn’t expecting to see one here in Bangui, which I think of as a rather sleepy place. Many Central Africans wonder what the humanitarians are actually doing, as the economic bustle has not done anything to change the structural problems of Central African politics and the weakness of state institutions. LandCruisers and walled villas with brightly-colored gates tagged with signs evoking laudable goals are all quite visible; the effects, whether long term or short term, of their good works less so. These criticisms strike me as both unfair and a bit true. They’re unfair in the sense that humanitarian aid is explicitly a band-aid, not a cure, and should be judged in those terms. Moreover I am sure that the people receiving “pulses,” oil, and maize appreciate the food they get, whether because they can eat it or they can sell it (little baggies of yellow peas can be seen at markets all over). At the same time, though, it seems to me that the biggest effects of these organizations lie not so much in the distributions of household goods, and much more in that they are a legitimate way to bring money into the economy at a time when other types of businesses are for various reasons fraught. Most of that money comes in the form of rents for offices and houses, salaries for locally-hired drivers and maids and guards, the 18,000 CFA (about $35) that expat employees will spend on a prix fixe lunch at Relais de Chasse, and so forth. That this industry operates with an implicit “expat standard” in contrast to a “Central African standard” is a boring fact related to the distribution of power and money in the world (I too lived in a lovely, humanitarian-rented apartment during my stay). That’s not the point I’m trying to make. It would just be nice if there was some recognition that the more prosaic impacts of humanitarianism – namely the economic stimulus, especially to landlords and long-distance transporters and restaurant owners – might be more important than the stated, more-ephemeral goals of solidarity and relief.

I was also surprised by how calm it has seemed in the city. Though carjackings had become normal in recent months, they seem to have declined. The peacekeepers play soccer and chat with people like me but are otherwise a bit bored. Partly this is due to the improving security situation and partly it’s due to the red tape surrounding any action they might endeavor to undertake now that they’re inside the UN bureaucracy fortress. Whether this lull will last remains something of an open question, of course (rumor had it that all the big politico-military entrepreneurs – Bozize, his son Francis, Michel Djotodia, Abakar Sabone – were meeting in Nairobi last week). But, as I heard time and again, people are tired.

The reasons for the relative calm are no doubt many. My personal favorite has to do with the death of Levi Yakete. Yakete was a party operative under Bozize, and he fled to France after the Seleka coup. From there he was active in getting money and supplies to anti-Balaka fighters, and for this he was placed on the UN sanction list. In mid-November, he was driving near his home in southern France when his car broke down. With his wife at the wheel and his children in the back seat, he began pushing the car to the side of the road. But before he got there, another car came up from behind and plowed into this unexpected, nearly-stationary obstruction. So Yakete is no longer able to incite violence.

There’s another layer to this story, however. It is widely understood in CAR that people’s spirits outlive them, and these spirits continue to act in the world after a person’s death. One of the death-spirit’s main tasks is to exact vengeance in the case of a wrongful death. “La mort n’est pas gratuite.” “On lui a rendu la monnaie.” These sayings indicate the sense that vengeance will be had, that people will get what they have coming to them. So the second layer of meaning associated with Yakete’s death had to do with the feeling that the spirits have come to work their vengeance. And so people are proceeding with caution.