Foole's No Man's Land

A day at the zoo

2012-01-15T16:18:00.000-08:00

South Sudan’s only zoo is in Wau, in the vicinity of its biggest national park. The zoo shares a sprawling compound by the river with the state’s anti-poaching guards, a force perhaps a thousand strong. Why, I wondered, did the zoo exist, and for whom?

After passing through the rhino-painted gates, I approached a group of milling officers, nearly all of whom sported uniforms with South Sudan Wildlife Service epaulettes. I squeezed as much as I could out of my year of classical Arabic study in my attempt to communicate my interests. Eventually they ushered me to the base commander, who sat in a large office adorned only with a portrait of President Salva Kiir and a vase of plastic and nylon flowers. I explained -- now in English, for someone had located a translator -- that though I had long studied conservation in Central Africa never had I come across a facility like a zoo, and that I was curious to see how it was done.

The commander summoned a uniformed young woman, Theresa, to show me around. South Sudan boasts one of the largest armed wildlife service in the world, with some 14 - 18,000 guards (because they work on a sliding scale of formality, and because they are organized on a state-by-state, rather than a federal, basis, overall tallies of their ranks are imprecise). Shunting the less-experienced SPLA fighters into the wildlife services was one way for the new army to unburden its rosters of those ill-equipped for a military life, or those higher-ups would rather push out of the way. I suspect this is why I saw so many women on the wildlife service bases, though I didn’t manage to corroborate this hypothesis. Some state governors use the wildlife forces as a kind of home guard, that is, as a rural police force. In other places, the guards are more left to their own devices. These are dynamics I hope to explore further in my upcoming research projects.

By the time we’d reached the animal cages, a distance of some 50m, Theresa and I had picked up an entourage of three men: a boy of about eight, a young man who looked eager to overhear some English, and a stooped-yet-spry older man. We stopped at the crocodile pit. I saw nothing lifelike inside the concrete kiddie pool that the creatures had been forced to call home. Eventually one lifted its head enough that a few warty patches were visible above the mucky water.

Next up were the monkey cages. As we crossed the compound, a herd of pigs of all sizes cantered past us. Pigs filled the tree-dotted yards. Some lay in the dirt and mud, and others sauntered in search of a patch of grass or scraps of food left behind by the women selling tea and fried cakes. I asked, in Arabic, who of our group would eat a pig. Theresa shook her head no and seemed to give an involuntary shudder of revulsion. The older man nodded an emphatic yes. The other two watched the responses of their compatriots but stayed silent themselves.

The first monkey flung himself around the perimeter of the wire mesh cube that penned him in with an intensity unmatched by even the most energetic hamster on a wheel. Who would eat that? I asked, pointing at the frenzied creature. Theresa again offered an immediate “No, no!” The older man said yes and began licking is lips. The hands are the best part, he said. “You slice them” -- he indicated slash marks on one palm -- “and grill them with onion and oil.” The recipe recitation called to his mien a reverential satisfaction familiar to me from countless excursions with New York foodies. By this point Theresa had already reached the furthest monkey cage, where a calm grey fellow with shaggy fur greeted her by sticking his arm through the wire mesh. Theresa began stroking him, her fingers working through the fur in a combination massage/nit-picking session. The little boy moved to touch the monkey, but the jerky thwap he struck out with met a reciprocal bop from Theresa. She yelled at the boy to leave.

Next up were the hyenas. The zoo houses two, each in its own cage not much larger than the average professor’s office. The first we met was pacing back and forth manically. Theresa walked up to the wire mesh and began speaking in soothing tones. The hyena stopped near her and pushed its snout through a hole in the grille. Theresa stroked the animal’s nose as one might greet a horse. The hyena occasionally pulled back and bared its impressive mouthful of teeth and then returned for more petting. The two men still present seemed to be debating whether to offer their rubs as well but thought better of it upon sight of the teeth.

The conditions at the Wau Zoo could only be wished on non-sentient creatures, as cramped and devoid of stimulation or natural elements as they were. But in Theresa I saw a glimmer of interest in communicating with the inmates, and as I left the zoo a surprising lightened, heartened feeling accompanied the pit-of-the-stomach soul-wrenching I’d prepared myself for. Of course, I still had no idea why such a zoo should exist. But I’m glad Theresa was there to watch over.

Modern nomads

2011-12-26T12:16:00.000-08:00

In my conversations with South Sudanese politicians in the western part of the country (the states that cozy up to the CAR), few topics elicited such energetic entreaties to action as the presence of the Mbororo. The Mbororo are nomadic, or at least itinerant, herders. Originally from West Africa, where they're also known as Peulh, they have spread as far east as Ethiopia. (By some accounts, the most violent conflict on the South Sudan/Ethiopia border pits Mbororo against Hausa – two groups usually thought of as West African.) Sedentary folks, maybe especially farmers and politicians, often portray the Mbororo as recent arrivals, as invaders who destroy fields. Though it may be true that the level of armament held by the herders has increased in recent years (a response to rises in cattle thievery and other defensive imperatives, whatever other offensive goals they may harbor), most are not newcomers. Mbororo have made use of western Sudanese space for some two hundred years.

I gained a window onto contemporary nomadism while talking with an Mbororo chief in Wau, Western Bahr-el-Ghazal state. (I should note that the category Mbororo is a nested one in western Sudan. In Darfur, both Mbororo and other groups of West African provenance, like the Fulani, are placed in the broader category Falata. This “Mbororo chief” – how he described himself to me – was probably technically Fulani, for he sold traditional medicines. His willful elision of such distinctions may indicate new solidarities taking shape.) In explaining the exactions meted out against his people (massacres of humans and livestock, theft), he portrayed himself as a law-abiding, yet victimized, South Sudanese citizen. But when he started showing me his treasured collection of faded family snapshots, a different picture emerged: “These are my children in Moundou (eastern Chad)...this is my mother in Ndjamena...this is my wife and daughter in the Congo...this is my wife in Kampala...this is my wife in Rwanda...” He learned English in Nigeria, Uganda and South Sudan. His life has stretched from Senegal (where his grandfather lived) to Sudan.

The professed pacifism of people like this Mbororo chief has not stopped politicians from seeing them as a danger in need of eradication. The fear is that they are “tools” of the government in Khartoum. In this reading, the Mbororo are simply the next group the North has unleashed on the South – invaders sent to squat and appropriate land. “We learned the lessons of Abyei,” was how one politician put it. That is, they see the Mbororo movements as analogous to those of years past involving Misseriya herders, who some southerners see as having planted themselves in borderlands in order to further northern claims to disputed territory. This is not a full picture of either region's politics, but it is an analysis that has proven an effective mobilizer. Other criticisms of the Mbororo include that they collaborate with the Lord's Resistance Army and that they are the authors of rapacious environmental destruction, particularly through hunting and gathering honey (one of the region's main products) with poison.

In all of these accounts, despite being a tiny minority, Mbororo appear an existential danger, in the manner so evocatively described by Arjun Appadurai (channeling Mary Douglas) in Fear of Small Numbers. Support for anti-Mbororo measures reaches to the highest level of government. South Sudanese president Salva Kiir Mayardit recently gave a speech in Raga, north and west of Wau, in which he exhorted his compatriots of the need to get rid of the nomad menace. One appointed official I met in Wau stated that South Sudanese troops are standing guard on the border to prevent any Mbororo from entering. He explained, “Everybody in Africa has his country. They should go back to their country!”

I asked him, “What is the Mbororos' country?”

“We don't know!” he replied, and he and the assembled crowd of suit-clad functionaries (most sported a South Sudanese flag lapel pin) burst out laughing. When the chuckles subsided, he added, “They are not part of our citizens. They are not among the tribes in South Sudan.”

Back in Juba, I rang mobile phone after mobile phone in hopes of reaching high-level officials. Every call ended with the message that the subscriber could not be reached, the tell-tale sign of a switched off phone. In the weeks before and after Christmas the city empties. The INGO and diplomatic crew decamp for northerly climes, and the government descends to Kampala and Nairobi, where their families live. Schools in South Sudan remain basic (universities have yet to re-open after independence last July), and so anyone who can afford to do so keeps his clan in another regional capital with better educational opportunities.

If “everyone in Africa has a country”, why are only some forms of (opportunistic) nomadism visible, and vilified, as such?

Penis snatching comes to Europe

2011-12-17T08:55:00.000-08:00

I’m not much of a comedian, but I can usually elicit a chuckle -- if only of disbelief -- by talking about penis snatching. Depending on one’s point of view, genital removal by occult means is either a rumor or an epidemic or both, and it has swept across western, central and southern Africa over the past two decades or so. I encountered an outbreak in Tiringoulou, in CAR’s far Northeast, in March 2010. Penis snatching falls into solidly into the category of African-news-so-bizarre-it’s-funny, and for that reason I often feel a little guilty when I regale people with these tales, for I fear they stoke false images of Africa as the home of startlingly irrational people.

What I hadn’t realized until my mom happened upon a reference on the Norwegian Wikipedia site about witch trials there is that genital theft was a major preoccupation in Europe, too, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries. Detailed accounts of these crimes can be found in the 1486 volume Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”). The Malleus’s authorship is attributed to two Dominican scholar/inquisitioners living in present-day Germany. Their objective was simple: to convince people that witchcraft exists and that it is a devil-driven scourge demanding immediate eradication. After offering a proof of the existence of witchcraft, the authors begin describing different modes of witchcraft, how they are perpetrated, and what can be done to treat them. They conclude with detailed discussion of how witches should be punished and reformed, which, though advocating the death penalty and torture in certain cases, are surprisingly un-bloody, with forgiveness often an important element. (These instructions cover scenarios from "method three of passing sentence on a woman with a bad reputation who is to be exposed to questioning under torture" to "method two of passing sentences on a denounced woman who merely has a bad reputation" to "the method of passing sentence on a woman who has confessed heresy but is relapsed, though repentant".)

The book explains a range of practices such as turning people into wild animals and such, but by far the bulk of the sorcery described concerns anxieties over procreation. For instance, the authors go into cases of women becoming infertile, and men whose semen can no longer exit or lose power, and men who can no longer get an erection. It also discusses “the way in which they [witches] take away male members”. Here is one such case, recounted by a venerable father from the convent at Speyer. He was hearing confession one day when

“a certain young man showed up, and in his confession he claimed sorrowfully that he had lost his male member. I was astonished and did not wish to believe his words lightly, since the man who believes lightly is judged to be fickle-minded by the wise man. So, I discovered the truth through experience, perceiving nothing by sight when the young man removed his clothes and showed me the place. Then, I came up with a sensible plan and asked whether he considered any woman suspect. The young man said that the did, but she was away, living in Worms. Then I said, ‘Here are my instructions for you. Approach her as soon as possible and strive, to best of your abilities, to soften her with promises and enticing words,’ which is what he did do. A few days later he returned to thank me, claiming that he had regained every thing. I believed his words, though I was once more made certain through visual experience” (p. 324).

One of the main differences I’ve noticed between the European and African discussions of this kind of witchcraft is the importance accorded to the visual/physical aspect. In conversations about penis snatching with people in Tiringoulou, I never met anyone concerned with the physical possibility of removing (and eventually replacing) a “male member” without touching it. When I’ve discussed with people from outside of Central Africa, in contrast, their first question tends to be something along the lines of, “But they didn’t really remove the penis -- that’s impossible!” Already in 1487, the Malleus anticipates this concern. Its authors go to great lengths to explain the mechanics of the operation. For instance, they write:

At this point, a few things should be noted for a clearer understanding of the previous discussion of this topic. First, it should in no way be believed that such members are torn out of or separated from the body. Instead, they are hidden by the demon through the art of conjuring, so that they can be neither seen nor touched. This is shown by authority and reason... . Alexander of Hales says: “Properly speaking, conjuring is an illusion of the demon. This has no cause from the point of view of a change in the thing but only from the point of view of the perceiver, who is deceived, in terms of either the internal or the external sense of perception.” In connection with these words, it should be noted that in this instance the illusion is played on the two external senses (sight and touch), and not on the internal ones (the common sense, fantasy, the force of imagination, that of estimation, and memory (p. 324).

The authors later continue,

As for what pronouncement should be made about those sorceresses who sometimes keep large numbers of these members (twenty or thirty at once) in a bird’s nest of in some cabinet, where the members move as if alive or eat a stalk or fodder, as many have seen and the general report relates, it should be said that these things are all carried out through the Devil’s working and illusion. In this case, an illusion is played on the viewers’ senses of perception in the ways discussed above (p. 327).

(When picturing a nest of members, my mind leaps to the handbag full of penis butter sandwiches that a Tiringoulou man told me about. How odd for such similar images to become socially powerful in such different times and places.)

I’m not sure what to make of this observation about the importance of the physical element to tales of penis snatching. The most facile interpretation would be the developmentalist one: “Africa -- (still) 500 years behind Europe.” For obvious reasons that’s unsatisfactory, to say nothing of simply wrong. I’m in the early stages of developing an article comparing contemporary African penis snatching scares to these earlier European ones. I don’t yet know how it all fits together. For now I’m filing it under the trove that is the mental category of surprising connections -- a category that gives me satisfaction as much for the puzzles it introduces as those that it solves.

Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches). 2006. New York: Cambridge. Christopher S. Mackay, ed.

Warriors and the rest of us

2011-12-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

While in Nairobi at the home of a bibliophile friend I picked up Gerald Hanley's Warriors. The book is a memoir of Hanley's stint in Somalia as an officer-administrator during WWII. I only made it about a third of the way through before I had to leave, but the book's understated yet searing descriptions of this work have stayed at the forefront of my mind as I trek around Juba.

Hanley describes privations most Westerners today would find insupportable: a year at a remote outpost training a group of Somali soldiers with nothing but a bi-annual (if he was lucky) alcohol ration that he'd too-eagerly quaff in a few short days to break the monotony and the heat. Finally, a full year in, he received the order to descend to Mogadishu, dreaming all the while of the books and alcohol he'd stockpile, and the vegetables he'd demand, for his next posting, which would start some three weeks later and last another year.

Critiques of colonialism abound, and many are full of merit. But I find myself chastened by Hanley's experiences. Few today would travel across the earth to endure such trials. (To be fair, many of Hanley's compatriots went crazy or fell ill under the stress.) In my evenings with UN folks, I'm continually amazed how quickly the conversation turns to the vagaries of job privileges: if one has classification x, what kind of R&R policy does one fall under, and what are the salary implications? Should one's generator fuel be paid for by the organization? and so on. These are smart people spending long hours packed in converted shipping containers, writing reports and organizing logistics and coordinating meetings. Many of them appreciate the idealistic goals of their work. In mentioning their interest in parsing privileges (puzzlingly dull to an outsider), I don't mean to critique -- I think that kind of exchange is an inevitability, and useful, when working for large bureaucracies in which merit may be less important to success and remuneration than skill navigating rules. And I fully include myself in the category of those gone "soft" -- I enjoy running water as much as the next person, and wifi even more. But I do rather wonder how future generations will view us, our work, and our accomplishments in places like this.

Getting around in Juba

2011-12-14T08:04:00.000-08:00

As a foreigner in Juba without an INGO/UN cocoon, I spend a lot of time getting up to speed on the workings of public transport. Private taxis -- often posh SUVs -- are prohibitively expensive. This leaves three options: foot, matatu (minibus), or boda-boda (motorcycle taxi).

[An aside: this city is run by foreigners, and I'm fascinated to see how that affects language -- which words overheard on the street are taken from English (anything NGOish), which from Arabic (numbers) and which from Ugandan street talk (boda boda, of which all the drivers hail from the land of the crested crane).]

As one boda driver observed, laughing, yesterday, "You are fearing!" It's true -- I don't feel very safe on the careening motos. The young drivers wear dark sunglasses even as the gloaming turns definitively to dusk. They take the bumpiest, narrowest, most-rutted and soccer-playing-children-filled dirt tracks so as to avoid the traffic police, who can always find some infraction with a boda driver. When walking is not possible, I prefer matatus. Matatu parks are always a mess: the minibuses jostle, bodas dart, hawkers ingratiate, and would-be passengers stay alert to the alternating squishes of mud, dust, and garbage underfoot as they scope out and push for a seat on the next bus home. They're Hans Monderman on speed.

Here's what I really like about these situations: being forced to rely on strangers for navigational aid often reaffirms my faith in humanity. Usually someone will see my confusion and help me find my way, taking on my cause as her own. (Three times people -- who I'd barely had time to say hello to -- offered to pay my fare. That has never happened to me in CAR.) Here's what I don't like: getting dumped in a far-off marketplace just as it's emptying for the night and discovering that, kindnesses of strangers or no, I am miles from my intended destination.

On dowries and contradictions

2011-09-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

While in Bangui last December I attended a dowry ceremony for a cousin of my friend Pichou, Bangui’s best events photographer. The family’s house was in the bustling quartier near the airport, and the yard was already full of people finding spots among old friends and relatives in the rows of white plastic chairs rented for the occasion.

Pichou introduced me to everyone on her side of the family. At one point we met a toddler. “And this is…” Pichou leaned back to think for a moment. “She’s the daughter of my sister so…my daughter! She’s my daughter.” Then we turned to give bises to a vibrant, designer jeans-wearing youth. He died a few months later while working on the electoral census in the Southeast. (The circumstances of his death are a bit murky.)

The ceremony itself involved the groom’s family, represented by a cracking-voiced teenager with an often-malfunctioning microphone, who presented large quantities of household goods, food, and clothes (“two pairs of women’s sandals”; “one liter of cooking oil”; “two sleeping mats…”) to the bride’s family, whose job it was to act miffed at the poor quality of the offerings. Some plantains that the goat had taken a bite out of got a loud laugh. Finally, he handed over an envelope of cash. Now the derisive comments started flying in earnest from the bride’s side: “You want her to walk to the hospital when it’s time to give birth…?” (complete with pantomime of the offensive possibility). One by one people came forward to augment the total. Finally, they’d put together somewhere between three and four hundred thousand (a bit shy of US$1000).

I left early, my exit smoothed by the fact that Pichou, too, had to leave. She had to head on to the airport to take photos of a family friend who was returning in a coffin. The friend had gone to Cameroon to give birth since the hospitals are so much better there. But she’d died anyway. I was headed in the other direction, toward town, and I managed to hitch a ride with one of President Bozize’s sons. (Bozize has many sons. I prefer not to mention which of them was my chauffeur.)

He drove a Hi-Lux kitted out with darkly tinted windows. In the gloaming last minutes before total darkness we traversed the market, which was full of kids running around to fulfill their parents’ final errands of the day. A tiny baggie of cooking oil, a Maggi cube. I was sure we’d hit those darting shadows, but somehow we avoided disaster.

After the held-breath market crossing, we started making small talk. I talked a bit about my research. After an awkward pause, I asked, “So what do you do?”

He hemmed and hawed a bit. “I was a soldier, but, well, I mean, I was in the army for a while, but…” Finally he blurted out, “You know that the president is my father, right?”

I did. I waited for him to continue.

He explained that he was setting up a Christmas fair next to the stadium. Something about selling drinks, and music; and also teaching the youth about peace and democracy.

As we navigated a roundabout at the edge of town he turned to me and asked, “Have you been following the news?” I hadn’t heard anything since the day before. “About Ivory Coast? Gbagbo held his own inauguration today! Mais ca, c’est vraiment trop!”

Bozize’s son then launched into a diatribe about the failings of African executives. He and his friend, in the back seat, agreed that Ouattara would have been the better choice. “Ouattara is open. He’s for the West. Gbagbo is too much of a nationalist. You see what I’m trying to say?” Then he shifted fully into lecture mode: “We Africans, we have a problem. We like power too much. There are people who, once they grab power, stay there for thirty years! Est-ce que c’est normal? Non! Do you think you could see such a thing in America, or in Europe? No way! The problem here is the nepotism and the corruption.”

I nodded and murmured in hopes that he would continue this fascinating speech. To me, these seeming contradictions are the most thrilling moments during fieldwork. Here my interlocutor had gone from describing himself through reference to his father’s power (and remember that Bozize took power in a coup, and the last elections were far from free and fair) to decrying nepotism, all in the span of ten minutes. As we arrived at my place, the conversation had turned to President Biya in neighboring Cameroon, now in power for more than thirty years. “C’est pas normal,” the president’s son clucked, shaking his head.

I’ve been thinking about this interaction as I write a chapter about militarized anti-poaching in CAR. I’m struggling to describe how anti-poaching militia members who can fluidly espouse conservation rhetoric in conversation with me – and not just espouse, but really advocate, with heart – and then turn around and hunt and fish and otherwise break all the conservation laws they are meant to enforce. The cynic might say, “They’re lying,” and move on. But I think that believing one thing and doing another is actually a very human tendency, and to describe it simply as lying misses much of what is interesting about it. Anthropologists might talk about such apparent contradictions using the language of performance: the guard is performing his mastery of the Western conservation dictates, demonstrating that we’re on the same team, so to speak, but it’s just a show put on for potential donors. This evokes some of the emotions at work, but it nevertheless seems lacking. Embedded in the idea of a performance is that it’s fake, a show, a façade. And isn’t that just a way of saying it’s artful, ritualized and entertaining lying?

And thus a dissertation speed bump arises.

Bandits, etc.

2011-08-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

My review of Saïbou Issa's Les Coupeurs de route: Histoire du banditisme rural et transfrontalier dans le bassin du lac Tchad was just published in Politique Africaine. Available here (ungated) under the heading REVUE DES LIVRES.

Now there's really no excuse for me not to finish the chapter I'm currently working on, which compares robbery like that Issa describes to roadblocks, two techniques of governance with similar outcomes. And yet.

p.s. A happy post-script, for once: Patrick got his passport!

A passport to nowhere

2011-08-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I received an anguished message from my friend Patrick, my co-investigator in matters religious in Bangui, as I mentioned in my last post.

Patrick works for an international humanitarian NGO that, with the exception of a horrid (but largely covered-up) sex scandal, has become one of the most steadfast of the aid groups present in northeastern CAR. The job was Patrick's first for an aid group, and thanks to the mentoring of his former boss and his own helpfully-inflated sense of pride in a job well done, he became one of the organization's most-trusted employees. He now has a dream: to work, just once, as an ex-pat. Partly, this is because he yearns to see some of the world. And partly, it is because he has noticed that expatriate employees earn exponentially more than national staff, and just one posting abroad would be enough to secure his dream of building a farm for himself and his family in the southwestern countryside.

Pride, excitement, and not a little apprehensiveness mixed in his demeanor as he told me that his bosses had nominated him to attend a workshop on gender violence in Nairobi. It would be his first trip outside the region. For my part, I was purely thrilled. As someone who has always adored going to new places, perhaps I over-value things like trips. But even if that's the case, I was happy that Patrick would get a chance to see a bit more of the world and expand the knowledge that would help him contrast his Central African experience with those of people elsewhere. Not everyone desires (or has the privilege of) this kind of anthropological perspective, but Patrick does. He put himself through college by spending evenings at the airport, where he could use the streetlights to do his homework while earning money watching travelers' cars in the open car park. Now he too would be taking off.

After a three-week work stint in the far Northeast, Patrick returned to Bangui to take care of passport formalities in advance of his trip. For the past two or three years, CAR has been in the process of switching out its old passport facilities for a new, biometric system. (Apparently, the US has pushed for these changes.) This has meant that the passport authorities have been shuttered for more than two years. The only passports obtainable during that time were those purchasable (illegally) at PK5, Bangui's big market. (The existence of such a large black market in passports is part of why people say there are more Central African diplomatic passports than regular ones.) If your passport expired during the past two years, tough luck. If you never had a passport before (like Patrick), also tough luck.

Fortunately, the new biometric facilities opened at the end of June. Unfortunately, the minister and his adjoint responsible for managing the office went en mission to Ndjamena shortly thereafter. These two lead the process of convening an audience at the presidency, and this commission decides whether the person should be granted a passport. In their absence, Patrick's completed dossier languished. His plane to Nairobi came and went. He remained in Bangui, and the passport officer remained in Ndjamena. “L'Afrique c'est le monde le plus compliqué, comprends” (“Africa is the most complicated place, you understand”), he wrote, and then refused to talk any more about it – the memory was too bitter.

Thus I found myself in the perhaps contradictory position of lamenting the injustice that one person could not go en mission and the injustice that another had gone en mission. A friend who used to work for an international organization in Bangui complained that she would continually get calls from headquarters asking her to name a Central African delegate to a global conference. (These junior staffers are judged on whether they manage to round someone up from every country.) She finally refused when the request came for a representative to the world conference on tigers in St. Petersburg last year: with no tiger within thousands of miles of CAR, why should some functionary be plucked from his office – where ostensibly he has work to do – to spend several weeks (given the paucity of planes into Bangui, any trip quickly becomes a long one) on a per diem-paid vacation like that? There is a small conference class in Bangui that trots around the world to round out attendance statistics. (One friend who is part of this select group admits that most people just show up each morning to sign the register and claim their per diem and then depart, a practice he decries) But for everyone else, even just being allowed to obtain the documents necessary to be permitted to leave the country requires a massive feat of organization and lobbying. (And let's not get started on the travails of those seeking visas to North America or Europe...) Everyone is shooting for those narrow holes – the “conference gaps” in the global immigration system. What would it take to figure out and make new openings?

From Hannah Arendt onward, much thought has been expended over the plight of the stateless, who have no one to approach for a passport; but what of the state-d who nevertheless are denied the basic rights of citizenship?

All this reminds me: time to renew my passport. I sure am lucky.

How to be a Winner

2011-07-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of decades the number and variety of churches in Africa have seen a major expansion. Led by West Africans, and especially Nigerians, the pentecostal churches have quickly gained ground from the staid outposts of the previous century's Christian missionaries. The new churches are the object of much fruitful anthropological study (Birgit Meyer's work has been ground-breaking; my friend and colleague at Duke, Brian Goldstone, studies the prosperity gospel in predominantly-Muslim northern Ghana). The churches arrived late to CAR, but their presence has been growing, so I decided I'd go and check one out for myself.

I picked La Chapelle des vainqueurs (Winners' Chapel) because I remembered puzzling over its name when I saw it while living in Nairobi in 2004. I brought Patrick, a Central African friend who works for a humanitarian agency. We sneaked into Sunday morning's service a few minutes late. Inside, the hall had little adornment. Signs with one-word inspirational-moral prods (“prosperity,” “faith,” “supernatural,” “wisdom,” “healing”) marked the places where other churches might have depicted the stations of the cross. Here, I saw not a single cross.

At first I didn't recognize the preacher's language – his screaming and the microphone's distortion made deciphering words difficult. A translator quickly repeated his every phrase into crisp French. It dawned on me that the mysterious language was a heavily-accented Nigerian English. “Eh-ta-do!” became a clear “C'est fait!” in French. Only thanks to the French version did I figure out that the preacher kept repeating not “the war of God” but “the word of God”.

Despite the continual references to the word of God, God's actual words were notably absent from the service. I counted only two direct biblical references – to Matthew (Jesus as healer) and Romans. And we were treated to only one song. Instead, the preacher and translator worked themselves into rhythmic, repetitive incantations: “Heey-too!” “Il a pris!” “Heey-too!” “Il a pris!” The themes of health and wealth ran through it all.

Testimonials (my favorite part) punctuated the sermon. One man came forward and told how he had been preparing a dossier to submit for a Termes de référence (a contract bid). He lacked some of the required paperwork, but when he went to drop off the folder the person told him it didn't matter. And he got the contract! Everyone cheered and clapped. Another man told how he was en mission (the terminology used for trips outside the capital) to Paoua when he got in a car accident and broke his arm. He made it to a healer in Bossangoa, who set the bone and handed him a piece of string to tie around his wrist and protect him from the town's witches. He tossed away the man's string. And look at him now – his arm is fully healed, and no witches were able to come near him!

Later, the preacher asked “all the businessmen” to come forward. Patrick whispered to me curiously, “It looks like everyone is going forward.” Indeed, the pews had emptied. This is really strange in CAR, where there are very few businesspeople. The small salaried class all draw their paychecks from the state or aid agencies. Most of the businesses are run by expatriates – Chadians and Cameroonians in the markets; French, West African and middle Easterners in minerals; Lebanese in imports – to the extent that “businessman” is almost synonymous with “foreigner” here. I wondered if perhaps Winners' Chapel encourages people to think of themselves as entrepreneurs in order to attain wealth. If so, the arrival of these churches here can only count as a good thing, for an expansion of people's imagination of the realm of paid employment beyond the state is sorely needed.

Toward the end of the three-hour service, the preacher turned to public health. He called on people to avoid exposed food (flies can come and set up on it, he explained), turned that entreaty into a spiritual metaphor (you have a doctor in you!), and then finished on a bombastic note: “Destroy diabetes! Destroy AIDS!”

Once the service had wrapped up, all of us first-timers were invited to stick around and fill out cards with our contact info (I gave my real info and have yet to be contacted) and sip warm sodas. I guess even I won something.

Typo

2011-07-04T00:55:00.000-07:00

One typo in my SWP Comments piece -- where it says "UN Peacebuilding Fund" it should read "UN Peacebuilding Commission."

CAR: Peacebuilding Without Peace

2011-06-30T00:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Denis M. Tull, I enjoyed a couple of months as a guest researcher at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (the German Institute for Security and International Affairs) in Berlin this spring. One outcome is my (short) piece "CAR: Peacebuilding Without Peace" for their "SWP Comments" series.

The 'gerund defense,' alive and well

2011-06-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

L'universitaire Roland Marchal a été abondamment cité à Bruxelles, les 16 et 17 juin, lors de la table ronde des bailleurs de fonds sur la Centrafrique....ce spécialiste des conflits a produit un rapport très critique sur le niveau de fraude enregistré lors des élections couplées (présidentielle et législatives) dans ce pays, le 23 janvier. A croire que cela n'a pas convaincu. Au cours de la rencontre organisée au Palais d'Egmont, en présence de quinze ministres centrafricains et de l'homme d'affaires Hicham Kamach, roi des forêts en Centrafrique, le Banque africaine de développement (BAD) a annoncé le doublement de ses engagements à 180 millions $. Et la Banque mondiale, qui a salué "les efforts considérables en faveur de la paix", devait augmenter de 20% en volume son portefeuille de projets.

(From La Lettre du continent, No. 614, 23 June 2011)

Translation:

Professor Roland Marchal was often cited in Brussels during the donor roundtable for the CAR on 16-17 June. This conflict specialist produced a report that was very critical of the presidential and legislative elections in this country on 23 January. Apparently it did not convince. Over the course of this meeting at the Palace of Egmont, in the presence of fifteen Central African ministers and the businessman Hicham Kamach, King of the Forests in CAR, the ABD announced that it would double its investments to $180 million. And the World Bank, which saluted the country's "considerable efforts in favor of peace," will augment its portfolio in the country by 20%.

What it really means:

The 'gerund defense' is alive and well.

Monday's Tidings

2011-06-21T02:06:00.000-07:00

I was happy when I looked across the compound yesterday morning and saw Carine walking toward me, her small frame engulfed in a billowing West African boubou. I had thought of Carine and her sister, Berenice, often since I left CAR in December. Two of twenty-eight siblings, they were due to give birth within days of each other.

I asked first after Carine’s baby, who I’d heard had been sick last week. He’s doing better now, thankfully. Then I asked after Berenice. I’d only met Berenice a few times, but she’d quickly won me over with her vibrancy, generosity, warmth and smarts. I’d brought some baby board books for her and hoped to meet up with her soon.

“Elle est morte.”

Carine’s response made no sense to me. My first thought: she’s joking. My second thought: “morte” must have some alternate meaning that I’m not aware of. The idea that such a strong, healthy woman could just die seemed absurd.

Once I’d sat down, Carine explained. Berenice had gone into labor. At first, it seemed things were OK. But the doctor said she would need an operation. Sometime while she lay there, her abdomen gaping wide, she and the baby passed away.

I suppose I’m naive to be so shocked. CAR has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. But I realized that I had thought of those statistics as the statistics of other people, of people without access to doctors or people unable to take various precautions during pregnancy. When I last saw Berenice, a professor of geology at the University of Bangui, she explained how she was watching her diet and avoiding sugar and caffeine and visiting her physician regularly, all for the sake of her baby-to-be.

I had met her at a workshop of political “fragility”. Of the few women present, she spoke with the most passion. I’ll always remember her heartfelt monologue on the challenges of living with pervasive witchcraft. She joked comfortably with even the most senior people present. She had not just confidence, but confidence back up by intelligence. All that energy. Gone.

I went through the day with half a brain. The rest had clouded over, preoccupied and foggy. When I discussed Berenice’s passing with friends, many responded with some variation on “Si elle est morte, c’est que Dieu l’a voulu” (“If she is dead, it’s because God wanted it to happen”). I don’t buy it. But if I wanted to pull a shred of personal meaning from what was essentially a meaningless death -- that is, an unncecessary, preventable one -- I might take it as a stark reminder of the limits of anthropological values of relativism. I often find myself trying to explain -- to frustrated aid workers, for instance -- how people here aren’t just irrational or backward, and how their ways of life make sense if only you stop to try to understand the world from their perspective.* But deaths like this one are not to be understood. They are to be decried and abhorred and mourned.

* This is something of a caricature of both the aid workers’ and my own perspectives. For instance, recent anthropological work both important and fascinating (such as that of my adviser, Charles Piot) has tried to take the experience of radical uncertainty -- including the fragility of life in a place like Bangui -- seriously as a mode of sociality and understand the struggles it engenders.

Update: Bangui on the Potomac

2011-06-16T10:42:00.000-07:00

Last week I trudged through the Washington humidity to embassy row. The facade of the CAR embassy looked even more derelict than usual. Some indeterminate building material (paint?) hung precariously, like the bark of a eucalyptus tree. A piece of paper was taped beside the door. It bore the handwritten message that “The Ambassy of the C.A.R. has moved.” Well, I thought, it has happened. It was only a matter of time.

The CAR government bought this prime real estate shortly after independence in 1960 and then left it to decay. From its innocuous beginnings, the building metamorphosed into a fun house of dangers: rusty springs booby-trapped chair seats, stairs warped so drastically they led climbers downward as they attempted to ascent, light fixtures sprouted colorful exposed wires. Staff learned to pick careful paths through the hazards. Instead of fixing the place up, the CAR government decided last year to put the building on the market. A private couple paid $1.099 million -- cash -- to purchase the house and will likely spend a similar sum to return it to the kind of habitable space they desire.

Meanwhile, nestled between the ‘Sandinista Safeway’ and Chief Ike’s bar, the new CAR embassy announces itself not with a flag (they moved in only a month ago), but with a gaggle of young men hanging out on the porch watching the world go by, just like in Bangui. Inside, employees debated the proper positioning of presidential portraits amid the plastic ficus plants and shiny, lightweight pleather couches. France 24’s talking heads blared from a small flatscreen. The government bought this 2704 Ontario Rd. edifice for $800,000, which, after adding a couple thousand dollars’ worth of furniture, still leaves a tidy margin. The new embassy is not without its oddities: the waiting area abruptly gives out onto a linoleum-floored space, the ghost of a kitchen or bathroom. And here, too, the gaping electric sockets spit wires.

Still, it was heartening to see the evident pride with which the receptionist inhabited his sprawling desk in the entryway. What would it take to transform that pride into a broader sense of responsibility for the building and the institution it represents? Regular cash flow would be an obvious factor; but if it were that simple one would think the $200 visa fee (a $50 hike since last time I checked) would help in that regard, and this doesn’t seem to be the case.

I managed, through no more nefarious means than a little pleasant schmoozing, to obtain my visa within an hour, rather than the official 48-hour processing time. And, by the time I post this, I will be back in Bangui la Coquette.

Dirt, etc.

2011-05-07T12:44:00.001-07:00

My mental to-blog list -- on topics as varied as the fascinating books I've read lately (Lauren Benton's A Search for Sovereignty; Saibou Issa's Les Coupeurs de route; Edward Keene's Beyond the Anarchical Society; and, for lazy weekend reading, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin) to research anecdotes I'm mulling now as I write to observations during recent travels -- is starting to overflow my too-small head.

First up: the timeliest item. In early April I had the good fortune of spending a couple of weeks in London. Most of the time I spent holed up in the apartment pecking away at my keyboard, and much of the rest of the time I wandered around and gazed into the windows of too-expensive pubs and restaurants, like the grad student Oliver Twist, while nibbling a Sainsbury's pre-packed egg and cress sandwich (half price on its sell-by date!).

But the one place I felt rich was in museums. Many of London's best museums are free, making it easy to pop in and out as if the Dutch masters section of the National Gallery were actually your living room. I enjoyed the John Soanes Museum by candlelight (a special treat the evening of the first Tuesday of the month). Soanes was an architect, and his mansion -- now the museum -- is preserved in the overstuffed manner he designed with paintings, sculptures, and even a sarcophagus.

But the two museums I implore you to visit, if you happen to be passing through, both have an anthropological bent (surprise, surprise).

First up, the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. Mostly housed in one large room full of dusty, dim glass cases, the displays of cultural artifacts at the Pitt-Rivers have changed little in the nearly 100 years since it was founded. I had expected a lot of "exotic" pieces from "native" cultures of the world (Ecuadorean shrunken heads being an obvious example), but I was surprised to find that the collection included many exotic pieces from England as well. Most interesting to me were the items related to witchcraft, and the fact that an Azande rubbing board shared pride of place with various British charms and spells, like preserved lemons stuffed with pins to ward off evil doers, or a bull's heart punctured by nails and needles. A beautiful silvered flask bore a faded type-writer-written tag:

"Small glass flask of bilobed shape, silvered over the inside and stoppered. This is reputed to contain a witch, and the late owner, an old lady living in a village near HOVE, Sussex, remarked, 'they do say there be a witch in it, and if you let un out there'll be a peck o' trouble'. It was obtained from her in 1915."

Exoticizing, Orientalist -- pick your cultural theory-derived insult, and the Pitt-Rivers Museum could make an easy target. But it's impossible to leave the place without feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and elated by the vast riches of human cultural production.

Whereas the Pitt-Rivers Museum is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future, the other expo I recommend will shutter in a few months. The Wellcome Collection, a wonderfully bizarre museum, is hosting an exhibit inspired by the outstanding Mary Douglas's argument that "dirt" is a socially constructed category. "Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life," is an exhibit too wide-ranging to capture successfully in just a few sentences, so I'll just say, if you pass through the city, Go! It combines fine art (seventeenth-century Dutch paintings linking sweeping and other chores of household cleanliness to Godliness); scientific discovery (the first microscope in the world and some of the things its inventor looked at -- first up: the "batter" full of "little animals" that he scraped from his teeth); public health, design (such as the architecture of hospitals) and the development of info-graphics (John Snow's gorgeous map showing cholera cases clustered around the Broad Street Pump -- a feat of visual communication impressive still today); installation art (I admit, I was less taken by the majorette dances in a London waterworks than by some of the other displays); diaries (including the amorous letters between a London photographer and his working class subjects, especially a maid named Hannah); maps depicting the plan to move Parliament far upriver to avoid the noxious sewage stench that pervaded London in 1850s summers...and on and on. I often find museums have a calming effect, encouraging slowing down to ponder the development of artistic technique and its relationship to beauty. "Dirt," in contrast, was quite simply hugely stimulating -- almost as if I could feel new synapses connecting previously dusty or shuttered off corners of my brain.

Now I'm in Berlin and can afford the cafes and bars but not the museums. Go figure.

Meeting Old Friends Anew

2011-03-21T17:12:00.000-07:00

“The tidy, systematic and well-rounded texts written by anthropologists are more often than not the end-product of long periods in the field characterized by boredom, illness, personal privations, disappointments and frustration: few anthropologists can state squarely that their fieldwork was a continuously exciting journey of exploration, full of pleasant experiences.”

Those are Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s words, in his Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, which I came across while preparing to teach an intensive course on Anthropology and Development this May (suggestions for readings and lesson plans welcome).

Eriksen’s words rather neatly describe many of the feelings that dogged me during much of my time in CAR. I went to the dentist today for the first time since I began my fieldwork and learned that I had developed the bad habit of clenching my jaw so hard that I’ve worn through enamel and am now grinding down tooth. My life has none of the stress of, say, an investment banker’s, but I nevertheless think that fieldworkers can lay claim on a particular kind of anxiety (am I doing all that I can? What more should I be doing? Argh -- if I’m bored it means I’m slacking!).

But what an unalloyed pleasure it has been to re-acquaint myself with friends from Ndele and Tiringoulou and Kaga Bandoro and Bangui and beyond as I transform fieldnotes into dissertation text. Acquaintances, pestering youth, stonewalling functionaries, confidantes -- they all become friends in hindsight’s warm gaze. More importantly, there is something I find inexplicably satisfying about presenting a person in all his/her complexity. The other day I was writing about the Chef de Cantonment in the Ministry of Water and Forests in Ndele. He’s someone who, in the span of a couple-hour conversation, might explain Chadian gris-gris innovations; negotiate responsibilities with his boss in Bangui (his cell phone ring: “Appel en provence directe des Etats-Unis, ville de New York!”, layered over a siren); give a forehead kiss to his two-year-old daughter, who toddled into his office every day on her way home from nursery school; argue his theory of the symbiotic relationship between humanitarian aid and rebellion; and haggle over roadblock fees with passing Sudanese truckers. All this while also making peace when his subordinates fight (including with him). Even just re-reading these opinions and tales is a surprising, fascinating jaunt as unknown and known alternatingly intersect and then veer off from each other.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein describes a similar feeling as one of the things she had to get used to, and came to love, when she shifted from academic philosophy to fiction:
“The struggle for clarity doesn’t cease when you write fiction, but it’s a clarity that can’t be pursued to completion, or else the whole point is lost. Hammer home what you, the author, take its meaning to be, and you hammer the entrance closed. The shaping of a work of art means, paradoxically, preserving some space for ambiguity. … Characters let me know they’re becoming real when they start surprising me. Keep them one-dimentional and the deadliness of total control is yours. Give them many dimensions -- details suggestive of rich inner lives -- and a certain wildness takes hold.”

The people who fill my fieldnotes are just that -- living people. They’re not characters. I certainly don’t consider myself to be creating a work of art, but just a rather humdrum humanities-tinged social science text. Clarity must remain my watchword. I’m sure most of those complexity-indicating details will not survive once I turn to editing. (My adviser’s one entreaty was that I please not write a 600-page dissertation, and I’m happy to oblige.) But, oh, how lucky am I who got to meet these people, these endlessly surprising people! “Wildness” is an addictive privilege. Who cares about anxiety.

Rebels, Revolutionaries, Rappers

2011-02-20T15:59:00.000-08:00

“Grinning, the rapper lays it down in a local Ugandan language: ‘I was given a knife/ I gave it to the people who harvested millet and they gave me the millet. I gave the millet to the cattle keepers, who in exchange gave me a cow.’ … To reach the farmer-youth vote bloc of this east African nation, Mr. Museveni, 65 years old, has channeled his inner MC: He has crafted his own brand of agri-rap to show he’s hip to young people’s concerns.”

So explain Sarah Childress and Nicholas Bariyo in their WSJ article about the Ugandan presidential campaign.

Hearing of Museveni’s musical strategy reminded me of a provocation launched by Jean-François Bayart that I always found searing. He argues that in Africa

“...democracy has shown its limits. It is, indeed, unable to incorporate either economically or institutionally, in terms of either education or ideology, the groups we have just mentioned, namely young people and rural communities, in spite of the fact that these two excluded categories actually compose the majority of the population. Too often it is war which has instead become the vector of their mobilization.”*

By rapping about cows and millet, has Museveni found a non-war solution to the problem of integrating youth and country folk into the Ugandan polity? The article suggests that Museveni’s raps are wildly popular, so the answer might well be yes. If so, the Ugandan case still does not disprove Bayart’s argument, for, Friday’s “elections” notwithstanding, it is certainly not democracy that has drawn in the dispossessed.

In the run-up to the Ugandan presidential elections, I read several accounts exploring the idea that Uganda might be the next to erupt in democratic protests -- 2011 could be the year of freedom in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya... and Uganda! I read those musings weighed down by a large dose of skepticism. “I doubt it,” I thought, and then immediately wondered why I lack faith in African capacity for peaceful revolution. After all, as recently as a month ago Egypt was notorious for its torpor, a characterization that today seems unfair at best -- perhaps even ludicrous.

Am I just another shill for the old Gluckmanian idea that “Africans are rebels, never revolutionaries”? That is, the idea that social structures in Africa are inherently unstable, but that that very instability and conflict is a functional means of re-establishing the system. Truly revolutionary change never occurs. (Bayart for one criticizes Gluckman for his “vulgar” emphasis on function -- efforts to prove the functionality of social practices often quickly become circular, and hence analytically shallow. But Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, avant garde post-structuralists though they might have styled themselves, had no apparent problem with it.) I hope not, but the idea remains lamentably seductive.

As I write, rumors place Gaddafi in Venezuela. The limits of his efforts to portray himself as an “African” leader have become exposed. Even his scores of African mercenaries (grisly footage here -- not for the faint hearted) seem not to have saved him. He is falling with the Arabs, while Museveni will rule on.

* Jean-François Bayart, “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion,” African Affairs 99 (2000): 217-267; 227.

GFFL

2011-02-08T15:24:00.000-08:00

Like Ronald Reagan, last week my grandfather would have celebrated his hundredth birthday. George F.F. Lombard devoted his professional life to the Harvard Business School. Since I'm temporarily in Cambridge, I decided to head over to the Business School to see if I could find any traces of him. I found far more than I could digest: carton upon carton of his correspondence, lecture notes, chapter drafts, dating from his days as a student to his tenure as a dean. He got involved with the Human Relations Group in the 1930s (famous in those early years for the Western Electric research) and remained in the field, specializing in organizational behavior.

I've tried to read some of Grandad's books but never made it very far into the dry, practical prose. But in the nests of correspondence, an intellectual life came alive in all its mundane excitements – thank you post cards from students now far afield; articles passed on by soon-to-be colleagues because they were curious to hear what you thought; conversations about ho to communicate theory so that students can put it in practice. Nothing earth-shattering, to be sure, but a satisfying life all the same, I thought as I browsed.

In addition to teaching a course with Robert McNamara (statistics and data management for air force officers), during WWII Grandad conducted research to help solve some of the “human and organizational challenges of the rapidly expanding Air Force” at a military base near Boston:

“Lombard made almost daily visits to the base over the span of six weeks, early in 1943. He tried to observe as much as possible about the human interactions at the base without disrupting normal routines. He recorded not only what various individuals said, but also what they did; and how what they did affected the work of others around them. This was a different kind of research, which drew upon the lessons of the Western Electric experiments of the 1930s to assess and depict the inherent complexities of a human organization. Lombard quickly perceived a collision of values and a pronounced incompatibility between old and new types of warfare...”*

Grandad, in other words, was an anthropologist! Who knows in what ways his life and studies have impacted the course I've taken. For all the time I knew him, Grandad was a spectral presence carefully mowing the lawn and oiling bike chains while his wife regaled and opined for the two of them. But I'd like to thank him nevertheless.

* Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. 1987. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945. Boston: HBS Press. P 245.

Photos from the HBS library and the Harvard Gazette.

What I learned about fragility

2011-02-01T15:13:00.000-08:00

While in Bangui a couple of months ago I participated in a workshop organized by the World Bank assessing the factors that make CAR “fragile.”

[An aside: The previous terminology to describe state dysfunctionality (failed/collapsed/failing) seems to have fallen out of favor with all but the gang at Foreign Policy. In addition to sounding rather, ahem, judgmental to development “partners,” “failed” isn't a very useful analytical category because it describes nothing about the ways in which politics work and only what they lack (see this Alex de Waal lecture for a typically erudite explanation of how this impoverishes analysis). But always the critic, I'm afraid I have a bone to pick with the new “fragility” lens as well. This is because many of those states labeled “fragile,” such as CAR, are in fact quite durable in their weakness. They remain mired in a position of low functionality, receiving just enough aid to prop up the status quo; their negative (externally-granted) sovereignty makes revolutionary, democratic change difficult if not impossible to achieve. For a much more eloquent and detailed explanation, see Pierre Englebert's latest book, in which he shows the surprising resilience of the state form in Africa.]

The workshop gathered Bangui 'intellectuals' (I use the term in the broad Francophone African way to refer to people with a level of education that differentiates them from those in the fields). In more and less heated tones, participants decried and celebrated aspects of sociality in their country. Occasionally, thanks to having spent a fair amount of time in provincial towns and villages, I knew that the statements of these cadres, who themselves rarely leave the capital, carried only partial truth.

One man finally highlighted the Bangui-centric nature of their polity. In Cameroon, he said, Douala and Yaounde are weekend ghost towns – all the well-off return to the village to seek the benediction of their communities. In contrast, in CAR, those who have left the village almost never return. Whether a university student or a minister, all fear the “jealousy” of their compatriots. The villages are home to strong powers of witchcraft. (The country's terrible road network and lack of transport options don't exactly facilitate travel, either.) Some in the audience chuckled at this statement. But a friend who lectures in geology at the University of Bangui became exercised – “People might say they don't fear sorcery, but they're lying! Everyone fears it!” She went on to relate several famous cases, and I saw heads nod in acknowledgment.

While in Ndele, I got to know a Chef de Quartier whose son had been Minister of Defense a decade previously; he lived in the same kind of house as all his neighbors and wore the same beat-up flip-flops. What about “wealth in people” – the idea that wealth in Africa is determined by the number of people you support – I wondered? Few to no traces of elite beneficence grace CAR's hinterlands (unless you count the villa the disarmament co-president is building himself, or the monument to his mother the president constructed – both, incidentally, paid for with DDR monies, now used up before the program could even start...but I digress). But elsewhere on the continent, scholars have shown how the return of the successful to the village is perhaps the main means of city/village redistribution.

Claudine Vidal analyzed city-village relationships in Côte d'Ivoire in her Sociologie des Passions (1991). Her perspective spans several decades, which lets her show how these relationships change through time, partly as a function of economic fluctuations and partly due to the changing nature of honor and shame. In something of a reversal of the current CAR dynamic, she found that in the post-independence decade rural relatives begged their city-successful offspring not to build them new villas for fear of neighbors' jealousy, which would manifest through sorcery.

In the following years, displays of wealth became more lavish. Funerals, a kind of theater for enacting relations of dependence and power, are one of the main occasions for such displays. And because people are buried where they were born, these often take place in the village. The increasing need for ostentatious displays went hand in hand with growing feelings of shame attached to coming from a village deemed backward. Qualifying someone's village became a way of describing the person him/herself. For instance, a village (and its progeny) could be described as “pretty” or “have everything one could need”, but it could also be “disgusting” or “have nothing at all”; it was understood that the descriptor held for the person as well. As a result, ministers worked harder to fix up their villages, sometimes even against residents' wishes. (Ivoirian President Houphouët-Boigny's build-your-village campaign, of which his own village, Yamoussoukro, was the never-imitable example, probably contributed as well.)

Vidal's argument reminded me of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book, The Honor Code. I've only read the op-ed versions of it that he published around the time the book came out, but in those he argued that “moral revolutions” occur when people's ideas of what constitutes “honorable” behavior changes. From the op-eds, I got the sense that Appiah views moral revolutions as generally progressive, and he seems to think that it is possible to push the evolution of the concept of honor (for instance, he discusses the possibilities for approaching the eradication of “honor killings” in Pakistan). Would shaming CAR's intellectuals about their villages' appearance, an economic upturn and better roads lead them to transform their communities of origin with no consideration of jealousy and sorcery? I'm not sure human relations are that rational-functional. Still, even if not so predictable, I'd be curious to see the results.

p.s. I've heard that the magnitude of urban-rural redistribution by elites has been quantified in Côte d'Ivoire but haven't found the citation. If anyone knows the details of these studies, I'd be obliged if you could pass them on.

Elections in CAR

2011-01-25T15:15:00.000-08:00

My post (er, rant) about elections and democracy in CAR is available here. Thanks to the folks at the Monkey Cage for indulging my rambling.

Pirogue race photos

2010-12-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

Finally, a few photos:

Bozize gives a thumb's up to the crowd (note the stylish life preserver/suit color coordination):

And they're off:

Photos shot by Pichou Stone (www.pichoustone.com), professional photographer based in Bangui and Paris.

Pirogue race!

2010-12-01T23:47:00.000-08:00

Tuesday morning I awoke early, stepped onto the balcony and peered down to the fog-swaddled Oubangui, the river that separates CAR from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Already at such an early hour, the water teems with pirogues (canoes made from hollowed tree trunks). Some are full of fishermen, who paddle (sometimes with oars, sometimes with flip-flops, cupped hands, or whatever else they can find) to the calm, current-less spots that dot the water like knots in a piece of wood, where they cast long nets in hopes of ensnaring the ever-more-elusive capitaine. Some have outboard motors and transport beehive-like Styrofoam structures full of plastic baggies of neon-colored juices for sale either here or across the river in Zongo. It's a Bruegel painting come to life, even on the calmest of Sundays. But Tuesday was different: the annual pirogue race. My two housemates had slept on the balcony in anticipation of catching the first preparations.

Sadly, though, I saw only the usual puttering river folk. Perhaps the race was on Wednesday after all – it is usually on 1 December, which is the day CAR celebrates independence (not the actual day of independence, which is in August like that of all the other former African colonies save Guinea). But this year they decided to roll the usual independence day celebrations into the 50^th anniversary commemoration, and hence expected a number of the region's heads of states, and the festivities spread over several days. The official program (a few hastily photocopied sheets stapled into a book, such that the text ran in randomly inclining and declining lines) placed the race on Tuesday, but who really knew? I sighed and commenced the usual early morning ablutions.

Then I heard it: drumming, and some cheering, and people beginning to gather on the patch of beach that has emerged now in the first weeks of the dry season. All of a sudden a monster pirogue appeared around the corner. Whereas the daily pirogues carry maybe five people, some 45 people filled the enormous race pirogue. They stood in two columns. Each column was divided into thirds. The front and rear third rowed in unison, and then, as they rotated their paddles through the air, the middle third cut into the water: a human piston. In addition to the rowers, each boat carried a drummer to keep rhythm, and many carried a bailer to triage the water inevitably taken on.

Pretty soon the water teemed with drumming, whirring boats. Some teams sported a fresh-white t-shirt from their sponsor. An Areva employee tossed them out to his boat. One of the KNK (the president's party) boats got to wear their signature orange. Another was inexplicably pink. Others stuck with the rainbow of knock-off soccer jerseys they wear every day. Meanwhile, the Navy (yes, landlocked though it is, CAR has a navy) zipped around in Zodiacs and wore their orange horseshoe life preservers with all the dignity of ermine-bedecked royals. A fight broke out between a young man and woman on shore, but the crowd quickly broke it up. Last year the police spent a lot of time whacking people with sticks to clear the finish area of people. This year they didn't even seem to mind as fans climbed on top of their vans for a better view.

And they were off! The race started more suddenly – ahead of schedule! – than anyone thought possible. The water churned with these human pistons, who quickly sped around the bend and out of sight. They returned via the far bank, some 800m away, racing millipedes to us now. Then, immediately in front of where they started, they cut across at a 90 degree angle to finish by ramming into the shore in front of the assembled dignitaries. The rowers jumped out quickly to avoid those behind them and as they did so the pirogues often became water logged and sank. The skill of many of the rowers – none of whom ever seem to practice – became even more apparent alongside this reminder of their crafts' fragility.

Meanwhile, pirogues kept arriving from both sides. I learned later that the initial race had been a false start, but the navy had been unable to catch up to all the boats to alert them to turn around so they just let them complete the course. Either that or the VIPs weren't in place yet. By the time President Bozize, gliding by in a Zodiac (no life vest for him, just a sober beige suit), made a surprise appearance, flashing his trademark double thumbs-up at the crowd, 32 boats jockeyed for position at the start. The gun cracked and they again flew downriver. Whistles blew and Zodiacs whizzed: false start. It seems impossible to actually line up so many boats evenly in such a strong current, and I wonder if the false start verdict is simply a way of increasing the illusion of fairness. Whatever the case, it meant that we got to watch the most exciting part not once, but thrice.

Apparently two pirogues overturned during the race (post-race rumors said two died), but I didn't see it. I saw only the masterful cooperation of one of the white teams, which powered to shore in first place. The rowers celebrated with gymnastic leaps from their craft. In their euphoria they seemed not to notice the runners-up sailing in behind them, but by some unknown artistry, disaster was avoided.

After the race, overheard shrieks led us to wander to the deck on the side of the building that fronts the road. A large woman, resplendent in a boubou, screamed at a man with a pousse-pousse (a hand cart similar to those Americans use for their gardening). The pousse-pousse was filled with pigs trussed by their legs. The woman grabbed each pig by the ear and hurled it angrily onto the ground. The pigs wailed their too-human-like squeal at the pain and attempted futilely to scootch away. They came to encircle a homeless man who'd made the grassy patch his bed and slept tranquilly through all the drama. The woman disputed the delivery charge the pousse-pousse man had leveled for his service. In the end, she tossed the pigs – using either the ear or the tail as a handle – into a taxi and drove away. The turbaned Chadian soldiers that accompany the president watched on, seeming bored, from their on-guard positions in the middle of the road.

For the rest of the day, I bubbled over attempting to convey the morning's excitement to friends: Did you see the pirogue race? It's the most impressive sporting feat I've ever seen! Never have I felt such exhilaration and euphoria at an athletic event. The West Africans who populate the middle levels of INGOs and UN agencies sniffed, “Pirogue races? We used to do that.” Expatriates shrugged, “I had to work.” Central Africans seemed happy to see a foreigner so impressed with their country but a little baffled by the eagerness.

Far greater sportswriters than I have dedicated their careers to describing the effervescence that animates these mass events. And yet in the end it always comes back to: you had to be there.

Truth in advertising

2010-12-01T23:32:00.000-08:00

What is the name of Bangui's best hotel?

It is a "charming quirk."

Decades after "the Sofitel" lost its international affiliation, a fresh coat of paint brings new accuracy to Bangui's leading accommodation. It seems likely to be upstaged, though, by a soon-to-open edifice, known to all as simply "the Libyan hotel."

Clarification

2010-11-22T23:08:00.000-08:00

A reader pointed out that it was unclear whether the woman in the picture I posted last week understood the meaning of her shirt or not, so I'll just say it outright: she had no idea.

After meeting her I traipsed off to an INGO-run hygiene promotion seminar for community leaders. There our presenters treated us to text bubble- and arrow- filled PowerPoint presentations, which they referred to as "tools". As the t-shirt illustrates, modes of representing abstract information are culturally-specific and learned. If they're lucky, people here have grown up copying sentences written on a chalkboard, the main school-day exercise. Bubbles of text, arrows, and flow charts don't enter into it. At the risk of anthropological pedantry: this should factor into the creation of "tools".

T-shirt Hell lives on...

2010-11-19T05:46:00.000-08:00

For the record, this woman is a deaconess in a friend's church as well as a primary school teacher here in Kaga Bandoro and is by all accounts an upstanding person.

(For those unacquainted with T-shirt Hell, it truly is hellish.)

CAR: 2014 World Cup champion?

2010-11-13T08:28:00.000-08:00

In June and July, when World Cup drama swallowed sports fans, Central Africans too followed the action – only from far beyond the sidelines, their country's team finishing in nearly last place in the FIFA rankings that determined who could take position on the field. Unfortunately, this year no one organized an alternative World Cup Final for the two last-place teams in the world, as an enterprising Dutchman did in 2002. In that match, Montserrat fell to Bhutan, and the result is perhaps the most genuinely uplifting sports film I've ever seen. (And this within the genre of sports films which, rightly or wrongly, prides itself on uplift.)

As the year's football/soccer teams have played on, however, CAR's has jumped from the doldrums to 112^th position – the largest improvement made by any team the world over this year (from #202). First, the Central Africans tied Morocco. Then they played Algeria – the same Algeria that everyone watched eliminate Egypt for the World Cup, the same Algeria that came in second in the African Cup – at the Chinese-built stadium in Bangui and won. Never has Bangui seen such joy, such pride. (Incidentally, CAR also has a surprisingly good basketball team – any NBA scouts out there should take notice of this entirely untapped resource.)

My posts here tend toward the negative, confronted daily as I am by the myriad challenges that people here most overcome to achieve anything more than basic subsistence. So I am happy to be able to report this kernel of positive news among the rest. One can argue – rightly, in my view – that sports are far less important than fostering more substantive, and more widespread, political, economic and social opportunities. But, in the country that has attained last place in the World Bank's Doing Business rankings for two years straight, people relish the good news they can get.

Oil flares, theft and trust: A long, rambling trip to Bangui

2010-10-31T06:16:00.000-07:00

According to a National Geographic article I happened upon a couple of years ago, northeastern CAR has the least light pollution in the world. It has no doubt struck many people who have flown over the region that there might be something to those problematic stereotypes that label Africa “the dark continent”: in addition to vast un-peopled spaces, there is simply very little electricity to go around. Scarlett Lion recently linked to a gorgeous photo essay by Peter DiCampo about “life without lights” in rural Ghana. A photo of a teenage girl cooking expertly over a small open fire and of a teacher holding a paper-grading pen in one hand and a flashlight in the other evoked intense memories for me. The only thing missing from the shots are the inevitable swarms around a spot light – insects, moths, mosquitoes, gnats, and thousands of other creepy-crawlies you never before knew existed.

I thought of all this as I flew to Bangui the other day. Looking out the window, for hours I saw nothing but blackness. But on the Casablanca – Douala leg, we jogged out over the Gulf of Guinea, and there, suddenly, burned a haphazard series of red-orange lights. Oil flares, I realized. The fires that erupt from leaks in the underwater drilling stations. Immediately recognizable as non-electric light, how large must those bonfires be to blaze so vibrantly from 40,000 feet above?

I arrived in Douala near midnight, chastened at the reminder of how exploitative resource extraction can be. Immediately after the Douala-bound passengers filed out, leaving only the few continuing on to Bangui, I had another reason to be chastened: someone had made off with the duty free bag of gifts I had left in the overhead bin. No amount of tearing around Douala customs and baggage claim yielded the lost items; they were no doubt safely stashed away. All the gazes that met mine wore a composed look that came across as smug innocence. The bag contained Scotch for the friends with whom I'm staying in Bangui, one of whom explained that the same thing had happened to her when she passed through Douala. Luckily she woke up just enough to see as the man made to place her sack within his and intervened.

In future research, I would love to study trust. I have no idea yet how I would go about doing it (I find Nathan Nunn's work fascinating but lack the training to perform such quantitative gymnastics), but it strikes me as a crucial, and under-theorized, aspect of social life. Trust resides in shared expectations about likely outcomes. In other words, one could in theory trust in a likelihood of theft. But is that really the way it works – trust becoming a vector for heightened suspicion? Maybe partly, but not entirely. In his new book (Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow), Pierre Englebert cites a statistic from the Afrobarometer survey of Nigeria showing that most people simultaneously do not trust the police– indeed, even see them as the root of many problems – and yet also have confidence that the police is the institution that should handle all theft and crime. This made me wonder whether it is possible not to have trust in, and yet to have confidence in, at least of a sort. Perhaps all this is rather a question of faith – faith in the face of what an empirical analysis alone might label damning evidence.

A final, disconnected thought to conclude this rambling post (one of the luxuries of blogging is an ability to override the inner editor that argues against random asides): the Arabic maps on Royal Air Maroc's overhead monitors labeled Kisangani with its colonial name, Stanleyville (actually staanleefeel in transliteration). Odd how these little time-travel glitches arise; the English version, and all the other Arabic terms, were up-to-date.

Welcome to Bangui.

Truth and Rumors

2010-10-26T05:28:00.000-07:00

I promised months ago that I would review Julien Bonhomme's Les voleurs de sexe: Anthropologie d'une rumeur Africaine (Paris: Seuil, 2009). Now, on the eve of departure for Bangui, I must write at least a few quick words or else postpone months more, as I'm trying to minimize the number of books I lug around with me.

Bonhomme argues that the penis-snatching phenomenon can explain “forms of sociability and modes of communication” in African urban areas. It is a response to the dislocation and uncertainty wrought by moving from a village-based social structure, in which roles and relationships are at least partly determined by family and lineage, to an urban one, in which few have these networks of trust and support. On p. 89, Bonhomme has created a chart to compare penis-snatching to “traditional” witchcraft, of the E.E. Evans-Pritchard variety. Whereas the earlier forms of witchcraft took place at night, within the family, and at home, penis-snatching occurs in the daytime, between strangers, and in public space. Where news of witchcraft in the village travels through gossip, in the cities news of penis-snatching travels through rumors. (Bonhomme is careful to dissociate his argument from negative connotations that the rumor has had throughout Western scholarship – notably in Durkheim – in which rumors have been portrayed as a kind of social cancer.) In other words, penis-snatching is a way of understanding the world that draws from the various stressors of life in the city

Bonhomme's argument is a compelling and useful one, except that penis-snatching is not at all limited to urban areas, as he suggests. After all, it happened in Tiringoulou, which barely even has a market and could hardly be characterized as urban. This oversight is probably due to the bias introduced by his sample: he draws on his own experience and interviews in urban Gabon as well as newspaper accounts from all over West and Central Africa, which report almost exclusively on urban areas. (I should not that the book also benefits from an impressive mastery of both the English and French literatures on occult phenomena.) Moreover, though this point goes somewhat beyond the scope of his book, it bears mentioning that though he sees villages as running on gossip, in fact they, too, are saturated with rumors. A social life organized through rumor is not a new experience for recent city arrivals. And dislocation and uncertainty pervade both urban and rural spaces.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is Bonhomme's discussion of whether people “actually believe” that genitals are stolen in these encounters. He points out that part of how rumors circulate is because people are unsure, perhaps even doubting, of the veracity of an account, and they seek guidance by relating the story and observing their friend's reaction. In this way, the rumor spreads, even though its perpetuation is laced through with uncertainty. This is similar to the scene I described in It's Complicated, and I think it's a useful addition to the debates on witchcraft and belief, which have tended to assume a binary between belief and unbelief. Figuring out what is true is a social process, after all. In addition, people tend to assume that what they want to be true is true, whether or not this is actually the case. For instance, in the run-up to the 2000 election, an email circulated with a series of quotes attributed to George W. Bush, each one more stupid than the last. The email went viral, and I can imagine much tut-tutting over water coolers: “Can you believe this idiot wants to be president...?” None of these phrases issued from Bush's mouth, however; they all dated back to another notorious word-mangler, Dan Quayle. But few if any of those who sent on the email bothered to check. It seemed true because it correlated with what they wanted to be true. Similarly, think of the debates over Obama's religion, whether Nixon was a crook, or whether Christine O'Donnell is a witch. Repudiating the charges (“Obama is not a Muslim”; “Nixon is not a crook”; “O'Donnell is not a witch”...) simply entrenches belief on both sides of the issue. Hypothesis confirmation bias strikes us all, some more often than others.

This observation meanders away from strictly speaking about penis-snatching, but I wanted to mention it because of the initial reactions I tend to get when I tell people about the phenomenon. They usually follow a similar trajectory: “Huh?” → [head-shaking] → “But they don't really believe it, do they?” Part of the strength of Bonhomme's book is that he re-frames the issue around ambivalence. Rumors -- the (in)famous radio trottoir – enable ideas to circulate, but they may circulate more from a “better safe than sorry” mentality than anything else. The phenomenon's progress through the continent, and beyond, hides these variations in degree of certitude about what is happening. The more analytically-minded may regard a failure to always question and test one what one hears as stupidity, but that makes the tendency none the less widespread.

Bangui on the Potomac

2010-10-10T15:35:00.000-07:00

A faded Central African flag hangs above the door at 1618 22^nd St. NW and a busted doorbell to the side. When I walked in to renew my visa (I'll be returning to Bangui in a couple of weeks), two men greeted me. Stephen and Jonathan, I soon learned. Jonathan invited me to please sit down, motioning toward two chairs. I hesitated; the seats of both had ripped apart, and spiky springs burst through the Naugahyde. Stephen hunched in a parka and warmed his hands in front of a heater the size of a small plate. The embassy, he told me, receives no money for heat. (For the record, it was 65 degrees out – hardly freezing.)

The woman in charge of visas was out, so while I waited I asked Stephen and Jonathan what they did at the embassy. Stephen is a driver, except that there is only one car, and the ambassador drives it. If they had another car, Stephen would chauffeur the other employees on their errands. But, he has no car. So instead he sits and warms his hands. Jonathan is the security adviser. I asked what that job consists of. “Well, for instance, when you came in here I asked your name...” A receptionist, in other words, in an embassy in which I've never seen another visitor.

Eventually Jonathan showed me the way upstairs, over treacherously carpeted steps – uneven and threadbare. He flipped a couple of light switches, to no avail, and shook his head. If I hadn't known better, I'd have been sure I was in Bangui.

Meeting Stephen and Jonathan in the heart of a city bustling with business-suited office warriors made for a stark contrast; I was struck by how little my new acquaintances' jobs are about work. In places like the CAR, especially in the case of government employees, “job/salary” has to a large extent been divorced from “work,” in the sense of mental or physical labor. To make this observation is emphatically not to say that Central Africans do not work hard. Most spend their days sweating in the sun as they toil in their fields. But field-work is not considered work, in the sense of an occupation that carries payment, and so it falls into a different category, more like a chore. People with postes may desire to do their jobs well, but the decades-long lack of sufficient materials and resources has changed people's ideas about reasonable expectations of productivity.

Jean-François Bayart explains how in the 1960s and 70s African leaders in effect created citizens by distributing salaried posts: a post in the government and its accompanying salary made a person a full member of the polity. The ranks of the civil service swelled. The 1980s saw the advent of structural adjustment and a push to clear the rolls of these “ghost workers.” The fact that so many residents' citizenship was effectively downgraded at a time of broad economic decline and donor eagerness for multi-party democracy helps explain the apparent chaos of the 1990s in Africa.

The CAR hews loosely to Bayart's trajectory. But Bayart's analysis does not delve into what it might mean that labor and salary-drawing have been severed from actually doing much of anything besides showing up at an office. In a way, the oversight for which feminists love to hate Marx – that he failed to consider women's work labor – has been reborn. Only in this case peasants of both genders take the place of women and an empty office with a single chair replaces the buzzing factory floor. There is a clear hierarchy that makes that which is paid that which is “real.” Pundits like to comment on the transformations of the knowledge economy, which produces ideas and information instead of tangibles like widgets. But the situation I'm describing produces something even more ephemeral than that.

The Danish Refugee Council runs programs aiming to change the way people think about farming. Rather than just a chore that enables daily sustenance, they want to show how agriculture can bring wealth and even status. If they succeed, perhaps even the hustling, stymied, under-employed youth who yearn for the status and salary that accompany a poste will re-think their preference. I can't help but think that would be a positive development.

House proud, or else!

2010-07-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago in Bangui I had a conversation with a Central African lawyer who lamented how so many of the disputes she sees concern real estate. She explained that a person will buy a house or a plot of land, build on it, inhabit it, and then, for whatever reason, leave for some period of time -- perhaps a month, perhaps a year. In a place where the search for paid work often takes people far from home, this is a common cycle. Upon seeing a house or plot thus "abandoned" the chef de quartier will often seize the opportunity to put the lot up for sale. It's the Central African variant of the infamous Nigerian "419" scheme in which entrepreneurs sell already owned and/or occupied houses to rubes from the countryside in need of lodging. In true Central African style, in the Bangui version it's the governing official -- chef de quartier, chef de village -- rather than a businessperson stricto senso who assumes the helpful huckster role.

This kind of scamming is generally considered a contemporary phenomenon stemming from the upheavals of urbanization. And, on one level, that is correct. But hearing the lawyer's explanation, offered with a rueful shake of the head ("People these days...") reminded me of a now-distant case I happened upon in the Ndele tribunal "archives." It dated to the early independence years, when most of the colonial-era laws remained on the books and in people's minds (today the former may still be true, but rarely the latter). The court found a certain man guilty of "failure to maintain his property". He had been away working on a cotton plantation and did not return to sweep his yard and otherwise keep up appearances. The judge sentenced him to prison time and/or a hefty fine.

At first, I thought this ridiculous, as I thought the home re-sales. But the more I think about it, the more I understand the usefulness of both the 419/chef de village lot recycling and the house proud law. In a place like the CAR, where plants and prickers grow rampantly, an un-swept yard quickly becomes a breeding ground for snakes and other poisonous beasties. If today local officials lack the judicial means to make sure that people abide by certain home ownership maintenance norms (which are after all established for the sake of public good, however bizarrely that good may be constructed -- think anti-clothesline rules in the US), selling the house to a more-conscientious user might be both an effective deterrent and a way of furthering public safety.

Genital theft goes to Hollywood: Another penis snatching update

2010-06-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

On a plane recently I made the bad decision to pass the time with the film "It's Complicated." Meryl Streep leans on the coos and croissants of her Julia Child portrayal to this time incarnate a supremely irritating SoCal divorcée. I squirmed with embarrassment for the actors' sake, especially Alec Baldwin -- please, Alec, do us all a favor and return to 30 Rock, where you belong.

But the film does contain one noteworthy scene. Toward the end, Meryl and her gal pals are dishing about their lackluster sex lives when one bursts out the assertion that a lack of sex can cause a woman's vagina to close up. "It's true!" she insists, "I read about a case on the internet!" The others laugh, but the scene is ultimately ambivalent about the veracity of the tale, leaving viewers with the impression that whether or not it's true, it's a real fear for women of a certain age and status.

Though most of the African stories of disappearing genitals involve men, women can suffer the fate too. For women, it usually happens much like the actress said: the crotch becomes strangely sealed, like a Barbie doll, though in the African case lack of sex is not understood to be the precipitating factor.

Julien Bonhomme, in his book Les Voleurs de sexe: Anthropologie d'une rumeur africaine, argues that because the notion of the rumor carries such a negative social-epidemiological charge -- the rumor as social cancer -- the phenomenon of penis snatching is better understood as gossip, a major mode of communication in the African city. It's "radio troittoir" as the animating force of social life, in newspapers (Bonhomme's main source) as well as in curbside conversation, and penis snatching offers a prism through which to grasp that reality. I'm only a few chapters into the book so will save a full review for later. For the time being, I'll say that if nothing else, "It's Complicated" reminded me that gossip, even penis-snatching absurd gossip, is far from solely an African thing. Perhaps Bonhomme will have to write a sequel: Anthropologie d'une rumeur américaine.

(This is one of the things I love about anthropology: navigating and exploring difference and finding unexpected convergence amid the divergence.)

Surprising ways of fulfilling the responsibility to protect?

2010-06-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

One of the highlights of attending the Law and Society Association annual meeting was having the chance to catch up with my friend and fellow Duke cultural anthropology grad student Jatin Dua. Jatin, one of the most brilliant people I know, is studying piracy in the Horn of Africa, and he specifically looks at how the region's modes of governance turn on the fusion of protection and profit. As he writes (in an abstract of his research),

“Western Indian Ocean piracy may be seen as an attempt to produce protection from global poaching and dumping and from the surveillance of regulators more generally, and signals a shift from the purchase of protection through taxes, tariffs and bribes to collecting rents through a form of capital-intensive armed entrepreneurship. As such, piracy as a system of protection competes with a variety of state and non-state forms of protection in this area.”

Both the pirate-cum-coast guard (the Somali Coast Guard has apparently renamed itself the Somali Sovereignty Protection Unit; shape-shifters with much in common with the the highway bandits/rebels in Central Africa, these armed Somali seafarers often play both pirate and coast guard roles) and the maritime insurance agent at Lloyd's describe their actions as important forms of protection. A form of coerced rent collection has taken on an important role in the region's political economy, similarly to the way that Charles Tilly described the history of the state as a the evolution of organized protection rackets. Jatin will soon start fieldwork on the Kenya coast, in Somaliland, and in London, and as he learns more the synopsis I've just offered here will prove increasingly simplistic, but it at least outlines certain contours of what he will be looking at.

Jatin's analysis fascinates me for several reasons. For one thing, through the R2P doctrine (Responsibility to Protect) “protection” has become the organizing principle of humanitarianism, and the main fault assigned to places like CAR (or Somalia) is their failure to protect their citizens. I have myself had a hand in perpetuating this line of analysis through publications with titles like “Still Waiting for Justice and Protection.” And, maybe especially on a visceral level, such accounts have a high degree of explanatory power. As Achille Mbembe pointed out in his contribution to Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, in parts of Africa government forces and the rebel groups that oppose them more often attack civilians than their putative enemies. Upon meeting peasants who have recently been racketed by highway robbers or cattle thieves or poachers or “rebels” or soldiers or any of the other kinds of militarized entrepreneurs, the lack of protection does indeed appear a defining feature of the region's politics.

And yet, as an anthropologist, I find this analysis deeply unsatisfying. Anthropologists have long been in the business of countering/completing the analyses that identify how people and places fail to measure up to certain theoretical principles derived from the intellectual history of the West by instead studying social systems as they actually work. (For a contemporary incarnation of this argument, Alex de Waal, himself an anthropologist by training, made an impassioned case in his Christen Michelsen lecture last year.)

This is partly why I found Jatin's description of the existing Horn of Africa protection regimes, which turns the aspirational humanitarian vision of the term upside down, so stimulating. Given the similarities between piracy and highway banditry and the like in Central Africa, I wonder in what ways the model of protection that Jatin describes might be working here. In my simplified model of his reasoning, it could possibly be distilled as

rent-based mode of governance + profits/entrepreneurship = protection

The CAR is also home to a profitable, rent-centric mode of governance. But where and how might protection enter into the equation? What kinds of protection (rackets) do we see here? I'm finding it hard to get out from under the humanitarian model of lack.

Post script: Contradiction

2010-06-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

A couple more examples, as food for thought:

In his book For the City Yet to Come: Changing Urban Life in Four African Cities, AbdouMaliq Simone describes scenes he saw in Khartoum: devout Muslims hanging out in back lots, drinking alcohol as they arranged used car sales. Simone invokes the example to show how people might deploy different qualifications in different situations in order to create opportunities; ie., shape-shifting brings benefits, and to the people who do it, such transformations are neither contradictory nor solely instrumental.

In a presentation I listened to last week about “shanzhai” (bandit, counterfeit) phones in China, the speaker showed a photo of a tightly packed shanzhai shopping mall in Shenzhen. Someone had unfurled a large banner in the atrium: “Respect intellectual property. Every day is intellectual property day!” it proclaimed. Not quite sure what to make of that one.

Contradiction and social life

2010-06-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

Social science researchers speak of the need to triangulate – compare multiple sources of data about the same topic – in order to parse the meaning of contradictory information. But what should one do when a single individual contradicts herself – espousing diametrically opposed opinions with equal force – in the course of a conversation?

I've struggled with this question during my research in CAR, particularly in relation to Central Africans' views and management of international aid. What to make of a conversation in which a government environment ministry employee, with the patience of a practiced teacher, explains (in French) the workings and importance of wildlife conservation (including a moratorium on all hunting), and then, just a few minutes later, yells (in Sangho) in favor of his right to hunt, a right he is prepared to fight to maintain?

One diplomat to whom I posed this question responded, “It's simple. They're lying.” But that response offers little analytical meat.

Linguists would likely describe it in terms of code-switching, a literature in which I am woefully little-versed (suggestions for readings welcome). As I understand it, code-switching refers to the ways that multilingual people switch between the languages they know in order to better suit the demands of the social situation in which they find themselves. A person might code-switch within a single sentence, or else might speak employ different languages to suit different settings. Relatedly, Foucaultians might describe this as a situation of overlapping “epistemic communities.” The term epistemic community refers to the people who accept a set of truths/assumptions about the way things are, a shared understanding that forms the basis for their cohesiveness (and control).

These perspectives interest me, but, given that epistemic systems do not exist as discrete, bounded units within a person's head, I'm curious about how contradiction is itself a part of the human condition. A witchcraft-believer might accept biomedical explanations for disease causation at the same time as she pursues a witch for “poisoning”; a racist might count a person of color as a close friend. The exception may prove the rule, but that doesn't harmonize the contradictory beliefs. It seems to me that humans have a great capacity for holding contradictory statements as simultaneously true.

For a number of years now, anthropologists have tried to expose contradictions – the Plato talking to the cave-dwellers model. These analyses might take a form like, “Development workers think they're working for liberation, but really they're enacting a more-invasive form of neo-colonial discipline!” (Ditto human rights activists.) There are some useful works in this literature (I found Harri Englund's Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor useful, for instance), but it has limits. For one thing, you can only pull the wool off of people's eyes so many times before they do it themselves and then get on with the work of living, trying to chart the best course amid imperfect information and inevitable unintended consequences. It strikes me as more fruitful to attempt to make sense of the sincerity that may characterize apparent contradictions. (Bill Maurer is at the forefront of the shift away from what I term curtain-lifting anthropology. Though his writing might be too experimental for some, his analysis usually fascinates.)

To return to my aforementioned Ministry of Environment friend, I'm starting to analyze the statements of people like him as similar to the statements of, say, oil company executives engaged in environmental initiatives or Pepsi employees spearheading anti-obesity projects. They seem sincerely to understand and strive to combat the ills of their industries, and yet they still drill ill-advised wells in the Gulf of Mexico and advertise their soft drinks to kids using cartoon characters. In other words, their actions are at cross-purposes. I'm not sure where this line of thought might lead, but at least it gets me beyond simply seeing Central Africans as gifted liars, which strikes me as an intellectual cul-de-sac demanding a bit of bushwhacking.

A rant: Cell phones and Africa

2010-06-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

On the plane this morning (I'm making my way to the Law and Society Association annual meetings), I flipped through the Wall Street Journal and saw an article about Africa illustrated by a photo of a dark hand holding a Nokia. Could this be yet another incarnation of the hackneyed “cells phones revolutionizing Africa oh wow farmers can get commodity prices on their mobiles and no longer get rooked at the market” stock piece?

Indeed it was, in a way.

I swear, these articles come out so often college students could make a drinking game of it – take a shot every time you see the stock-prices-on-phones example! Or is it some editorial world where's Waldo, planted here and there to see who's actually reading (is there a prize?) I, for one, have lost count of how many times I've seen it since the first coverage around 2005. And yet I've never seen a single farmer consulting commodity prices on his phone.

The WSJ article at least took a novel tack: turns out those commodity prices on a phone aren't so revolutionary after all. Service providers in Uganda are finding that once people have to pay for the quotes, few deem the service worthwhile.

So can we move on to another story now?

On Revolution

2010-06-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

If anthropologists still described their reflectively loquacious interlocutors as 'chief informants,' a man I met a few days ago in Kaga Bandoro (a local employee of an international NGO) would rank among mine. Though he's only from the next prefecture over, he counts as a stranger in Kaga Bandoro, and, like so many other liminal people, he has a privileged position from which to wonder over how and why things are the way they are in the town.

“The people here say, 'We are like the whites' – they only look out for their nuclear family – and that's not accepted in African culture. They want only to receive, but they never give,” he mused.

Marcel Mauss' idea that “The Gift” serves as the basis for social cohesion popped into my mind, and I eagerly described it to him. What to make of a place where, in my interlocutor's assessment, gifts were limited to within immediate families? He shook his head at the challenge of it. and then returned to Mauss to ask for clarification so he could carefully note the basics of French sociologist's theories. Did I perhaps have a French pamphlet on social cohesion that I could share with him, he wondered?

We sat quietly for a moment and then he asked, with some urgency, “Based on the research you have done all over AR, do you think it would be possible for us to totally change, to reverse all these problems of corruption and lack of trust?”

“Like a revolution?”

“Yes.”

And now an old line of Max Gluckman's clamored in my head: “Africans are rebels, never revolutionaries.” To be fair, I'd argue that no one is really a revolutionary, in the sense that new orders never fully wipe out the influences of their predecessors. The blank slate does not exist and history always remains with us in surprising ways. But Gluckman's point, that in African societies conflict, in the form of rituals of rebellion, serves to reproduce the social order, is painfully borne out in Kaga Bandoro, the eastern outpost of APRD territory.

The APRD is one of the first rebel groups to emerge following President Bozize's successful coup in 2003. Its members await integration into the state through the recently-begun DDR program. They fight with the government over the right to man lucrative roadblocks. (I came across a letter written by an APRD officer to the local authorities in which the author even went so far as to eschew the niceties of usually formal written French to blast the government for hassling travelers and subjecting them to searches on a contested barrier.) Like so many in the government, the rebels see politics as a money-generating scheme. They have no interest in changing the system – they want only privileged access to it. Gluckman's rebels, in the flesh.

But this analysis, I sensed, would leave my friend bereft (though he may have agreed). I wended my way through a meandering answer, saying that I thought revolution unlikely, but that change – and even major upheaval of mores, could happen. And I hoped he was not as unsatisfied with this response as I was.

Excuses

2010-06-03T14:48:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the lack of posts of late. Travel together with computer problems have conspired to constrain my posting.

A few posts, written over the past weeks, follow, and from now on I'll try to keep more up to date.

The Public Treasury, a Tale in Two Acts

2010-05-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog may have noticed that my posts have tended toward the negative as far as the Central African state is concerned. Today, I have positive news: in February, it became illegal for people to pay taxes to officials in their offices. Instead, good citizens must go to the bank, where there is now a special window marked “public treasury.” People deposit directly into various departments' coffers. In the first month with the new system, revenues more than tripled. The introduction of a basic technology thus eliminated a massive amount of pay-yourself-government (corruption, in common parlance). Of course, money deposited in bank accounts may still wind up building ministerial villas in the provinces, but at least this way there's a potential for more transparency.

This morning as I pulled into the market in Sibut, two hours' drive north of Bangui, I heard a familiar voice call out, “Louisa!” I know no one in Sibut, except maybe for the guys at Restaurant Destroy (the name shares sign space with those of the various humanitarian groups who have patronized the establishment), where I usually get an avocado salad and omelet. I opened the door and saw, to my surprise, a friend from Ndele. He works for some Sudanese merchants by accompanying their truck to DRC to buy coffee and then make the long trek north again to Am Dogon, Sudan to sell the beans. Along the way, they stop in Central African villages and peddle Chinese-made pots and tea sets, toothpaste, and dates. My friend's truck stopped in Sibut to await a money transfer of 200,000 CFA (more than $400) to pay for the rest of the voyage to Bangui. He estimated that in all he would pay 550,000 CFA in road barrier fees for the the Ndele – Bangui journey. Gendarmes, soldiers, police, water and forests ministry guards, and other entrepreneurial sorts set up barriers to extort fees on the roads. Because of the armed group insecurity in Ndele, they can now demand more from voyagers – especially “foreign” Muslims – as a kind of proof of loyalty. Pretty much the polar opposite of the efforts to de-personalize taxes described above.

I can't help but wonder, upon seeing the bedraggled, beaten-down trucks that ply this trade, how on earth they can make a profit from selling an occasional tupperware set and some mid-grade coffee beans if they must pay thousands of dollars in bribes for every round trip. And yet they keep doing it.

Experimental Ethnography

2010-05-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the silence. I've been fine, mostly in Bangui due to the recent rebel attack in Ndele and a spate of highway bandit activity on the roads around there.

Partly, my no-post laziness has stemmed from plunging into reading in the wake of encouragement, thanks to a friend in Bangui , to explore the new world of economics – Nathan Nunn (who, incidentally, cites my adviser, Charles Piot, on multiple occasions), Edward Miguel, Stathis Kalyvas...(I welcome further recommendations!) I even caught myself thinking like an economist the other day, trying to draw little diagrams of potential causal relations and wondering how one could isolate the factors and determine the links.

As I approach the end of this chunk of fieldwork I'm filled with mixed feelings including, yes, some regret.

Though the idea of fieldwork as a rite of passage is oft-critiqued in anthropology, it nevertheless persists. My department, for instance, offers no methods course. Throw 'em in the deep end and see how they do. Most people swim, even if just dog-paddling. So on one level this rite of passage practice is fine. But I have started to notice myself developing a certain anxiety over the lack of structure in ethnographic research. This lack of structure was less apparent when anthropologists worked in small villages and immersed themselves in every detail of their social structure. The (artificial) geographic boundary of the village provided the contours for the study. But now as multi-sited ethnography has become common (my own research has been more multi-sited than I had envisioned, simply because the places I had hoped to do research have been intermittently unsafe, forcing me to find other options), there is a risk that the great strength of anthropology – its receptiveness and openness – will make for watered-down research unless one has years in which to do fieldwork, which for most of us is impractical. (The most common question I get from ex-pats these days is, “So, are you done with that dissertation?” Sigh. That's not quite the pace of these things.)

All of this is a rambling prelude to my main point: the methodology-envy that hit me upon reading about Elizabeth Levy Paluck's experimental ethnography.

Paluck sought to assess the impacts of encouraging listening to a conflict resolution-themed soap opera in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). She randomly assigned villages to either receive the broadcasts or not and then designed an evaluation survey that used both quantitative and qualitative measures. At the end of each respondent's interview, the interviewer offered a bag of salt as a thank you. The interviewer then explained that a local humanitarian group had drawn attention to a needy group in the community and asked whether the respondent would share any salt. “Which group?” was the most usual reply. The interviewers asked whether there was a group the person would not feel comfortable giving to. Most people in this area plagued by recent years of violent conflict responded affirmatively. The interviewer then measured the quantity the person said s/he would give, depending on the group. As expected, people gave less salt to members of their rival group. Surprisingly, the results showed, tentatively, that those who had listened to the soap operas were less willing to donate than those who had not.

How fascinating to make social norms and relationships materially visible. I have tried, in my limited capacity as a solo researcher, to do similar things myself, but have bumped into frustration each time because, I think, of my failure to materialize the hypothetical examples I set out.

In my next project, whatever it might be, I would love to systematically integrate some experimental methods. But I have much to learn.

Who wants to save the elephants?

2010-04-08T03:41:00.000-07:00

The other night I plowed through Jeffrey Goldberg's recent New Yorker article, "The Hunted: Did American Conservationists in Africa Go Too Far?" (full text blissfully available online). Goldberg reports the story of Mark and Delia Owens, animal researchers turned conservationists in southern Africa. They wrote several books about their life in Botswana and Zambia, and American TV producers filmed a documentary about them in the mid-90s. The film crew captured the shooting death of a "trespasser" (or poacher?) by someone off-camera, believed to be Mark's adult son Christopher. The Owens left Zambia shortly thereafter and, in the aftermath of the controversy, have been advised not to return.

As I read, I kept waiting for the climax. OK, I thought, so the Owenses were perhaps involved in the murder of one person. What else? This thought was immediately followed by another: has my time in Central Africa made me so cynical that I no longer react with outrage to the killing of an unarmed "trespasser"? Perhaps.

But I think my reaction stemmed less from cynicism than from Goldberg's relentless focus on this one charismatic American couple at the expense of placing them within a larger perspective -- a larger perspective that would in fact have been more chilling. For many people are killed every year in the name of combating poaching across the continent.

In CAR, militarized anti-poaching is done by a parastatal "project" funded by the European Union. (The project will end in July, at which point it will be replaced; its successor aims to critically examine the management of space in CAR, which hopefully will diminish the death toll of poachers, anti-poaching guards, cattle, elephants, and other animals.) In the past twenty years, this work has been done by French soldiers ("securing the borders"); an American conservationist (his efforts never really got off the ground, though, because the South African mercenary in his employ got into diamonds and attempted murder and other scandals); Russian former French Foreign Legionnaires funded by safari hunters...I could continue.

The well-armed poachers come in increasingly large groups (up to one hundred strong, with camels and donkeys), and, according to the anti-poaching guards, they shoot first. These are not people you can ask nicely to please not kill the elephants and go home. The poachers, who generally come from Sudan, used to target CAR's north and east, closer to home. But they've killed all the elephants there, and the poachers have now penetrated as far as the southwest, and even Cameroon. Because of this dire situation, appearance alone suffice as justification for the guards to kill an interloper. It is war between the anti-poaching guards and the poachers and cattleherders who seek to profit from CAR's vast, sparsely-populated terrain. Only it's a war that is largely hidden from the outside world.

(I once spoke with a man who does militarized anti-poaching work about the fall from grace of one of his predecessors. The predecessor had apparently mutilated, or allowed his men to mutilate, the corpses of poachers they killed. I suggested that this was why he had been kicked out. My interlocutor, though, disagreed. The problem was not that he mutilated bodies. The problem was that he took photos, and, when he had a falling out with a few people, those photos made their way into the European press.)

There is a case to be made for militarized anti-poaching work. Richard Leakey makes it eloquently in Wildlife Wars, his book about his tenure as head of the Kenya Wildlife Services. It is a difficult issue that demands a sustained examination. But focusing on Owenses, and the fall-out from one particular incident, risks masking that what they appear to have done/abetted slots uncomfortably into a widespread division of labor in the conservation world. I once spoke with a director at a reputable international conservation organization, who explained his personal opinion: militarized anti-poaching work is necessary, and our programs would be useless without it, but we can't do it, or say we support it, because of the outcry. Donors wooed with fundraising entreaties full of photos of furry friends would be scandalized. Again, the message is that it's OK as long as it is hidden.

By focusing on the Owenses' misguided efforts (yes, criminal would probably be a better descriptor, but there is a lot of technically criminal activity that goes unpunished in Central Africa) the article makes them into scapegoats rather than implicating the rest of us who see saving the elephants as an imperative. Goldberg unintentionally obscures the thorny challenges of human/livestock/wildlife coexistance that the world (the ivory market is not in Africa, it should be noted) currently struggles with. (Based on the article, it seems like poaching in southern Africa is somewhat under control; in Central Africa it is anything but.)

It is important not to oversell the successes of militarized anti-poaching. National Geographic published a graphic photo-studded story three years ago about Zakouma National Park in Chad (just across the border from CAR), which has been hard-hit by poachers. The author, Mike Fay, struck a cautiously congratulatory tone in his description of the anti-poaching guards' (also EU-funded) work. Nevertheless, in the past four years Zakouma's elephant population has dwindled from 4,000 to 400. Unless something is done about demand, no conservation efforts will succeed.

The article's best line by far came from an Idahoan reacting negatively to the Owenses' attempts to impose their will on their Idaho neighbors: "We're not Africans." The comment carried a clear meaning: you can't just push us around the way you can those peasants. The comment is such a sad commentary on the state of Western ways of operating -- whether motivated by good intentions or not -- in the continent's "hidden" spaces.

Penis snatching update

2010-03-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

I have wanted to write an update on the penis snatching incident that occurred here in Tiringoulou last week, but some of the responses I've received to my previous post have reminded me that a phenomenon that seems normal (though unfortunate) here appears bizarre to people elsewhere, and I don't want to portray people here as exotic rubes.

As I learned more about the incident, I had one of those moments that occurs sometimes during field research when words on paper suddenly become animated: so this is what the recent surge of anthropological literature on “occult economies” was about. Led by the Comaroffs, this branch of research investigates the ways that people make sense of a world in which the origins of wealth have largely become obscured from view. Before, this argument goes, wealth came from things like factories. Townspeople could see in front of them why the owner had a mansion: the coal-spewing workhouse. But when people become massively, incomprehensibly rich from something as ephemeral and mysterious as credit swaps (or government corruption), it is bound to have an effect on our explanations about how the world works. And one effect that scholars have noticed is a heightened anxiety about the body and trades in organs.

Several people with whom I spoke in Tiringoulou made these links. “You see how advanced Cameroon is compared to CAR? They have multi-story buildings! It's because they are so strong in commerce of all kinds – including in genitals and scalps.” (Male pattern baldness sufferers take heart: your bald pates fetch higher prices in this trade.) Practitioners of such magic profit in one of two ways. A man here in Tiringoulou who used to live in Cameroon had seen both with his own eyes. In a crowd, a person might suddenly realize that his penis has disappeared. He cries out. Immediately his savior steps forward: I'll heal you, he says. For a fee of 25,000 [about $50]. Or else the penis-taker sells his loot to the boss who taught him the magic, for which he is handsomely rewarded.

The man who had lived in Cameroon described one case that particularly stuck in my mind. A woman arrived at the airport, off to Europe to sell a load of penises. The airport guard sensed something fishy about the woman and decided to thoroughly go through her hand luggage. He saw that she had packed some baguette sandwiches and asked if he could have one. The woman assented and made to hand him the one on top. But he persisted in reaching deeper, deeper into the bag and picked one from the bottom. Now the woman became agitated. He unwrapped it and found that, though butter leaked from the edges to make it look innocent, a row of penises were lodged between the loaf's halves. A penis-butter sandwich. Not to be eaten. Without a doubt this is the most memorable tale of “effective” (the story-teller's term) airport security I've heard.

When I asked another man if he'd heard of any similar magical crimes, his response surprised me. “Yes. In Bangui sometimes a child in a crowded street will eat a biscuit and suddenly disappear – all the way to Nigeria!” All of a sudden people's anxiety here sounded familiar: how many ridiculous strictures (not allowing kids to walk to school, for instance) have been erected in the US in recent years due to a largely irrational fear of the dreaded candy-offering kidnapper?

If the idea of penis-stealing seems beyond-the-pale weird, consider what people in a subsistence economy might think upon hearing of an American woman who starves herself near death because her reflection in the mirror convinces her she's fat? Or consider the affliction philosophers love to ponder which consists of being convinced that certain of one's limbs are not supposed to exist, making them beg their doctors for amputations. What, ethically, should the doctor do when the person avers that she will cut it off herself if necessary (and those sufferers who do so report immense relief afterward)? One hundred thousand people in the US have this condition, if Wikipedia is to be believed. I cite these examples only to highlight that there is no end to the strange things people experience when it comes to their bodies.

Did the men in Tiringoulou really have their penises magically removed? Everyone here (including the doctor at the hospital) thinks so. I don't, but the men's experience of debilitating illness certainly seems real. Perhaps their maladies are as real and yet medically invisible, unexplainable, as certain kinds of back pain or chronic fatigue syndrome. For this latter condition, the only effective treatment appears to be group talk therapy with fellow-sufferers – people who don't doubt your agonizing reality. In that respect, people in this poorest of places are well-off.

RIP CAR?

2010-03-13T11:39:00.000-08:00

The other day a diplomat offered his serious opinion that in fifty years the CAR will no longer exist. Each neighboring country will subsume the part extending out from the shared border. We're at the end of the road, he said. This prognosis strikes me as the most hopeful of any I've heard. I'd even go so far as to say that it is more realistic than assuming that the aid directed here will bring about a turnaround in the governance of the CAR state, which is largely privatized, in Bayart's sense of the term.

If you consider the political map of Africa as a kind of jigsaw puzzle, the CAR is like that pesky piece that you just can't find when you've otherwise finished. It was the space left over and claimed by France at the Berlin Conference in 1884, a grab made partly so that France's colonial holdings looked bigger, and so that they could try to repeat the Belgian Congo's incredible profit-making by experimenting with their concessionary-state-on-the-cheap idea (it failed, and they even controlled the sea access, which CAR currently does not). The CAR's anti-colonial leader, Barthelemy Boganda, never thought that it could be a tenable country on its own, and he chose the anodyne name it now bears in hopes that it would facilitate joining forces with the rest of Central Africa to become a federation. However, he died before independence, and going solo proved too tempting to the leaders who outlived him. They all did quite well by this arrangement, but the people they govern have suffered.

Life expectancy in CAR drops by six months each year. For men, it's now 39.2. On a continent that has seen its population skyrocket in recent decades, CAR's has stagnated for 25 years and remains at a measly 3.9 million in an area the size of France and Spain combined (or Texas). Meanwhile, everything is imported (even manioc, the staple food), and importing is hugely expensive (and quite profitable for Cameroon, from whence most products arrive). Even eggs are imported from Cameroon – keep in mind that to get eggs from Cameroon to Bangui requires two days (or one long, if you have a good vehicle) of travel on terrible roads. A supermarket owner I've gotten to know (Lebanese, of course) entreated me to try the pineapples that she sells every Monday. They're really good, much sweeter than the ones you get here, she assured me. They're from Cameroon!

A friend's Cameroonian boyfriend came to visit her in Bangui. He paid 15,000 CFA (a little more than $30) to ride as a passenger in a merchant truck (the only “public transport” available in CAR), and 180,000 CFA ($400) in payments to the assorted soldiers, gendarmes, police officers, and water and forests guards who man roadblocks. By the end, he convinced the driver of the truck to let him try to pass as a truck-boy so that he wouldn't be so tempting a target. The roadblock-keepers' authority derives from their status as officers of the state. Without that state, they would no longer be able to act as such a brake. (Granted, CAR is not the only country in the region to have problems with metastasizing roadblocks.)

In Tiringoulou, a town in the far Northeast of CAR where I am currently, residents complain of the discrimination they face from the faraway central government, which labels them Chadian or Sudanese and therefore sub-standard citizens. “We're Central African!” they lament. Little good that has done them. Crossing the border to Chad or Sudan, one finds towns that bustle with commerce unimaginable here – motorcycles, bread, you name it – even products difficult to find in Bangui. The unrequited nationalism expressed by those in CAR's hinterlands is frankly tragic.

If dissolving the CAR state seems like sacrilege under the principles of sovereignty that govern the international system, and maybe especially African Union-era Africa, or if it seems like some flavor of lack of solidarity with CAR (a put-down, in the sense that they couldn't make a go of it on their own), I'd argue that such points of view reflect a lack of the kind of creative thinking that could actually help the people who live in this literal center of the continent. Contra Mamdani (who recently argued for efforts to ensure the equality of sovereign states), I'm in favor of it.

A final thought, also somewhat inspired by Mamdani (who calls for greater accountability from aid and advocacy groups), but in contrast to his view: The usefulness of aid provided by NGOs and international agencies notwithstanding (I have on multiple occasions benefited from the medical care provided by aid groups here, for which I am grateful), in my observation these agencies do more to strengthen the state (and not necessarily in good ways), even though they see themselves as a kind of counter weight. They must interact with state officials as the legitimate rulers of the territory and respect their wishes (agencies like UNICEF work solely in partnership with the government), while in many cases those leaders have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the population, who burst with stories of monies bouffé or piqué (eaten or swiped). Would it be possible to re-think the whole foreign aid (and I include humanitarian aid) system so that it it could include radical alternatives? David Kennedy suggests as much in his study of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, when he argues that it should not take state sovereignty as its organizing principle. Putting such an agenda into practice is, of course, much easier said than done. But from where I sit in Tiringoulou, it seems worth more than idle consideration.

The arrival of the penis snatchers

2010-03-13T11:31:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I wrote about the effusive greetings here in Central Africa. Yesterday morning when I arrived in Tiringoulou, in the remote Northeast of CAR (even further northeast and even more remote than Ndele), however, I was told that since yesterday people had forsaken the usual handshakes in favor of a small wave. Why? The day before a Sudanese merchant truck arrived in town. One of the passengers alighted in the village center and went to take tea. He shook the proprietor's hand firmly as he sat down.

The guest left, but the proprietor soon felt an electric tingling all over. He knew suddenly that something was wrong. He looked down: his penis had shrunk to smaller than that of a baby. (Witnesses aver that the penis was in fact teeny-tiny, but unfortunately no one had a camera for proof to convince those who weren't there at the time.) This fate befell one other man before the mob descended upon the visitor, the only one judged capable of committing the crime because of his contact with the men at the fateful hour (bodily contact is sufficient to remove the penis). Under duress from the UFDR (the armed group that runs this town) forces' “interrogation,” he admitted his guilt. He was executed (gunshot) shortly thereafter.

This is the first case of penis snatching seen in Tiringoulou, but a woman in a village not too far from here had her genitals disappear as well. The visitor, a Chadian, worked for some merchants in Nigeria, where, if newspaper reports are to be believed, penis-snatching occurs in epidemic proportions. When I asked why they snatch penises, people here responded that they could be sold for a lot of money in Nigeria, where they would be used by “feticheurs”.

I admit: I'm skeptical. For one thing, the victims have their members back and currently complain only of a bit of testicular pain. But I also find it really interesting to think about how the phenomenon of penis snatching has traveled through West and Central Africa, finally now reaching this most remote corner of the world. How did people here become aware of it, and does it resemble anything they have seen before?

I hope to meet one of the victims tomorrow. Perhaps then I will have more answers.

Humanitarianism Under Suspicion

2010-03-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

Since the rebel attack on Ndele on the 26^th of November, the government has severely limited humanitarian and NGO workers' movement. The rebels occupy a stretch of road some 80km north of here (not far from the Chadian border). Before the attack, there were four international NGOs in Ndele. Now there are three, and they are allowed only to work in Ndele and on the road leading south toward Bangui. An NGO that hoped to do a risk assessment on the Golongosso road, another road to Chad, was told “nyet” (as many Central African francophones put it). That road has had problems with cattle rustlers and highway robber-type incidents (some perpetrated by the rebels), and past 84km from Ndele it's said to be more or less in the control of Chadians in uniform (which, given the pervasiveness of men-in-arms in Chad does not necessarily mean soldiers). But it's not particularly more dangerous than many other places where humanitarians work. The government's, and especially the military's, aversion to allowing humanitarian access seems to be motivated not just by security concerns but by a certain mistrust as well.

In a recent conversation, my interlocutor explained one version of the government's reasoning. For one thing, the humanitarians cannot help but support the rebels, he argued. The rebels have a road block, and they will demand “formalities” even of humanitarians. But this man went further, arguing that humanitarianism and rebellion are symbiotic. “If the rebellions end, there will be no more NGOs. In order for an NGO to exist, there have to be rebellions. You will at least agree with me on this one? So, if you want your career to exist there has to be rebellion. When the rebellions end, they'll tell you no, we don't need NGOs and that will end their careers. There won't be any more funding from over there either.”

The boom in NGO presence in CAR dates to late 2006 and 2007, when CAR was able to capitalize on its proximity to Darfur and the extensive fund-raising of a highly energetic UN coordinator to draw international interest. Not entirely incidentally, since then the number of rebellions has gone from two to five or so, depending on how you count (one of the groups is generally brushed off as Chadian and thereby an illegitimate contender for the upcoming disarmament program. Never mind that the leader of one of the other armed groups – Abdulaye Miskine – is also a Chadian/CAR citizen and under suspicion of the ICC to boot).

For the international NGOs there is always another crisis somewhere else, whether an earthquake or a war. But their local staff might have to scramble a bit to find new employment. One young man I met in Birao (the far northeast, near Sudan) a couple of years ago who was doing dance and games for kids courtesy an NGO contract now sells pilfered flowers outside a Bangui supermarket and, when he recognizes an NGO face, pretends that they were in fact a gift to this special person...and does she know of any job openings?

Many state employees have explained to me that, in contrast to “here one day, gone the next” NGOs, the biggest advantage of their posts is that once a public servant, always a public servant. You even get a pension. Not necessarily a regularly paid pension, but a feeling of entitlement to one. But the people who seem to have the most dignity and self-respect are those who aspire to use whatever jobs they hold to squirrel away money so they can buy a tract of land in the countryside where they can farm, raise animals, and live off the grid, free from politics.

Though the comment above exaggerates and simplifies, it reminded me of the reason a friend gave for leaving the anti-landmine world, where she had worked for a number of years. Getting rid of landmines, she said, is entirely doable. It takes nothing more or less than tedious work by humans (guinea rats and dogs are not reliable, meaning that the fields they “clear” are not really cleared). But she came to the conclusion that her fellow bureaucrats in Geneva were so comfortable with their modern offices and business class travel to international conferences that, whether consciously or sub-consciously, they stalled real progress. Sometimes it seems to me that all an armed group needs to do to go from highway bandit – criminal – to rebel – political opponent – is to adopt a patriotic acronym. And once one does that, recognition from the international system, with its peacebuilding programs and aid and all the rest, descend. Arresting the cycle of rebellion does not get easier as more disaffected politicians try to work these levers, with all the jobs they represent.

Proof!

2010-03-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

For all those who have recently endured my complaints about the heat here, proof that I was not exaggerating: the report of the African Centre of Meteorological Application for Development (ACMAD) for early February showed that the highest average daily temperature (37.4 C) was recorded in Ndele, CAR. (Granted, of the 61 locations around the continent measured by ACMAD, none were in the Danakil Desert. But still.) I should add, too, that I now remember early February as a time of wonderful cool compared to the baking days we're enduring now. On top of that, the sinus-clogging harmattan has started blowing. This is most troubling to me because it calls into question my thus-far workable strategy for avoiding sunstroke: an umbrella that accompanies me on all daytime walks. (Three years in North Carolina and only now in Ndele do I affect the Southern Belle, with her parasol!)

Effective legal aid

2010-02-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

On the morning Habiba was preparing to go home from the hospital, two Chadian soldiers approached her room. They called out a greeting and then stood, slightly awkwardly, in the doorway. One removed his large aviator sunglasses. Then he asked her questions about her marital problems.

Since Bozize took power in 2003 with a “liberating” force that was largely Chadian, the Central African army, and especially the powerful Garde Presidentielle, has been full of Chadians, who are usually easily recognizable by their turbans. They have a well-deserved reputation for brutality.

However, that morning sitting on Habiba's hospital bed I saw another side to the soldiers. Habiba explained how her ex-husband had taken her baby daughter to live with his sister six days ago. She described the location of the house the child had been taken to, down to the guava trees in the yard. And she described the little girl. The soldier assented he understood the directions and then he and his companion turned and left.

By mid-morning, both Habiba and her daughter were back at her house. She didn't know the soldier, but explained that he helps out with a lot of problems in the Chadian community here: domestic problems, settling debts, etc. I asked how the soldier does his work, and Habiba joked that he threatens with his Kalashnikov. Or perhaps she wasn't joking. Hard to know.

Greetings

2010-02-20T10:13:00.002-08:00

Last summer I spent a few days reading and researching in the French National Library. As anyone who has worked there knows, it's an odd place. Readers are confined to subterranean rooms while the stacks of books rise above them in four glassy skyscraper towers. Researchers must sign up for a date, hour, and numbered seat. Somehow or another, the same people often end up sitting next to each other, day after day. Silence reigns, of course, but one nevertheless has occasional contact with one's neighbors when asking them to keep an eye on belongings when one needs a bathroom break or that kind of thing.

Hour upon hour of reading – classics like Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch's Le Congo au temps des grandes compagnies concessionaires as well as browsing the bizarrely prolific genre of safari hunting memoirs from Central Africa – left me crazed for human contact. When I passed my neighbors in the hallway, or at the cafe, or elsewhere, I would attempt to give a mild greeting – a sort of 'Hey, I've seen you before and I acknowledge your existence' kind of thing. Always the attempt was met with a blank, icy glare of non-recognition. A French friend tried to help by introducing me to her friends, but when we all met for coffee they would all turn away from me and my friend, and their body language made it clear that they had no interest in including me in their conversation. The next time we saw each other, they would forget that they had met me before.

Imagine my happiness when an Ivoirian friend of mine showed up to read Ivoirian newspapers from the 1950s, together with a Canadian friend looking into the enduring effects of colonial health policies! Finally, people I could greet effusively and share wonderful discussions with over vending-machine coffee! Say what you will about the falseness of American “have a nice day” tendencies, that friendliness is something I often miss when abroad.

Here in Ndele one of my favorite things is greeting people I know or recognize on the street. I always get a response, and it makes me feel more like I belong. (I'm even making my peace with the swarms of “Munju!” chanting kids.)

The other day I discussed the importance of greetings with a Central African friend. “Here, if you're on the road coming toward my village and you pass some people sitting in the shade and you don't greet them, people will take you for a criminal. People will start saying that we need to figure out who this person is. People will make problems for you,” he explained gravely. He told of a now-departed NGO employee (French, as luck would have it) who never had time to say hello. He would call it out only in a harried way as he rushed off to some oh-so-important task or another.

That NGO currently finds itself embroiled in a set of rumors and associated problems preventing it from working in the area, at least for the time being.

On that note, I've been surprised how often I've heard of NGOs having to negotiate with the government for the right to do their work, and this in the CAR, putatively one of the weakest of states. Though there's more than a grain of truth to Mariella Pandolfi's idea that international interventions constitute “mobile sovereigns,” time and again I've noticed how international organizations and NGOs, partly because they specifically define themselves through reference to the state (as its counterpart), end up propping up and legitimizing the state more than anyone else. NGO employees are in about the same situation as “kota azo” (big people) in the government: above/outside the law (not subjected to humiliating roadblock searches, for instance) and yet nevertheless at the mercy of the state and its whims, which seem often to turn on rumors. Rumors can come around for anyone. I learned a bit about that myself a few weeks ago.

Scratch that

2010-02-15T09:41:00.000-08:00

Please allow me to retreat from much of that last post.

Thanks to a few days of visiting a friend in the hospital, she and the retinue of women who help her and chat with her have given me an Arabic body vocabulary that surpasses my knowledge in every other language but English. My favorite: rushrush (eyelash).

Arabic and Sango

2010-02-11T09:36:00.000-08:00

Speaking Arabic and Sango together, I notice that the set of words I know in the former are different from the set of words I know in the latter. Often, I'll start a sentence in one language and then want to plug the holes with words from the other. The main difference in the Arabic and Sango vocabularies I've accumulated concerns the body.

In Arabic, I studied for two semesters and have to wrack my brain to think of any body parts besides “heart,” which I only know because it appears in so many Arabic pop songs. In Sango, it sometimes seems like every sentence contains a word that also refers to a body part: “inside” is “in the stomach of,” “after” is “on the back of,” “center” is “heart,” and it goes on from there.

If, as I suspect, the copious body references in Sango and their lack in Arabic is a broader phenomenon than the limited knowledge within my head, I wonder whether that difference has an effect on how a native speaker of one or the other perceives the world. Perhaps it's just a marker of broader cultural traits. (Of course, in English the body part back and the directional marker back are the same, and I don't usually think of my spine when I tell someone “It's back there.” But a native speaker probably wouldn't be the one to notice these things.)

Mostly I just try not to let it all get too jumbled. Considering that in any given day I might write in English and Norwegian and speak in French, Sango, and Arabic I figure a bit of confusion is understandable. Getting to use all these languages is one of the things I really enjoy about my work.

Checking Checks

2010-02-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

In this almost wholly unbanked part of the world, I overheard an interesting bank rant this morning.

When one attempts to cash a check in Bangui (there are less than a handful of bank branches outside the capital), the teller examines it minutely. Very often, she will declare that the signature is “non-conforme” and reject it. This happened to one man's wife with the last six checks she wrote. He “was forced to tell her to change her signature.” This, however, will set you back 11,000 CFA (about $25; it used to be free, he said). Even just to examine the signature they have on file for your account you must pay some 5,000 CFA. The man, a government employee as a guard for the Ministry of Water and Forests, declared these practices a “politique commerciale” - the bank is just out to get money by charging more fees. (Levying fees, both official and unofficial, is of course how the government functions as well, and they contribute to the payment the man receives.)

But leaving aside the issue of whether this is “commercial politics” or not, I was struck by the extreme lack of trust that it belies. I thought of my own signature: thanks to all those electronic signature pads, it has devolved into a scrawl that could be mistaken for a toddler's doodles, different each time. When was the last time the cashier examined what you entered there? More often he tells you to just go ahead and push the green button, because the signature pad is worn out.

I've heard countless stories of Central Africans getting defrauded. You give a friend money to buy you a computer in Europe; he tells you it costs 1000 Euros, and you pay, but when encouraged to look up the model online you find it actually cost less than 400 Euros. Meanwhile I buy books online from some random person trying to clean up his shelves and have every expectation that I'll get what I ordered on time and of the advertized quality. I had a conversation with a humanitarian worker recently in which he said he'd never do development work in Africa because there's no solidarity. He feels useful working, as he put it, as “a band-aid.”

Would the technology of bank cards erase the mistrust in Central African economic transactions? (As of very recently, there are a few ATMs in Bangui, but they work only with local EcoBank cards.) Or would the mistrust simply take a new form? In Nairobi and Mexico City, private security guards continually patrol ATMs, but that doesn't stop thugs in the latter locale from carrying out “express kidnappings”/“millionaires' tours” during which they cart their captives from ATM to ATM until they've withdrawn their day's limit.

I've heard of economic studies that trace the lack of large-scale trust in much of Africa to the legacy of slave trading. I'm not sure if any economists have tried to look at the ways that trust has been affected by the fact that until colonization, with all of its violent distortions of social life, many people lived in “stateless” societies – that is to say, decentralized, with no leader assembling each community into a larger-scale whole. I look forward to someday teaching Thomas Beidelman's article “Beer Drinking and Cattle Theft in Ukavuru” (I might be butchering the place name; internet is too slow to look it up to verify) because I think it shows, simply and yet elegantly, the ways that the colonial introduction of force created inequalities and mistrust that persisted with independence.

From the burgeoning literature on African cities, it seems like there are places – Rem Koolhaas' Lagos and Marie-Francoise Plissart and Filip De Boeck's Kinshasa come to mind – where whatever mistrust exists becomes a catalyst to all sorts of improvisations, sometimes predatory but also productive, such as 419 schemes. In CAR, though, which is landlocked in so many ways, it seems only like a brake. People here in rural CAR describe themselves as moving backward.

Derrida fans would no doubt have their own take on this problem of the signature.

Sultan Senoussi's City on a Hill

2010-02-09T10:04:00.000-08:00

After obtaining permission from the First Adjunct Mayor (the Sultan-Mayor's replacement when he is not around), the General Secretary of the Mayor's office, the Zone Commander of the army, and the Unit Chief of the gendarmerie, and finding a guide, this morning I was finally able to climb up the hill to see Sultan Senoussi's old city. (Once there, I discovered that it is in fact an oft-traversed plateau, where people come to collect firewood, to cultivate small, terraced gardens, or just en route to more-distant villages. But for a foreigner, it's different. There would be rumors if I just went up there poking around.)

Senoussi settled on the hilltop in 1891 and Ndele life centered on that well-defended plateau until the Sultan's assassination by the French twenty years later. At that point everyone fled and the city on the hill has been abandoned ever since. The town now spreads out from the southern base of the hill. If I could choose, though, I'd much rather re-site the town up onto that plateau. It is full of dramatic rock formations that provide hollows for afternoon resting spots with lovely views over the surrounding countryside. In a few places, paths shaded by tall trees that almost, just a tiny bit, reminded me of the trails I grew up with in New Hampshire, slope down toward verdant streams.

Of the old city, only crumbling half-walls of the more important buildings remain. The current Sultan-Mayor has put up little signs identifying some of the spots in an effort to make this a tourist site. For the time being it's not a very friendly place to visit, though, both for the red tape required and for the sharp, reedy grasses that remain in the aftermath of the dry season burn and copious other thorny plants through which one must bushwhack. I sliced open my ankle and one of my companion ripped his trousers straight across the knee. On the other hand the guide, Chef de Quartier Yaro, was in his 58, at least a foot shorter than me, wore flip-flops, and even so I kept having to call after him to slow down.

It must have been a vibrant and surprising place, set in such ranging topography and making such use of the rock formations and other natural features. I was struck by how many of the structures of which traces remain are guardhouses, soldier's barracks, or other military fortifications. The guardhouses ringed the perimeter at the access paths. The soldiers and close guards lived nearer to the sultan. (Insert reference to the Presidential Guard, army, and gendarmerie currently inhabiting Ndele, and their, ahem, variable comportment. Deleted for fear of being “too sensitive.”)

Today, when the sultan is in Ndele he lives in a tall house set within a large compound graced by mango trees. During the rebel attack on November 26, a rocket – not clear who launched it – landed in the foyer and burned a living room set that President Bozize had given for World Food Day Ndele 2008 as well as many old photographs of sultans and their families over the years. I ask people when the sultan will return from Bangui, and they cite the state of his house as a reason why he has stayed away: “Where would he live, with his house in that state?” But when I ask who will repair the house, they say that the sultan must return for it to be repaired. No one here has any money for that. If the sultan were here, they would gladly approach him and present in tribute their few francs. But only if he's here. All of which makes me doubt I'll see him in Ndele during my stay here.

Sooner or Later

2010-02-06T03:53:00.001-08:00

It was bound to happen. Someone has found my blog, and deemed it to contain vast amounts of information that is “très sensible” (highly sensitive). I knew it would, and yet pretended it wouldn't. I so enjoyed having a forum to think through some of the issues or questions that troubled me and even, when lucky, getting some helpful feedback. It made me feel less isolated than I otherwise did, here in this remotest corner of the world. And it calmed me, made me feel more in control of my fieldwork, to organize observations in a presentable format on the page.

And I even brought the discovery on myself, I think, when, in desperation, I challenged someone who accused me of being a spy to Google me. I figured he'd find some innocuous Duke page with outdated information about my dissertation and maybe the couple of pieces I've written for Making Sense of Sudan. Hopefully my pontificating convinced him that I am indeed but a lowly grad student, but innocuous it was not. As countless others have observed before me, blogging is an odd forum in that it feels strangely private, making it easy to forget or ignore that it is, of course, fully accessible.

In the process of being found out, I have realized something about how politics works here. Much of the game has to do with pretending not to know, and certainly not ever stating, the things that everyone knows. (I mean seriously, as a newly-arrived expat I'm the last to know anything.) That a certain official drinks a lot, for instance, or even that a certain road is closed to humanitarians. Always better to feign ignorance, since you don't know who might betray you (“So-and-so said such-and-such about so-and-so...” can take on a life of its own in a place that in many ways functions on rumors). This can make research difficult. It also makes it hard to change endemic corruption or other malfeasance, because any whistler blower could quickly face allegations herself. Many if not most of the bylines in Bangui's 8-page newspapers are sobriquets.

So I will have to be more circumspect about the things I write here.

If the internet connection permitted, I'd upload some photos from the party I attended yesterday. It was a ceremony thrown by a Chadian man living here in Ndele who had been captured by the rebels when he went to visit his wife and kids in Chad. He was so thankful to Allah to have been released that he bought a cow for the neighborhood to enjoy. We women sat on mats spread across two courtyards and inside the house of a relative of the man, a recent divorcee who had followed her husband here from Ndjamena. They had prepared platter upon platter of delicious food, including things I didn't even know it was possible to obtain in Ndele. (I think the man probably brought some goods back with him from Chad, where more products are available.)

When a foreigner like me shows up at such a gathering, there is usually one outgoing woman among the group who takes it upon herself to try to communicate with the stranger, while the others sit and listen. The hostess, a beautiful woman with movie star teeth (most people here have broken, brown teeth) that she flashed when she smiled, was such a woman, and I struggled to align my Koranic Arabic with her Chadic Arabic. Some words are the same – “lahm” for meat – others are similar - “tayarah” instead of “ta-ira” for airplane – and others are quite different – “kwayyis” instead of “jayyid” for good. As frustrating as it can be, I find such intense efforts to communicate exhilarating too. I departed the gathering bathing in thankfulness: thankful for people like her, who welcome a stranger with friendly laughter, and thankful for those exciting moments when I squeezed some Arabic out of my receding memory.

That night I couldn't sleep, hepped up on the afternoon's glasses of sweet-sweet tea (Southern sweet tea tastes bitter compared to this stuff). And the wind, a whistling, insistent wind like Marseille's mistral, returned, flapping the curtains noisily and sending the neighborhood dogs into barking, whining frenzies.

RIP Bokassa

2010-01-28T09:05:00.000-08:00

Bokassa, the ludicrously voluble volleyball player (how many times did he yell at me for missing the ball or pinging it off the pitch? I lost count) and alleged son of the ex-emperor, was the first Central African soldier to die when the rebels attacked Ndele two months ago. He drove the rocket launcher-mounted truck, which the rebels hoped to capture. I can't help but wonder if his bad temper contributed in some way to his demise.

Missionaries

2010-01-28T08:49:00.001-08:00

(The abysmally slow connection here has kept me from posting in a few days.)

Father Yves extended a place mat-sized black-and-white photo toward me and said, “Find me.” The photo showed a young, not-yet-emperor, Bokassa standing next to a silky-haired, large-nosed woman in a wedding dress and veil. The stood indoors inside Bangui's main cathedral. Father Yves pointed to part of a book, visible at the left-hand side: “That's me – I was holding that book!” The next photo showed Bokassa's coronation. Father Yves gestured just to the left of the scene captured in the frame: “I was sitting there!”

Father Yves, a missionary with the Spiritin order of the Catholic church, left France for Oubangui-Chari in 1952 and has lived here ever since. In contrast to the aid workers and diplomats and Lebanese businesspeople (and me, more often than I'd care to admit) who bemoan this country's crushing torpor and imperceptible progress, Yves emphasized with wonder how quickly, how unimaginably, the place has changed in the 58 years he has been here.

When he arrived, no Central African held any position of authority. A few years later, a Central African was named to a responsible position with the postal service and “Everyone thought it was a mistake! No one would have guessed that in 1958 they would have more autonomy and in 1960 independence!” At that point, if you went to PK5 (5km from the center of town), the people would be dressed in nothing but a small piece of hide.

Father Yves was also a friend of CAR's only founding father, Barthelemy Boganda. Boganda was a priest like Yves but was defrocked for failure to maintain his vow of celibacy. Yves went to Boganda's house for a reconciliatory coffee with Boganda and his wife and kids, and then a short time later (1958) he was part of the team that went out to the site of Boganda's crashed plane and recuperated his remains.

For someone no doubt expecting the quiet life of a missionary, Father Yves has somehow had a front seat at all of CAR's most famous – or infamous – moments.

He took a trip to the United States once, and he stayed with his fellow Spiritin at their mission in what he described as a “quartier populaire” in New York City. He rode the subway – “under the ground! All by myself!” He was living in a quartier populaire in CAR then, a neighborhood so packed that if you stretched out your arm inside your house you'd hit your neighbor's. He lived simply. In New York, what struck him about the missionaries' life was that they too lived simply, but that made them have about the same socioeconomic level as those around them, or perhaps a bit below. In CAR, even living as simply as they did, they were still the whites – they were still the rich ones. And so the expectations they have for each other are entirely different, as are the dynamics of their relationships. In CAR, missionaries are important personalities, on a local and sometimes a national scale. In New York, I'm guessing they're known only to their congregants. Same title, but how different the job.

Father Yves seemed happy he had ended up in Central Africa.

Chabal and de Waal...and me(?)

2010-01-19T04:06:00.000-08:00

In Alex de Waal's recent two-part review of Patrick Chabal's “Africa: The Politics of Smiling and Suffering,” he argues that the north of Equatorial Africa belt that Chabal excludes from his analysis in fact offers rich insights to corroborate and expand his argument. Rather than delving into the particularities of Chabal's points, which seem heartfelt and frustrated enough to make good fodder for an African Studies class, though perhaps at the risk of encouraging a bit of hubris on the part of students (he might inspire them to do things differently, and better, without realizing that his critiques sometimes verge on caricature), I'd like to discuss some of the material de Waal presents, because in a way it describes what I am hoping to do with my own research. His writing was thus both an inspiration and a reminder to get down to work – I have much to go before I pretend to comprehend these kinds of processes and mentalities.

De Waal draws attention to the ways that the areas north of Equatorial Africa were drawn into the world economy through integration into largely Muslim raiding empires. He writes:

“The characteristic form of successful Sudanic states was an assimilatory empire, managed through clientelism and organized violence. The trans-Saharan links enabled the states in the Sudanic belt to adopt organizational technologies that could allow clientilistic political models to function on a far larger scale. Paramount among these was Islam...At their zenith, the Sudanic and Ethiopian empires ruled their domains as three concentric circles. The inner circle was the fully administered territory, where a centralized patrimony controlled political life. In the second circle loyalty was bargained, with local chiefs enjoying a degree of autonomy, and negotiating their obligations to the centre. The outer circle was a zone of influence, where power was exercised by the intermittent use of force. The nature of patron-client relations varied according to the circle.”

In the outer circle, where force was used, the raiding party ruled. However, even in these outer regions the raiders would establish zariba – outposts for trading and pilgrimage pit-stops.

“In summary, pre-colonial chiefly administration in the Sudanic states was more instrumental in support of a power hierarchy than the world of reciprocal obligation described by Chabal for elsewhere in Africa.”

However, this is where I – who has yet to be able to access Chabal's book and so am relying on the reviews I've found to form my analysis – would tweak both Chabal's and de Waal's points. The world of reciprocal obligation “perverted” (yes, Chabal uses this word) by colonial command-and-control may once have existed, but in many places it had already been profoundly re-shaped by the kinds of raiding and integration that de Waal describes by the time the Europeans set up a physical presence on the continent. Across Africa in the late 19^th century, raiders transformed the political, economic and social landscape. From Tippu Tip, who traded and raided from his base on Zanzibar far into Central Africa to Senoussi, sultan of Dar-al-Kuti (where I'm doing my research, in the north of modern-day CAR) to the Chamba expansion in Nigeria, these transformations, which in some instances represented a form of colonialism and in others terror, have, in my opinion, been neglected in the midst of the contemporary emphasis on the lasting effects of European colonialism. I'm curious to see the ways in which this raiding colonialism, which in CAR coexisted with French colonialism for a couple of decades, has affected the political repertoire of current leaders and the expectations of the governed. CAR is an ideal place to carry out this project because the colonial administration was so half-hearted, victim of continual budget cuts, and the French even ruled through the raiding sultans for several decades.

As a part-time historian at best, I find it challenging to delineate precisely how the political life of a century ago has influenced the reality today. One could argue, for instance, that the CAR state fits the model of three circles rule: the elite form the first circle; urban residents – because of their potential for disorder – the second; and the hinterlands, whose residents are generally ignored except when they are attacked, the third. But that seems possibly too facile. On top of that, educated people tend to be sufficiently familiar with the anodyne “good governance” platitudes hammered home by UN and other aid programming that they stick to that script instead of delving into the actual workings of the political system here.

In any event, if anyone has any tips or reading suggestions, I'm all ears.

Legitimate state, illegitimate corruption? Or vice versa?

2010-01-19T03:57:00.000-08:00

An American company recently sought to open a gold mine in northeastern CAR. Gold mining can have massive harmful effects on the environment, but the company worked to minimize the damage by using innovative, cyanide-free mining techniques. They also wanted to use the best labor practices – no Dante-esque scenes of child miners here for Sebastiao Selgado's progeny to snap – and planned to establish community development funds and a number of other projects to benefit area residents. In addition, they would build and maintain a CAR-Cameroon railway and also repair the region's roads. Even those skeptical of the local benefits of mining agreed that this company strove to do things right. The company director arrived at his appointment with the minister in charge of permits for such undertakings. The minister, ensconced in his office full of the over-large furniture that is fashionable among the Central African elite, asked point-blank: where is my money? The company director explained what he was hoping to do and that he couldn't pay bribes or gifts. When it became clear that he wouldn't budge, the minister stood, turned to his personal security guard and punched him the in face, apparently out of frustration. The company director took this as a cue to depart. A week later, his company's mining concession was revoked.

I heard this story a few days ago. I heard it second-hand, so some details may have been embellished, but it follows a narrative of corruption that, if stereotype, is stereotype because it happens so very often here. Many are the people I've known who have tried to set up businesses in CAR but failed for lack of bribery-funds. (Some businesspeople, like those of a diamond buying house I know, seem to have found an equilibrium of bribes that remains profitable for them, but few manage to achieve this delicate balance.) Tell this to a non-“dignitaire” Central African and he or she will most likely cluck with disgust and frustration. That's not to say that, given the constellation of factors (generally precarious lives) that people here face, these people on the street wouldn't behave similarly if given the chance. But they don't tend to see it as legitimate, either in the abstract, ideal-world sense or in the practical sense of the brakes it places on their country's economic development.

Hearing stories like this over and over makes one wonder: at what point, if ever, does the state cease to be recognized as a state? Is there anything a country could do to lose credibility, to render itself no longer a (theoretically) sovereign entity? Regrettable nomenclature of “failed states” and facile analyses of globalization notwithstanding, there is really very little a state can do to fail. Even Somalia, the “failed state” par excellence, has not failed in the international system, where it is assumed to fulfill its independence-era borders despite a lack of government for the time being.

I wonder, what if a corporate CEO or a university president behaved like the minister did, demanding money on the side and punching his associate if denied? The corporation might well Enron its way out of existence and into cautionary notoriety. The university's standards might well decline so precipitously that enrollment would plummet and it would close its doors. In both cases, there should be sufficient feedback from clients to correct bad behavior, and the categorical forms of corporation and university are not assumed to be immutable, ever-lasting containers and so a particular example may die and disappear (OK, with the partial exception of those that are “too big to fail”). Not so the state. When states are comprised of practices as flagrantly corrupt as those of the CAR minister above, their economies founder and they might lose some foreign aid, but they'll gain other, correctively-minded aid (though they'll likely scuttle anything that upsets their status quo too much such as aid projects that refuse to pay bribes). Despite the heterogeneity of the state form throughout history, it has always held a special almost peculiar legitimacy in the realms of theory and international law.

This might be partly why people here have such high hopes for what the state should do for them, even though their actual state falls short on any of their desires: they make a distinction between the state as a set of agents and processes in their actual lives and the state as an ideal that daily reality can never contradict, like the hope of heaven. Christian Lund makes a similar point in his article “Recategorizing 'Public' and 'Private' in Ghana.” In the case he describes, people made land claims in reference to an abstract, ideal version of the state that had little to do with local functionaries' comportment.

From what I've heard from my interlocutors so far, their ideal state is one that provides never-endingly for their welfare. Leaders they experienced as just were those who welcomed the hungry with plates of food. Obligatory bribes/gifts, skimming funds or materials, taking a bit on the side – these practices are more ambiguous. Rarely, though, do their benefits trickle down in the way the jobs created by the presence of more businesses would. (An aside: many of CAR's leaders' spouses and children – and the leaders themselves, on holidays – live in France or elsewhere abroad. This, too, decreases the local benefit of their skimming.)

One final note: re-reading what I've written here, I recognize the resonances with the colonial era when I describe with awe the prospect of a railroad and resource exploitation. But, quite simply, people here need jobs. The hope of a life comprised of some work other than subsistence farming is one reason many young men join armed groups and become violent entrepreneurs. And though roads can bring all sorts of negative consequences, such as an escalation of the bush meat trade, the limiting effects of isolation and “enclavement” in this country are great enough to outweigh the potential harm.

Chimps for sale

2010-01-16T02:38:00.000-08:00

Bambi the chimp

The most interesting part of JMA was the afternoon market and exposition. Vendors filled the market stalls with the region's agricultural products. There were funny-shaped squashes and snowy piles of dried manioc, displayed like at a state fair. And there were piles of machetes and hoe blades printed with “made in Cameroon” that the seller assured me were actually made in China.

But alongside these more mundane items most was the proud display of leopard skins, two chimps and a monkey, and carved ivory, all for sale and all illegal by the letter of the law. Daniel, a friend in Obo who is also something of a fixer (he translates for the Ugandan soldiers when they have gas or uniforms or cookies to sell; he also translated for me) explained that normally one must obtain a 70,000 CFA (almost $200) permit from the Ministry of Water and Forests officials in Zemio (a good six hours away by road) if one wants to sell these products. Failure to do so gives the gendarmes sufficient pretext to seize your goods. Either way, though, strictly speaking the law forbids the sale of protected animals, whether alive or dead.

But somehow the state laws didn't apply on this, the day of greatest state power and presence. It is well-known to all that the dignitaries are the major purchasers of the wares. Daniel said the laws had been specially “relaxed” for JMA to enable locals to benefit from the dignitaries' visit. Even Daniel was in on it: a gendarme from Bangui had asked him to procure a chimp. Bambi, one of the chimps at the market, lolled on a young man's back, just like a human baby. The young man named his price as 70,000, but Daniel said this was the dignitary price – usually, you can get a baby chimp for 10,000 (about $23). Only chimp babies are docile enough to be pets; they are caught by shooting the mother and seizing the infant carried.

The illicit-goods-fest continued at the president's banquet, where an ivory salesman set up a whole table of carved tusks. (The elephants would have been relatively small, I noted sadly.)

All this fascinates me. It reminds me of the Central African leaders of the ECOFAC (EU-funded anti-poaching program) who use their jobs as privileged positions from which to consume and traffic in game meat (also, strictly speaking, illegal). Whatever else, being a state official does not seem to mean abiding by and enforcing laws. The laws do serve at least one function: they provide a pretext for seizure, should the official choose to invoke it. But it seems to get at something important that the day of the state is also the day of illegality. (This gets into the debate between Bayart et al and Chabal and Daloz about whether it makes sense to talk of criminalization/illegality if the state actors involved do not themselves view the activities as criminal or illegal. For now I'm sticking with the descriptor “illegal,” using the definition of contravention of written laws, without taking the next step of judging it “criminal.”)

World Food Day

2010-01-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

Each year, the president chooses a benighted corner of his country to inspire by visiting for World Food Day – la Journée mondiale de l'alimentation et la femme rurale. In December of this year Obo, a town in the far Southeast (several days' drive from the capital, even once the road was fixed up for JMA) plagued by the Lord's Resistance Army for nearly two years, received the (dubious) honor. JMA (pronounced “jema”) is supposed to be a spectacle of state power and beneficence. Will the president distribute food? I asked. No... JMA is about encouraging people to grow more, came the response.

It is fitting that in a country so thoroughly propped up by international donors, the only time when the state makes its presence felt in the hinterlands is on a holiday invented by the United Nations. Before leaving for fieldwork, one of my dissertation committee members posed the following provocation, “Would the CAR exist as a state if the international donors weren't there?” I stumbled in responding then. Now, I think it is indeed the international system's insistence on treating the rent-fee-spoils structure that is CAR politics as a state that makes it appear so. It's kind of amazing how the state category never loses its legitimacy in the international realm, regardless of wholly contradictory on-the-ground realities. Even “collapsed” Somalia is still generally assumed to hew to its post-independence borders, all evidence to the contrary. No wonder it seems like a magical entity.

JMA in Obo dawned hotter and sunnier than usual. By 8am the main road was baking and bustling. Many people were wearing t-shirts and baseball caps printed with “JMA Obo, 15-16 octobre 2009”, which were made before JMA was repeatedly postponed. A group of cowboy hat-clad pom pom girls waited at the front of the parade line. Clowns, their faces painted white and their shirts and pants stuffed to give the impression of potbellies and cushioned bottoms, butted into different crowds and pleaded for alcohol from the people selling and imbibing (mostly gendarmes and dress soldiers) along the periphery. A man played a giant marimba with beautifully clear sound, and a group of dancers (accompanied by a sign carrier: “Groupe des danseurs,” just to clarify) shook to the beat. The notables began taking their seats under awnings set up for them.

And then we waited. The pom pom girls eventually sat down on their puffs; the military brass band found the shade of the beer pavilions. I bought an orange and asked the price: 25 Francs. But it was three for 25 yesterday, I protested. “Today everything has changed,” the saleswoman shrugged. Happy World Food Day.

Two young men approached and introduced themselves as Liberian soccer players. They were en route to Sudan because they had heard of some Liberians who had gotten jobs playing there. But the military roadblocks along the road in CAR had been too expensive, so they got stuck, penniless, in Obo. (I tried to find them in subsequent days, but no luck. I hope they are scoring for Juba as we speak.)

Finally, some hours later, we heard the president's plane overhead, and fifteen minutes after that his motorcade blasted through, kicking up plumes of dust. He retreated to the residence prepared for him so he could rest before the festivities. So we all waited some more, in the beating sun.

Eventually the president arrived, clad in a banana-yellow shirt that made him easy to pick out. His late arrival meant the parade was truncated – only the military bands and a few others got to take their turn in front of the president's awning. An announcer then listed the name and title of every single dignitary who had come for the occasion. “So-and-so, Chauffeur, Office Nationale de Materiel,” he called out in a slow, ponderous voice. There were at least six ONM Chauffeurs. This roll call took an hour or more.

President Bozize gave two speeches, one in French and one in Sango. In the French speech, he read through every security/development tenet you would find in the most anodyne UN document: First, we must have security, then we will work on development; but we must have gender equality...and climate change... In the Sango version, the crowd got a bit more into it, applauding when he told them to “pika maboko” and calling out in response to his promises. Functionaries assigned here will no longer stay in Bangui – they will come to their post, he said. (Whoo-hoo, I thought.) And what about food, the ostensible reason for the holiday? “First, I am working on bringing security,” he said (in fact, his government's role in security is nil – any security in the area is due entirely to its saturation with Ugandan soldiers on the prowl for LRA), “and then I will negotiate with the World Food Programme about food distributions.” What? This is the best vision you can offer up? Distributions from WFP?

That night, a crew of waitstaff brought from Bangui set up not one but two giant banquets for the visiting dignitaries. I started bantering with the waiters in Sango and they insisted I attend. “With your white skin, you're an invité!” they encouraged, without a trace of rancor. (CAR has got to be the most racist place on earth; the mere whiff of foreignness brings vast privileges.) The second banquet, spread on tables arrayed around a well-lit concrete stage, was the more lavish. French red wine, sodas and beers from Bangui, and Cameroonian bottled water filled the tables to the point of clutter. At the buffet, waiters dished out chunks from a capitaine (CAR's prized river fish) the size of a five-year-old. (Once the dignitaries had served themselves, and taken seconds, the waiters served the assembled crowds of onlookers as well.)

Bozize and his wife (incidentally, they're technically no longer married – she had remarried and lived in France when he came to power; their kids urged her to go back and reap the rewards of the good years, such as a staff of five hairstylists) sat at the center table. Bozize wore a shirt covered with pictures of himself and slogans from KNK (Kua na kua – work, nothing but work), his political party. To the crowd's delight, the first couple danced repeatedly and even stuffed money on the forehead of the dancers they particularly liked, such as a young man who “ate” and regurgitated his cigarette while shaking his legs with an incredible elasticity, and a midget.

The next day, nary a trace remained of the previous day's festivities. The president stayed until early afternoon, and then blasted back to Bangui, sparking an exodus of dignitaries. I had the misfortune to be walking in the road then and quickly became caked with the dust of tens of speeding trucks. Even the mattresses brought from Bangui – ostensibly for the hospital in Obo – were packed up and returned to the capital, now likely gracing various functionaries' homes. Within a couple of days, the generator brought by ENERCA to provide night-time electricity had ceased functioning. Some problem with the battery. Potholes are already growing on the road to Bangui, which had been fixed up specially for JMA.

And food? The markets are sparse and food prices sky-high because people are scared to go to their fields for fear of being taken by LRA. But at least oranges are again three for 25 CFA.

Crocodile Men

2009-12-20T03:37:00.000-08:00

Some years ago in Bangui, I met a man from Obo. He had been working for an ill-fated American anti-poaching militia and was involved in untold drama: he'd accused his colleague, a South African mercenary, of embezzlement (diamonds, LandCruisers), who then accused him of murder, and he spent half a year in prison. Near the end of our conversation, he pulled out some photos of a corpse in the shallows on the banks of a river. The body was bloated, pummeled, and dismembered. “You Europeans don't believe it, but it is a very real problem for us – crocodile men. They are men who transform themselves into crocodiles and kill people in the water.”

I didn't have time to ask more then, but the image of the corpse and my interlocutor's grave mien – even graver than when he described his rivalry with the South African – as he talked of the crocodile men stayed with me.

Evans-Pritchard, meanwhile, in his extensive work on Azande notions of witchcraft and magic, makes no mention of the “pili” (crocodile men). So I was curious to find out more while out in Obo. The problem of crocodile men dates to the early 1980s, when many Yakoma functionaries were assigned to posts here. The president at the time, Andre Kolingba, was a Yakoma, an ethnic group concentrated in riverine areas near the capital, and his loading of the civil service with his kin marked the beginning of the ethnicization of CAR politics.

Many Yakoma are fishermen, and pili developed as a strategy to increase catches. A man who takes the pili medicine, imbibed under guidance of a magician, gains the strength to stay underwater all day and finds all the biggest fish. Only, it can be used for ill as well; pili can also employ these superhuman skills to slay a foe, provided the foe is in the water. As Yakoma moved into Obo, they mingled with the Azande living there and the pili skills passed between friends. Very often, crocodile murders involve rivalries over women.

The pili problem reached its height in 87 – 96. It felt like an epidemic to residents, who sought out and sanctioned any suspected pili in their midst. The usual practice was burning accused crocodile men at the stake. As the flames began to lick at their bodies, they would denounce others. For a while, the Catholic mission stopped giving communion out of exasperation with its members' excitement for the crocodile-men-burning.

Few Yakoma remain in Obo, as indeed few functionaries at all remain. The crocodile men problem has abated too. (Now, ill will is enacted upon others through inflicting sickness, a sickness that resembles AIDS but is not AIDS because it kills people so much more quickly than the doctors say AIDS usually kills, explained one interlocutor. Incidentally, there is no functioning hospital in Obo, so any opportunistic infections would go pretty much untreated.)

But there was one big crocodile man case last year. A boy from the nearby village of Gugbere came to Obo for a soccer tournament. In the afternoon, he and his friends headed home, but found themselves blocked by the ferry, which was at the far side of the river. Undeterred, the young man jumped in and began swimming to pull back the barge that would bring them home. Halfway across, he began yelling, “They've gotten me! The crocodile men have me! You will never see me again!” His head and torso emerged from the water, as if propelled, once, twice, three times, and then he disappeared.

People searched for his body for four days before they found it. The internal organs and the penis had been cut out. People understood them to have been eaten. Investigations ensued, and three men were accused of the killing: the boy's cousin, a man from Sudan, and a boy from the neighborhood. They confessed to being pili and killing the boy. The man from Sudan was the ringleader, in a way. He had been paid by a patron in Sudan. The patron had lived in Obo until the UN decided to repatriate Sudanese refugees a few years ago. He had his eye on a girl in Obo, but the girl thought him too old and preferred the soccer playing boy. So the patron dispatched his associate to deal with the rival. The associate paid the boy's cousin and another young man to help him.

The three accused sat in detention at the gendarmerie. But an angry mob yelling passages from the Bible (an eye for an eye) led by the murdered boy's mother broke down the door and killed all three. Their bodies now repose in a cemetery established by a Colonel who ruled as prefet of Obo a few years ago. This colonel is remembered as a particularly effective leader, because he could see through people to tell who was bad and who was good, a skill enhanced by his drinking, according to local lore, and he quickly dispatched the bad to his cemetery.

While in Obo, I read a novella by Mark Twain called The Mysterious Stranger. The story takes place in modern-day Austria sometime around the 1600s, a period marked by witch scares. The narrator, a young boy, enjoys a privileged view of the world thanks to repeated visits from the titular stranger, who describes himself as Satan. Satan enables his young friend to see the future and shows him how little humans understand about good and bad – early death might in fact obviate years of suffering; madness may bring greater happiness than sanity. What emerges clearly, through the witch burnings and unexpected changes in people's lives, is the ridiculousness of human efforts to make order out of the evil forces they see in the world. By the end of the story, Satan reveals to the boy that none of it exists. Not the boy, not himself; all is but a ripple, a sigh, a joke of the universe. A kind postmodern tale, a product of its brilliantly irreverent author. And yet, immersed in my own tales of crocodile men scares (not to mention LRA depravities), which have a social truth as well as a physical truth and yet are founded in what are, to a logical-rational mind, untruths, somehow it struck me as hopeful.

Attack on Ndele

2009-12-05T04:44:00.000-08:00

I arrived back in Bangui last Tuesday night after a fourteen-hour drive down the rutted dirt roads from Ndele. Thursday morning my cell phone's chirpy T-Mobile ring woke me: had I heard that Ndele was under siege? I immediately starting ringing up friends there to see if they were OK and find out more about what was happening. The Sisters sounded tired to the point of being unable to even talk – due, I surmised, not just to the attack itself but also to the fatigue of living twelve years in a place, hoping to see it progress, and being so often let down. The NGO workers were tensely waiting in their compounds and rightly jealous of their dwindling cell phone batteries. And Al-Habib, my fruit buyer/hustling-merchant/friend, was curious and headed out to see things up close.

The attack was over by the end of the day. The rebels – for it was members of the rebel group that controls the road north from Ndele who had attacked – left, carrying their 26 wounded and two prisoner gendarmes with them. Reinforcements from the Central African armed forces (FACA) arrived the following day. They abused a few people (and killed two wounded rebels) but avoided the large-scale exactions for which they have become notorious. Entry and exit to the town remains closely guarded, and the market stopped functioning for quite a few days as much of the population had fled into the bush.

Can I admit to a strange mix of feelings about hearing of all this from the safety of Bangui? My first reaction was relief that I had made it out before all this came to pass. My second approached guilt – I should be there experiencing it all, too, rather than ensconced in the comparative luxury of the capital, with its (occasional) hot water and cafes. After all, the danger was likely minimal for people who stayed in their homes, more or less out of harm's way. As an anthropologist, I'm supposed to live close to the population and and not erect a protective bubble between myself and the hardships they face. But studying an area home to violent conflict makes that more difficult because, quite frankly, when it comes down to it, I value my life more highly than my research. Unlike in the calculations of altruists like Zell Kravinsky, who argued that the risk of complications in his donation of a healthy kidney (which his wife opposed) was far outweighed by the benefit to the recipient, there would likely be little direct benefit to people in Ndele as a result of me “being there” alongside them as the bullets flew.

Tomorrow I head out again: to the far southeast, site of LRA attacks for the past couple of years, if all goes as planned (still awaiting final confirmation of our departure). We will go to Obo, the last town before the Sudanese border, where the president will alight on Thursday for the Journée Mondiale de l'Alimentation et de la Femme Rurale (World Food and Rural Women Day). Each year, the president picks some far-off, neglected corner of his realm to visit for World Food Day. The road is repaired for the occasion (the road to Ndele benefited from this treatment two years ago), and the president gives a speech reminding people of the state in which they live. I imagine that food is distributed as well. (Time and again here, people have illustrated avowals of the virtue of a leader through reference to the food he hands out. The World Food Programme, however, is generally seen as stingy – haven't quite figured that out yet.)

On the way, we will pass through Bangassou, Zemio, and Rafai, all formerly sites of sultanates who were employed by concessionary companies in the early 20th century. The majority of the population is Azande – I'm hoping I'll be able to thumb through my E.E. Evans-Pritchard as we bump along the roads.

Moto lesson

2009-11-25T05:57:00.001-08:00

IMG_0059
Originally uploaded by louniclom

Taking advantage of the Ndele airstrip before MICOPAX takes it over for their base. The old moto gets up to 75km an hour on the straight-away!

Witchcraft again

2009-11-22T08:12:00.000-08:00

Last night as I dozed off reading Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul by headlamp, I came across a passage that struck me as remarkably resonant with descriptions of witchcraft here.

In the book, one of the characters has just described a bomb plot gone awry. The bomb had been placed in a church and set to explode at midnight, but it failed to go off. The police colonel states that the fuse was badly set, but his interlocutor replies,

' “And why was the fuse badly set? One has to go back to the source, colonel. A miracle is very much like a crime. You say the fuse was badly set, but how can we be sure that it was not Our Lady who guided the hand which set the fuse?” '

These are the kinds of questions that animate accusations of witchcraft here in Central Africa. In Christianity, believers tend to cordon such powers off as the provenance only of delineated religious authorities (the baker is not credited with channeling Mother Theresa into the sticky bun that has just come out of his oven – a higher power is). With witchcraft, anyone – including the pushy woman at the water pump – might be capable of wreaking havoc. Makes the world a dangerous and tricky place.

This insecurity is one reason why discipline is so lacking in the armed forces here. An officer will not dare to sanction a subordinate who has known poisoning powers at his disposal. The head of the ECOFAC anti-poaching unit that I stayed with last week described how he had to shift around various members of his force because their wives were recognized as witches and accused of causing all sorts of problems. Clearly, there are many other reasons for the impunity enjoyed by soldiers. For instance, a humanitarian worker was shot by a soldier here in Ndele a few weeks ago, and the general (a government official no longer in the military), the person who should lead the investigation, spent the whole of the next 36 hours too drunk/hung over to deal with the problem and then promptly decamped for Bangui, where he has remained. But the discourse of witchcraft suggests that the reasons might include some beyond simple-to-uproot structural delinquency.

Les Racines du Ciel

2009-11-20T06:32:00.000-08:00

A quick plug for a book I just finished – Romain Gary's Les Racines du Ciel, which now gains pride of place among my running favorites (alongside Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing, and Caroline Moorehead's Gellhorn – yes, I admit to odd taste).

Gary is the only person to have won the Prix Goncourt twice (like the Nobel, you're only supposed to win once, but Gary won again under a pen name). Les Racines du Ciel (The Roots of Heaven in English), published in 1955, is a remarkably prescient book about elephants and ecology in Chad in the late-40s. The world it portrays seems eerily similar to the Central Africa of today, except for the great shadow cast by the Second World War, which looms large in the narrative and provides a reminder of the need for...something indefinable, which saving the elephants comes to stand in for – something to do with all that is good in human – and animal – relations.

Peace Corps

2009-11-12T03:16:00.000-08:00

CAR is perhaps the only place on earth where people believe Americans are particularly good at learning foreign languages. When I speak in Sango here, people say, “But, are you French?” “No,” I reply. “American.” At which point the person nods knowingly. “Americans are so good at learning African languages!” This reputation owes partly to the work of Yankee missionaries, but perhaps even more to the legacy of the Peace Corps.

Peace Corps volunteers worked in CAR until 1997, when army mutinies in Bangui encouraged the State Department to pull out. The embassy has since re-opened, but the Peace Corps has yet to return. To all the former CAR Peace Corps'ers out there: your students remember you! When presented with an American, educated men will often reminisce about the American they knew –
“We had a Peace Corps volunteer who taught English...we would go for picnics together on the weekends, up on those rocks...”
“We had a Peace Corps volunteer, she was so pale, I've never seen anything like it...and she liked to smoke hashish.”

Critiques of the Peace Corps abound. (Stuart Stevens provides a particularly funny and sad vignette about fish farming in his book Malaria Dreams, which begins in CAR.) And yet it seems like if the program could have a positive impact, it would be here. People yearn to learn English, and have a dire need for teachers. And, perhaps more to the point, as far as the State Department is concerned, the Peace Corps presence here seems actually to have achieved its desired goal: promoting a positive view of the US and Americans.

Hungry soldiers

2009-11-08T08:59:00.000-08:00

We stayed in Koubou later than we should have so that the Sister and her helpers could buy manioc, peanuts, and honey from the women there. Darkness enveloped us for most of the drive back. The headlights illuminated the basketball-player height grasses that very nearly engulf the dirt track this time of year, and my view out the front windshield looked just like what a Scuba diver would see through her mask.

A few kilometers from Ndele, a flashlight waved us down. It was a soldier, who proceeded to ask us where we had been and pan his light over the truck's contents, a hungry look in his eyes. The sacks of manioc disappointed him. He had hoped to find bush meat, which, being illegal, he could easily seize (to eat). In a beaten-down patch of grass beside the road a group of about ten women and children hurried to re-position the basins they carry on their heads while the soldier was busy with us. A few quickly disappeared through the grass, and the others made to follow them. They were en route back from the fields after a long day of work until the soldier stopped them to see what he could shake them down for.

Disappointed, the soldier let us pass. Everyone in the vehicle began tut-tutting. “Ce n'est pas normal!” Except, sadly, though it might not be “normal” it is certainly usual here. The soldiers supplement whatever salary they receive by requisitioning from the population. The interdiction of bush meat indirectly favors this practice, because it gives the soldiers a law to use as a pretext. The ministry of water and forests is one of the best posts a soldier can get. (Even the armed group that controls the road leading north from Ndele, which has distributed various posts to its members, has apparently established its own ministry of water and forests.)

While researching Central Africa in the archives, I often felt déjà vu as I read about the armies of old. The sultans who ruled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries raided with large armies. A sultan expected his soldiers to take their own salaries by raiding the populations just beyond the domain of the sultanate. Even at that point, the French decried the armies' undeveloped tactical maneuvers and general rapaciousness – attacking people rather than fighters, burning villages. (It should be noted that the system the French replaced the sultanates' armies with, the regional guards, treated people even worse.) The first treaty signed between Senoussi and the French, in 1899, included what I consider CAR's first security sector reform (SSR) project: the stipulation that Senoussi would permit French officers to train his troops. For the more than a century since then, CAR's armed forces have been in a near-continuous state of SSR. And yet very little has changed.

I mentioned in an earlier post how surprised I was to find that everyone, ex-pat and national alike, saw the state as the solution. The state needs to patrol and surveille its territory; otherwise armed groups – whether foreign or Central African – will continue to run rampage over this vast, nearly-unpopulated reservoir of resources. These comments remind me of a moment in a meeting of UN officials I attended in New York, during which we discussed the prospects for SSR in CAR. One man did some quick calculations: the size of the army in my country is x, compared to a land mass of y; he realized quickly the absurdity of expecting the CAR armed forces (maybe 5000 men, of whom less than 2000 reasonably-well trained) to control what goes on in their country's territory, which is the size of Texas and has almost no roads. The French realized this in the 1950s, and it was one of the reasons they gave up the colony without too much of a fight.

And yet we keep advocating SSR because what can you do besides work with the state form, in this day and age? I find myself highly critical of SSR and yet unsure what would work better. In his recent study of CAR, “Au marges du monde en Afrique Centrale,” Roland Marchal points out that the World Bank study “Voices of the Poor” entirely misrepresented the results of their survey of Central African priorities. The report ranks “security” as the number one priority, when in reality people seek economic development.

After decades of failed development projects, international planners (and the government officials who play to donor priorities) have positioned security as the prerequisite for development and therefore prioritize programs like SSR and DDR. In reality, of course, security and development have a chicken-and-the-egg relationship. Is it wholly naïve to suggest we go back to re-emphasizing the economic side of things?

(In fairness, not all the soldiers feed off the population. The president's special forces – the Presidential Guard – are thugs, as are many regular soldiers, but a lot of the officers are friendly and respectful guys. I played soccer yesterday with some lieutenants, among others, and though one kneed me awfully hard in the thigh, I can't chalk that up to anything other than my own deficient skills. Our goalie – not a soldier – was the best player on the pitch. He walked with great difficulty owing to an atrophied leg, but his hands magically always found the ball.)

Twins

2009-11-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon I accompanied the Sister to Koubou, a village 15km from Ndele, where she was checking the level of childhood malnutrition. Never have you heard babies scream until you try to put them in the truss-like UNICEF scale! In theory it's highly accurate, but the babies bounce around so much it's hard to get a good reading. Plus by the time you finish you'll be deaf.

Koubou's choir of screaming babies included two sets of twins, one six months and the other nine months. In both cases, one twin was substantially larger than the other. In the case of the six-month-olds, the little one weighed about half of what the big one weighed (3.2kg – the size of a robust newborn! – and 5.6kg, respectively). According to their mother, the little one sleeps too much. And while she sleeps, her twin enjoys all the milk. In all the time I've spent around African villages, this was the first time I'd knowingly seen twins. It made me think of the societies where people believe twins to be bad luck, or evil, and abandon the weaker one in the woods. (Apparently this happens in some parts of CAR, too, even quite near here.) It almost seemed like something similar was going on with the twins in Koubou, only in this case a drawn out version fueled by a combination of evolution and poverty, rather than belief.

During a conversation with a recent hire at UNICEF recently, my interlocutor expressed skepticism that mothers here need to be taught about nutrition, as UNICEF plans to do. Don't they already know better than we do how to get by in these difficult conditions, he wondered? They've been living this way for many years, after all. Yes and no: the Portuguese introduction of manioc (in the late eighteenth century, I think) has been a blessing and a curse. With colonization and the push toward cash crops, manioc became the staple. It grows easily and cheaply, but its nutritional value is next to nil. One of Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai's valuable contributions has been to reclaim and put back into use knowledge of Africans' once-varied and nutritious diets.

In my completely unscientific assessment, though, the main cause of malnutrition here is simply that women have too many babies. Even the (Catholic) Sister decries this (“Les gens d'ici font des enfants en désordre!”) We saw several mothers with 3-month-olds in their arms and 1-year-olds on their backs. Not enough milk then, and one or both kids will lose out. (Abortion, too, takes on a much less polemical cast here. The Sister told of visiting a woman in the hospital this week who had just had one. “She has eleven kids. She is tired. The mothers here are TIRED.”)

Magical twilight institutions?

2009-11-05T07:57:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite blogs, Texas in Africa, picked up on my last post to further discuss the idea of a "magical" state. When I started this blog a few months ago, I figured it would be a good way to start working through my findings, but I didn't even dare hope that it might incite some discussion. The fact that it has is both surprising and gratifying!

Now, off to read up on "twilight institutions" before my internet connection fades out or curfew o'clock, whichever comes first...

Here is her discussion of my post.

And here is the comment I posted in response:

The parallels between eastern Congo and CAR are striking – just replace Mobutu with Bokassa (“C'est notre Louis XIV! Notre Pericles!” gushed one man yesterday). People in CAR, too, feel squeezed by their more-powerful neighbors, especially Chad and Sudan. And the desire for a state that does “the things a state is supposed to do” – and then some – is immense. Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programs stoke this desire and unfortunately seem always to leave people more frustrated than ever.

Though I'm not thrilled with the term “magical” to describe state power, what I like about the descriptor is that reinserts the idea that state power, as played out in daily interactions, is not necessarily predictable. Thus it's not just about the Big Man who is able to dictate (a line of thought grounded in political theology and the works of people like Carl Schmitt or Ernst Kantorowicz, both of whom pointed to the enduring legacy of the Christian foundation of the European state) or control the heavens (Ranil Dissanayake, if you haven't read Max Gluckman's Custom and Conflict in Africa, you might find it interesting – he too points to the importance of rituals in re-inscribing state legitimacy), but also about the peculiar, almost nonsensical, kind of legitimacy that the state form has – a legitimacy that goes against logical reasoning, as the example of driving permits in eastern Congo so richly illustrates.

But I don't think this is a particularly African quality – I think all state power is magical, in different ways. Veena Das uses the example of India, and she makes the point that state officials themselves often don't know how to properly execute the letter of the law. This is where the unpredictability, and possibly magic, comes in. Every time I encounter the Norwegian state bureaucracy, I have this kind of experience: Norway is relatively small and homogenous, and so its laws often have gaps when it comes to outlying cases, such as Norwegians born abroad (like me). An American-Chilean friend who lived in Oslo for five years still gets erroneous tax reports mailed to her in Bonn, where she now lives. The peculiar thing about high-functioning states like Norway is that the officials truly believe the bureaucracy operates wholly rationally (they figure knowing the letter of the law suffices) and often respond with a “not possible” when in fact even a “not possible” is but one possible interpretation of an ambiguous rule.

Thanks for the tip about twilight institutions – I look forward to reading Lund's work. ICG has a report that labels CAR a “phantom state,” which I think is also nicely descriptive, provided one considers phantoms to be here among us.

What does the Central African state see?

2009-11-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday while reading dossiers at the Tribunal in Ndele I noticed how a single name might have many spellings over the course of a file. Similarly, in no case was a person sure of his or her age. The clerk wrote “Around 1967” or “around 1991” instead. This made me think of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998). What, I wondered, does the Central African state see, if its practices are so unstandardized?

Scott argues that the state engages in necessary tactics of simplification in order to keep track of and “arrange the population” so as to facilitate “taxation, conscription, and the prevention of rebellion” (2). Standardizing names, and making sure each citizen has a last name, is one such tactic of simplification. Scott refers to these simplification arrangements as the state’s (always-immanent, never achieved) “project of legibility.” Needing to make sense of and tabulate sprawling areas and peoples, the state must render them legible through the matrices it prescribes. Central to Scott’s understanding is that these simplifications do not merely reflect reality: the state imposes its simplifications, and they transform reality and re-make it following the state’s optical capacities.

Scott relates the history of scientific forestry as a metaphor for these projects of legibility. Birds, animals, insects, lichens, bushes, berries: the forest houses them all. People use the forest in a number of ways as well, whether for collecting firewood, hunting, or gathering food. But as wood became a commodity in late eighteenth century Prussia and Saxony, the management of the forest came to be increasingly narrowly defined in terms of the quantity of salable wood it could produce. “Nature” became “natural resources” and the only element of the forests to which surveyors paid attention was the possibility of extracting those resources. Thus a tree-filled area became measured only in terms of the quantity of board-length it could yield. As the foresters refined their task, they planted scientific forests they believed would optimize production. These forests contained only species prized for their construction-worthy wood, like the Norway spruce. They didn’t realize that the strength of a forest comes from the diversity of life it contains. Decomposing leaves and a range of plant life contribute to the health of the soil; without these, the scientific forests quickly failed.

(Pushing Scott’s metaphor a bit further than he does: if the vitality and strength of the forest lies in its diversity, the same could be said of society. Emile Durkheim argued as much by showing how increasing interdependence through specialization creates more tightly-woven communities. In contrast, exclusionary nationalism easily twins with statecraft, because both seek to homogenize an impossibly complicated social field. In the end, though, this homogenizing, purifying impulse weakens the society.)

Turning from the metaphor to the practical lenses the state develops in order to “see” its population and territory, Scott delineates a range of processes. The imposition of a state language, the imposition of surnames, the creation of standardized land tenure systems, the regulation of traffic, and city planning all serve to organize people and space in ways that will facilitate the needs of the central state (long-distance trade and taxation, for instance) but undermine rich and complicated local systems of organization. People may resist and subvert the state's imperatives, and illegibility (living in a neighborhood navigable only by a local, for instance), allows for a degree of political autonomy. But by and large the state's project of legibility proves hegemonic, in Scott's view, because the centralized state's quest to dominate by accounting for all aspects of its citizens' lives grows ever more detailed.

What, then, is going on in CAR? A friend who works at a health clinic here (and who lives closer to the population than any other ex-pat – in Bangui she has taken in 30 street children) recently told some stories. Many people come in and don't know their children's names. A person might barely know her own – particularly the last name. Age? “Well, he stretches one arm over his head to touch the ear on the opposite side, so that means he's about 4.”

Or take the example of hunting: it's forbidden in this area, because all the land has been consecrated to national parks. But bush meat is available in all the markets, and most people (even people charged with enforcement) explain that the total interdiction is too harsh – people need to eat, and they like to eat wild animals.

As I tried to follow the different ways the name “Atim” was spelled (Atim, Time) I found myself wondering if the Central African state engages in any projects of legibility at all. In terms of the population, the state here doesn't do much. The NGOs are much more effective at gathering and standardizing statistics about the people they serve, even though they miss a lot of salient information that might help them understand how and why things are the way they are.

In terms of other state imperatives that Scott outlines, the CAR state appears absent, too. It does nothing for long-distance trade and travel besides impose roadblocks and fees (arguably impeding these processes more than anything else). It has an impressive capacity to demand rents, but it does not collect taxes in any kind of standardized or all-encompassing way. (There is a tax code, and the tax collector here does seem to follow it to the extent he can. But that covers only the more-formalized sector of the economy.)

Still, describing the state here as weak, or describing it in terms of the things it does not do, is not very useful. For despite its apparent “lacks” the state here is pretty powerful. But its power lies less in the rational-bureaucratic mode of operating that Weber believed the state to incarnate, but rather leans more heavily on a “magical” mode of operating. (And this brings me back, yet again, to Veena Das.) For instance, when I asked why witches sentenced to prison time don't just use their powers to escape, the court official told me that they don't because they understand that if they try to escape they will fall ill and die.

I'm not satisfied with this word “magical,” but I'm having trouble replacing it. I would like to somehow encompass how the state here can be both the source of so many problems and yet simultaneously held out as the great hope and problem-solver by many people. People's orientation to the state has more of what a secular Western observer such as myself would label a religious character than anything else.

Before I left, one of my dissertation committee members encouraged me to ask the question “What is the state in...?” filling in with different countries. What is the state in Norway? What is the state in CAR? Not sure yet, but I'm glad he suggested this line of thought because it's been at the forefront of my mind here.

Post-Halloween edition: Witches and sorcerers

2009-11-02T09:17:00.000-08:00

When I walk from my room to the main mission building, I often pass one or two elderly women sitting on the ground, legs outstretched, a tired and droopy expression on their faces. This frustrates the Sister to no end. The women's children drop them here and then depart, explaining that they are witches and so the Church should take care of them. The Sister knows these families, though, and complains that many of the kids are themselves drunkards and ne'er-do-wells who simply want to be quit the burden of parents who can no longer work to feed themselves.

As my friends know, I find witchcraft fascinating. I count E.E. Evans-Pritchard's seminal study Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (1937) – many of whom live in southeastern CAR – among my favorite books. Evans-Pritchard wrote that for the Azande witchcraft is primarily a philosophy, a way of understanding causality that also defines the contours of social values: “the notion of witchcraft explains unfortunate events.” For instance, in warm weather Azande often sit beneath the open-walled roof of their homestead’s granary. Termites sometimes eat through the supports, and the building collapses. In the event that people have seated themselves underneath the granary, and the granary collapses on top of them, Western reasoning would state that it collapsed because termites ate through the supports. The fact that the collapsed roof injured people would be explained as coincidental, if unfortunate. In contrast,

"The Zande knows that the supports were undermined by termites and that people were sitting beneath the granary in order to escape the heat and glare of the sun. But he knows besides why these two events occurred at a precisely similar moment in time and space. It was due to the action of witchcraft. If there had been no witchcraft people would not have been sheltering under it at the time. Witchcraft explains the coincidence of these two happenings."

Evans-Pritchard writes that witchcraft co-exists with empirical knowledge of cause and effect, but it adds blame where a rational explanation would insist on coincidence. For Evans-Pritchard, witchcraft was a coherent system of philosophy, but one that the Azande would come to realize was incorrect.

Yet, all the modernizers' expectations to the contrary, witchcraft has not gone away. Instead, it has surged alongside the surge in economic and social instability that much of the African continent has experienced in recent decades. Contemporary anthropological accounts of sorcery and witchcraft have tried to dig deeper, then, and understand witchcraft not simply as a belief (because when we label something a belief, we tend to imply that on some level it is false, or that people could/should come to realize the error of their thought) but as a taken-for-granted fact of life and a tangible actor in the world.

I find some a lot of this work fascinating, because it stretches the limits of my whole way of making sense of the world: what would it be like to see witches all around me, to understand actions and problems in this way? This, to me, is what is exciting about anthropology.

But seriously, the women at the mission are not witches. They are destitute, desperate old women who have been abandoned as dead weight by their families. Today, my own mother's birthday, I have even less patience for scapegoating like this.

Nevertheless, witchcraft came to dominate my discussion this morning. I stopped by the tribunal to speak with the only official currently there (the president and the prosecutor are both in Bangui pending decisions on various disciplinary matters allegedly to do with their involvement in the illegal bush meat trade), the greffier en chef. He's a personable guy who was eager to discuss the vagaries of Central African law with me. (I'm afraid my blog posts have taken a slightly negative tone, and I feel the need to acknowledge here how generous people have been in talking with me, for which I am very grateful.) He showed me his reports and explained that the most common crime they see is “PCS” - Pratique de Charlatanisme ou Sorcellerie. (Ah, the francophone love of acronyms!)

I went through two PCS dossiers in detail to get a sense of how these cases play out. In one, the accused was deemed guilty, in the other, innocent. I'll start with the latter:

A child with no penis (he has had several operations to put him in order, but the doctor said that he should be treated with gentleness) was at the quartier's bathing area to wash. A slightly older neighbor boy came and shoved him out of the way so as to claim the space for his own. When the penis-less boy's father found out, he beat the pushing-boy harshly. The family of the beaten boy objected. Some days pass. One night, the father of the penis-less boy is bitten by a snake. He notices that the beaten-boy's father is outside, coming toward him. The beaten-boy's father is drunk, barefoot, and going to the edge of his compound (the edge abutting that of the snakebitten man) to piss. They exchange harsh words. Later, the snakebitten man notices that a snake is sitting in his usual chair. With neighbors' help, he manages to get the snake out. At this point, he accuses his neighbor of witchcraft: he transformed himself into the snakes, or sent the snakes. However, upon hearing a succession of witnesses, it was determined that the accused had no reputation for being a witch; no oracular proceeding had determined that he was a witch; and there was insufficient witness testimony to condemn him. He was set free.

The other case involved two women. They were at their quartier's water pump, jostling and arguing about who should be able to pump first. The accused screamed at the victim: “You're going to leave this water pump, and you're going to give birth through your mouth!” The target of her acrimony was in fact six months pregnant and had a miscarriage several days later. Following complications, she died. It was at this point that “En tant que africains mon mari et moi [parents of the deceased] avions décidé de proceder à des recherches traditionnelles pour déterminer les causes de la mort de ma fille” (Being Africans, my husband and I decided to use traditional means of research to determine the cause of my daughter's death.) The traditional healer they found did the egg test 8 times (not quite sure what this consists of) and each time the egg broke when they said the name of the woman they later accused. Furthermore, everyone in the neighborhood knew that she was a witch. (Being a witch is not illegal; only committing public offense through witchcraft is punishable.) And, when first accused, she didn't so much as open her mouth to deny the charges. Verdict: guilty of PCS in the case of the dead pregnant woman.

The lesson in all this: don't get into fights at water sources.

Arrival in Ndele

2009-10-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

I arrived here in Ndele on Tuesday, but I've been slow in writing about it – I'm not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I plan to spend a substantial amount of time here, and so I'm more hesitant to make any snap judgments. Or perhaps it's because I haven't yet found the exciting information and stories that I hope to find. I'm still largely operating on the surface level. Whatever the case, it's time for a quick update at least.

My first few days here I've spent much of my time making the rounds to various offices and officials, both to interview them and also just to introduce myself and extend my courtesies. Unlike in Tiringoulou, where the state representatives can be counted on less than one hand, here in Ndele state offices abound. By one count, there are 21 state agencies present in Ndele, from the ministry of water and forests to the weather service. Conversations with the “inspectors” or “regional directors” who man (I have yet to meet a woman in an official position) these offices play out along a familiar pattern. The official will explain his office's role and responsibilities (generally a question of various taxes to be collected, or permits to issue). The sous-prefet, for instance, has an impressive lazy Susan-type contraption that houses all his various official stamps. Bit by bit, it will become clear that the official in fact carries out none of the functions that he theoretically should: “Le probleme de moyens” extends to the tax collector, who has nowhere to put the money he collects (except his pocket), because the former treasurer died without telling anyone where he put the key to the safe. As these officials to a man plea for a vehicle so they can cover their terrain, I flash back to some of the documents I found in the colonial archives. A series in which the French resident in Ndele wrote letter after begging letter, asking for a typewriter, comes particularly to mind. Note to the government in Bangui: there's still a lack of typewriters here.

And despite the various offices scattered around town, there's also actually a dearth of state employees. The addendum “...but he is in Bangui” finishes many a sentence here. Appointed officials stay in the capital in hopes of better access to their salaries, or because they don't like the privations of life in “the bush,” or because they went on vacation and just haven't gotten around to coming back, or because they're ill.

(I think the explanation that a person is in Bangui for treatment is a general purpose one that may or may not be true, similarly to how in Tiringoulou the explanation “he's in his fields” is a general purpose way of saying, “he's not here,” and did not necessarily mean that the person in question was in fact farming. I wonder if this is because both explanations are ones that foreigners such as myself tend to accept without further probing or tut-tutting, as might happen if someone responded “he's been drinking since 9am,” which is another possibility.)

These conversations, with the exception of one thoroughly jolly tax collector, were a bit frustrating. What, really, am I trying to find here? What I see so far is a skeletal state that exists of little besides opportunities for fee- or salary- collection. But of course, there's a lot more going on here, at once more disheartening and, admittedly, intriguing.

Shall I stop there and leave this post a reasonable length?

I'll say only that a conversation yesterday with someone running a program here proved fruitful, and I look forward to discussing more with him when he returns from a trip to the capital. It turns out that though the state and rebel groups would like people to believe that their main problem is their lack of means, or their lack of force in the face of better-armed northern invaders, in fact they create a substantial portion of the treats they currently face themselves. The rents they collect from the armed actors that use the space (for instance, by leasing national parks to migrant herders) overlap, causing violence to break out. In CAR, having your cake and eating it too means welcoming internationally-funded anti-poaching militias at the same time as you charge (armed) herders to use the national parks as grazing lands.

But now I really will stop, because I do not yet fully understand these dynamics and need to find out more before pontificating.

Goya's forgotten Central African series:

2009-10-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

(Smoking, roasting monkey.)

Waiting for the state

2009-10-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I wrote about my surprise at how often people here – whether locals or expats – see the state as the solution to the problems the country faces. If only the state would do its job, all would be well. Some tens of interviews later, my initial surprise has given way to state fatigue. How many times have I heard people here – especially young men – express their frustration that their “prise en charge” by the state has not yet taken place? If I were to write my dissertation today, it might be titled, “Waiting for the State.” It would be a sadder version of James Ferguson's Expectations of Modernity, because whereas the Zambian copper miners Ferguson studied at least had an upswing before the calamitous economic decline they endured as a result of structural adjustment and other macroeconomic disasters, here in CAR the dreams of modernity have never even been close enough to really visualize, let alone expect.

The other day I sat with a group of “rebels” who await disarmament and reintegration. I justify the quotes around the term because of the twenty or so people assembled around me, only some handful actually had any part in their group's attacks back in 2006-7. The rest joined later, whether to benefit from DDR or for other reasons. One by one, they stated that they had joined the group because the presidential guard (the military strike force) had come and attacked their families and burned their houses; one by one, they vented their frustration that their “prise en charge” by the state has not yet been effected.

The attitude that the state should take care of people by providing salaries to its citizens is widespread here. There are almost no private companies, so the only way one can get a salary is through a state post. (As I've described before, a state job does not necessarily carry with it the service ethic that one might hope would accompany it.) The mayor's son, for instance, has finished school and submitted his dossier to a ministry where his father has an acquaintance. “Maintenant il attend sa prise en charge.” By god, it's enough to make a libertarian of me, all this whining and waiting!

During my meeting with the ex-combatants, the subject turned next to the oil that allegedly bubbles somewhere far below ground here in Vakaga prefecture. A presidential party official had flown in the day before for an early campaign visit (a visit composed of little but cash and promises, as the cliché about African elections would suggest), and he averred that the oil would be exploited before his party left office. This drew massive cheers. One of the most vocal of the ex-combatants, a man named Col. Tarzan (a nickname given by some Russian ex-Foreign Legion guys who used to prowl the area with an anti-poaching militia), piped up that oil had made Sudan and Chad powerful and rich. At this point, I couldn't take listening to what sounded to me like false hope in miraculous state benevolence anymore. The Chadian people, the Sudanese people – they haven't seen one penny of that oil revenue, I retorted. Chad's president Deby just uses it to buy more weapons and fight off the rebel groups that challenge his authoritarian rule. Tarzan shook his head exasperatedly. But if the state exploits the oil, they will have to build a road, he retorted.

I shut up then. It's true – even a road would be a big thing for people here, who live on an island for the rainy half of the year, when then dirt tracks leading here turn into lakes and rivers. My flood of libertarian fervor receded.

I found myself thinking of the philosopher GA Cohen, who passed away just two months ago, and who contributed to the debates about optimal levels of redistribution/state interventionism led by interlocutors like John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Cohen argued that because there is nothing natural about the way that private property is distributed, any distribution of property requires a set of trade-offs that in fact might restrict liberty, rather than enhance it. Therefore some form of redistribution might enable greater liberty and greater equality. Later in his life, Cohen argued less for state intervention, such as through socialism, and more for individual moral engagement as a way of bringing about a more just world. My observations here in CAR have led me to agree that waiting on the state to act for the benefit of its inhabitants is probably not the best way forward. But it also seems unlikely that individual moral engagement is going to get the people of Tiringoulou their road. Faced with such conundrums, hoping for something miraculous doesn't seem so unreasonable.

Quote of the day

2009-10-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

“Des fois je me demande pourquoi on m'a mis au monde ici. La Centrafrique c'est quand meme un pays bizarre.”

(Sometimes I wonder why I was born here. Central African Republic is a pretty bizarre country.)

Signs of the financial crisis

2009-10-17T11:11:00.000-07:00

Last week the president celebrated his birthday. As his motorcade rolled down Bangui's main drag, he tossed 500 CFA (about $1.25) notes out the window to passerby. People grabbed at them, but also shrugged – he used to throw out 10,000 CFA notes. Call it a sign of the financial crisis.

I heard this story from an NGO employee, who was appalled at this manifestation of local politics. That same week, another employee of his NGO flew into Tiringoulou, unloaded three tons of food, and promptly departed, without so much as helping to distribute in an equitable way. (Their departure was slightly delayed due to the fact that the plane got stuck in the mud at the edge of the runway – one of the most exciting things that has happened around here in ages.)

Parallels, anyone?

The magical, problem-solving state

2009-10-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

Time and again during my time here in CAR, I've been struck by how people look to "the state" (or, in the realist-inflected terminology of one diplomat, "le pouvoir") to solve all problems, especially the problem of conflict. I find it odd because the state here has done absolutely nothing to earn that kind of credit.

I'm in Tiringoulou, a village in northeastern CAR, a place with very nearly no state presence. The town boasts a mayor, but otherwise has only a few rebel-group gendarmes and a community- and NGO-run school and health post. And yet, when the question of the building conflict between the Gula, Tiringoulou's major ethnic group, and their neighbors the Kara comes up, the solution proposed is that the state should step in - whether the Sudanese one or the Central African one - and hold a formal peace process. Only, a meeting of kota azo (big men) requires financial means. And of course, people here have pretty much none of those. (The situation is such that I think even the Muslim at dinner had some warthog, which is unclean, like pork.)

Following the fall-out from the killing of Tiringoulou's sheikh (whose house I'm now staying in) in 2002, the Central African and Sudanese governments did meet and worked out a formal peace agreement. Sudan was supposed to build a school here, which I see no sign of. And apparently the peace didn't take, because the tensions have re-emerged in, if anything, stronger form.

I'm not sure where these thoughts will go, but I find it interesting that in the place in the world with arguably the least state presence (the army shows up occasionally and attacks, but that's about it), the state is nevertheless imagined as some kind of almost magically-powerful entity. Veena Das makes this point in her book Life and Words - the state, far from being simply a totalitarian political-theological relic, can be magical and surprising in the ways that it appears in people's lives, because the people comprising its bureaucracy have power, but not omniscience, and often don't fully understand the gray areas that surround the laws they are implementing. But Das' research is on India, where the extent of the bureaucracy is legendary. The situation here is the opposite.

This is also, incidentally, the place in the world with the least light pollution, according to National Geographic. I sat tonight and alternately slapped at the swarms of mosquitoes and admired the Milky Way, until the hum of the generator replaced that village idyll with the imperative of getting together all my notes during the day's two-hour power allotment.

Sunday in Bangui

2009-10-11T05:39:00.000-07:00

I had heard that a walking group met on Sundays at a restaurant near where I'm staying, so early this morning I headed out to find them. I arrived a few minutes too late and set off in the direction onlookers said they'd gone. No trace of them, but I did bump into Gilles, a logging company employee, and his trainer Manuela, the head of the Central African track and field association. After chatting a bit they invited me to join them for their ascent of Mt. Bangui (OK, it's really just a hill).

The hill is the site of one of Bangui's major landmarks, a large, illuminated sign that tries to be reminiscent of the Hollywood one. Only, lately I guess some bulbs have gone out, because at night all you see is "BANG". (If the city slogan, too, were illuminated, the sign would read "BANG la coquette".)

Photos available here.

Sango lessons

2009-10-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

Sentences in Sango tend to be pretty long, because it consists of a relatively few words that are then strung together to make a new word. The words, too, are often an amalgamation of shorter words. Some of my favorites:

lakui: la (sun) + kui (dead) = evening

bekombite: beko (anagram of "kobe," food) + mbi (I) + te (eat) = noon

I've learned several ways of saying "It's hot," but the one I learned today is by far my favorite:

La asu mingi: literally, the sun is sucking a lot.

Privatization of the state

2009-10-09T03:47:00.000-07:00

Alex de Waal has just finished up his five-part critical review of Jean-Francois Bayart's The State in Africa. (For those without the time or inclination to read the full five-part series, I'll serve up the punchline here: despite critiquing the lines of analysis Bayart does and does not pursue, de Waal concludes by giving the book the highest praise an academic work can hope for – that it's “useful.”) Part Two looks at the idea of extraversion, which I discussed in a previous post. De Waal uses the Sudan/Chad/CAR context to illustrate his critique of extraversion, and in so doing he lays out the broader context of the raiding dynamics I'm studying ethnographically in CAR.

In another of Bayart's books, The Criminalization of the State in Africa, the author argues that the state in Africa has become privatized. The public/private distinctions associated with the Habermasian democratic ideal are inoperative and political institutions represent means of private enrichment. The political position is coterminous with its holder, rather than existing as a set of theoretical ideals of service apart from the “kota zo” (big person) inhabiting it.

I have mentioned in earlier posts how the French leased pretty much the entirety of CAR's territory to concessionary companies. Any administration was a by-product of the quest for private profit. That kind of privatized state is pretty straightforward to imagine. It is similar to contemporary enclaves like mining operations. But what does it really mean to talk of the privatization of the whole state today? I heard a story yesterday that provides an excellent illustration, if also a tragic one.

Armed men, believed to be members of the Lord's Resistance Army, attacked a truck carrying humanitarian and development supplies for an NGO working in the southeastern part of the country. Two of the people in the truck were killed, and one was gravely injured. The injured man suffered a bullet in his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, and he was airlifted to the hospital in Bangui. There, his condition worsened and his body wasted as the doctors waited, apparently unsure whether they had the expertise to treat him. Finally, two weeks after his arrival in the capital, the doctors issued their verdict: he should been flown to Cameroon and operated upon immediately.

The NGO employees launched into making this happen. Foreigners here generally have health insurance and so can be evacuated with relatively little red tape, but CAR nationals do not, and airlifting them requires a signature from the minister of health. Following many frantic phone calls and intervention by the UN humanitarian chief and various other high-placed people, the minister of health signed the paperwork at 11am on Tuesday. The once-weekly plane would depart just three hours later. One of the NGO employees called the doctor needed to accompany the injured man. For various reasons, only this one doctor could accompany the patient – it is a state hospital, and the patient was his responsibility.

The doctor was at home when he received the call. Perhaps he expected that it would take longer to obtain the minister's signature than it did. But he flat-out refused to get on the plane. He said he didn't want to. It didn't suit his schedule. He didn't elaborate and didn't seem at all ashamed that he was so flagrantly neglecting the responsibilities of his post. Obstinate, the doctor continued stalling. Soon the plane would depart, and he wouldn't have to leave for another week, if at all.

In the end, the NGO employees prevailed, and the wounded, quite possibly dying man made it on the plane to Cameroon at the last possible minute.

In this situation, the doctor's position in the civil service position represented little more than a bundle of his individual interests. It could almost seem like to the doctor, the patient was somehow less than human – otherwise, how to explain the lack of empathy for the dying man under his care?

This question reminds me of Peter Singer's recent book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End Poverty. In it, Singer argues against valuing the lives of those proximate to us over the lives of those far away. Thousands of people die of water-borne illness and worms and other scourges, and all of these would be easily treatable if only the world's wealthy people would open their pocketbooks. Moreover, our dollars go further in poor countries than they do in rich ones. Singer asks readers to picture a starving person, or a worm-ridden person, standing in front of them: shouldn't you give a few bucks to save that person's life? It shouldn't matter that in reality the person lives thousands of miles away. Singer, in other words, argues that we all face the doctor's choice on a daily basis, and most of us respond as the doctor did.

I don't think the situations are as analogous as I imagine Singer might, but they do raise the issue of the relationship between responsibility and proximity when it comes to helping those in need. Still, I find the privatization of the state especially troubling because it means that the structures intended to ensure some kind of generalized responsibility for fellow humans are just a front for personally-determined interests. It is such an insidious problem it's difficult to know how it will ever change.

But then, perhaps from the perspective of people like the doctor, there isn't really a problem. Perhaps from his perspective, responsibility does not lie with him, but rather with the NGOs that have stepped in to fill the need created in the wake of the neglect of people like him and the officials who preceded him. If so, the doctor and Singer would be making strangely similar arguments, both placing private charity above public responsibility.

Either that or private charity has become the new public responsibility. But in that case what's the value of the vestigial state structures?

The real usefulness of private security

2009-10-02T14:30:00.000-07:00

E.E. Evans-Pritchard, of The Nuer and Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande fame, averred that the best way to learn a language is to immerse oneself in the world of children. They speak simply and have no compunction about pointing out one's mistakes. I don't doubt the effectiveness of Evans-Pritchard's method, but nowadays I have another group of teachers to add to it: security guards. Every ex-pat or otherwise wealthy house or business has at least one, but more often two, security guards, and they while away their days with nothing to do amid the alternating squawks of their walkie-talkies and the birds. Thus every time I leave the house and enter an office, I have the chance to exchange pleasantries with four eager conversants.

This morning, for instance, I learned “Mo lango nzoni?" (Have you slept well?), a common morning query, to accompany my comments about the weather (pouring rain). The word for rain in Sango, incidentally, is either poetic or yet another manifestation of African religiosity, or both, depending on your point of view: ngu ti nzapa (god's water).

From the Small World Department

2009-10-02T14:27:00.000-07:00

The other day I had lunch with some friends in the export business. I slurped my dessert so I could rush off to meet a prospective Sango teacher. The teacher, it turned out, himself had to rush out to meet his next student, who is studying French to facilitate business transactions in the provinces. The student? One of the people with whom I'd lunched. Later, at dinner, I mentioned to my companions that I'd found a room to rent while here in Bangui. They asked where it was, and it became apparent that one of the people at the table, a government minister, is my new landlord.

Ah, Bangui.

Alex de Waal on Jean-Francois Bayart

2009-09-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

I recently posted a few thoughts about Jean-Francois Bayart's idea of extraversion. Now, on the occasion of the republication of Bayart's opus _The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly_, Alex de Waal has started a five-part series on his blog reflecting on the book and its resonances with the Sudanese situation. Part one is available here.

At TIP

2009-09-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

Today I took my first step on Libyan soil. Well, concrete. With the airport here in Tripoli surrounded by construction, my plane from Paris parked far from the terminal, and we passengers had to troop across the tarmac in the late afternoon sun. Tripoli airport is an odd holding pen. The faded glamor of a long ago-modern motel meets third-world dim lighting and endless checkpoints of civil servants. Today a swarm of men in white jackets and face masks met the plane. They handed us forms to fill out about disease and contact information and then bustled off to puzzle over the results. In the duty free shop, one can purchase cans of salted nuts from Sweden, little rhinestone-studded ceramic boxes in the shape of dachshunds, and shelf after shelf of cigarettes. The gift shop is never open, and the restaurant serves little besides dates and cookies. Every time I'm here, at least one airport official will crow over my name and let it roll off his tongue. I know how to respond: “Hua ism arabiy” (it's an Arabic name). Not really, but close enough, especially if it makes their day of tedious work pass a little more quickly.

All that being said, I've not a single complaint about the journey so far. The plane here was nearly empty and I could stretch out across a row of seats freshly upholstered in Libya's signature new-grass green. I had my pick of six films and went with “Tropic Thunder,” none the less enjoyable for the bleeped expletives and fuzzed cleavage, bare legs, and gore.

As I write this I sit in the dusky final holding area before boarding. Here, finally, no one will express shock upon learning our little-known destination (“You're going where?”) I can't help but look around and wonder about what brings this collection of people to a plane bound for Bangui la Coquette. Some are from there, of course, and there are people whose appearance gives them away, like the two nuns sitting across from me. But many betray little beyond a drifting gaze: an eager and canny businessman, perhaps, next to a grizzled aid worker.

And then there's me. Not quite sure where I fit into all this. Anthropologists used to consider fieldwork a rite of passage. This idea has come under extensive critique in recent years, but I have to say it still feels true to me as I set off on this minor adventure. Will people talk to me, and keep talking so that I can sift layers of information? Will I finally learn enough Sango to understand the teasing and arguing that goes on all around me? Despite these doubts, thinking of the experience as a kind of rite of passage helps me face the prospect of all these months on my own, because it's something I know I must do, and, dare I even think it, I get excited at the prospect that it might even go well and I might actually find out something interesting (at least in hindsight – these things can be hard to judge underway). I wouldn't want to fall back a year – to when I was in the throes of grant-writing, with exams on the horizon – nor, obviously, do I feel ready to start next year's task: writing up. I do, however, already look forward to being close again to family and friends, and I've barely even left.

The old problem of pirates

2009-08-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

I've had several conversations in recent weeks during which my interlocutors, including one of my professors here in Osnabrück, have expounded on piracy and non-state combatants by proclaiming the newness of these threats. This is a new problem, the likes of which we've never seen before, they said.

How such commentators would do well to turn to history!

The pirate and the non-state combatant have served as the foils against whom the nation-state system has defined itself and its laws of war since the 1600s, or earlier if you count Cicero's Philippics, which so inspired the 17th century theorists. (In making this observation, I'm drawing on what I read and learned in a mind-blowing course I took my first year at Duke taught by Ian Baucom, as well as some of his writings.) Opinions may differ about the extent to which these characters have become a more numerous and pressing threat in the contemporary period than they were before (my friend Jatin Dua who studies piracy has pointed out the immense challenges piracy posed to New York City in its early years), but I would hesitate before describing them as tearing apart the state-based mode of political organization when they are precisely the figures that the state has long used to justify self-preservation using whatever means necessary.

The pirate, the brigand, or other non-state combatant has appeared in many guises. To Cicero, he is the man without a state; to Hobbes, he is homo homini lupus (man who is wolf to man, i.e., someone living in the state of nature); to Zouche (a humanist international law scholar), he is inimicus (inimical to our way of life); to Kant, he is the unjust enemy; to Bush, the unlawful combatant. All distinguish between war with an enemy (another state), against whom laws of war apply, and war with this stateless other. The stateless other has violated Hobbes' first law of nature, namely that one exit the state of nature (that horrible space of war of all against all, where life is "nasty, brutish, and short") by joining into a system of covenants. Anything is permitted against someone who has committed this cardinal sin, whether the transgressor be a pirate or an apparent savage like the "Hottentots" of southern Africa, or the natives of the Americas (both of these latter groups figured prominently in the 17th century theorists' writings). In all cases, it is the form of social organization these "unjust enemies" represent that justifies harsh corrective action.

In this vein, one could see the period of European-led slavery and colonialism as a variant of this continual project of ridding the world of its "stateless" menaces. Existential fears like these do not emerge in a vacuum, but rather, as Saskia Sassen might put it, reflect the accrual and interplay of capabilities, organizing logics, and tipping points -- in a word, history.

Or maybe I've just been spending too much time in archives lately.

The "Uighur question" gets an answer in Africa

2009-08-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking about a recent post on Chad blog, the project of a journalist named Celeste Hicks. The article present the statement of Mohammed El-Gharani, the youngest Guantanamo detainee, who was recently released in N'djamena. The story seemed so bizarre I wasn't sure whether to believe it, but a quick internet search provided a range of articles to confirm the skeleton of his story, which apparently first appeared on BBC. What would it be like to be held uncharged for seven years only to be plunked down in the Chadian capital and forgotten, passportless and confused?

His testimony, also available here:

I was so scared in Guantanamo. Sometimes I thought they would kill me or throw me into the ocean. I was there from 14 to 21 years of age, but sometimes I feel like I’m 40, because I’ve been through so much.

When I was in prison I called Al-Jazeera to tell them what was happening. Lots of people thought that when Obama came in things would change but it wasn’t true. In January I won my case because the judge said there wasn’t enough evidence against me. But even then I was still getting people pushing me around and not treating me well.

I don’t know why they sent me to Chad, I thought they would send me to Saudi because I was born there and my parents are still there. I’d never even be to Chad before. But when they asked me if I wanted to go to Chad I said of course I do! I could get to see my family and my country. There was no choice.

They gave me no help for the future. The day I arrived, the Americans brought me to the airport and handed me over to the Chadian authorities who welcomed me, and that was it. No more contact with them. The Chadians kept me at the police station for eight days. I don’t know why. They had to buy me a mosquito net and a mattress. I kept asking them every day why I was being kept there, they said don’t worry we’ll give you your papers you’ll get to see your family.

Finally they let me go, but I still don’t have a passport which means I can’t go to visit my parents. I don’t understand what’s going on. I’ve asked every day. Sometimes they say they don’t know if I’m really Chadian. I say if I’m not Chadian then how on earth did you guys take me from the Americans? They have no answer. I always say if I’m not Chadian, then just tell me, and if I am just give me my passport and let me live like everyone else.

Guantanamo is like a dream to me. I’m still living it, even now I’m free. Sometimes I wake up on a morning and I think I’m still there! I feel like there are guards around me, but after maybe half an hour I finally realise that I’m free. I never believed I would be there for so long, I never even believed I would go to jail. But I always knew I would get out. I read the Koran every day and I never gave up.

So I’m here in Chad now with no papers and no money, and my family are having to support me. I don’t speak Chadian Arabic and I’m still trying to learn my way around the city. But I’m free. Chad is really hot and not very developed, but I would rather spend the rest of my life here than another hour in Guantanamo.
I’m not angry with the Americans. I just want to get on with my life. I want to study, I want to work. I think I’ll try to go to school and find a job. I hope I can get back to Saudi Arabia to see my parents as soon as I can. I’m so close to them but I can’t get there. I call them every day. I tell them not to worry because I’m free now. Seven years away for no reason is inhuman.

How jealous he must be of the Uighurs, who, after a long period of uncertainty as they awaited hosts, now lounge on Bermudan beaches! (OK, that's an exaggeration, but four did end up there. Seventeen more are on their way to Palau.)

The dilemma posed by people like Mohammed El-Gharani has become known as the "Uighur question," and it's one of the biggest challenges slowing the closing of Guantanamo. What to do with people who can't return to their home countries, whether because that country won't take them, or because they risk torture there? According to Jonathan Mahler, there are sixty people at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release but have nowhere to go. Ireland recently announced it will take two. At this rate, these people might languish for months, years.

I haven't found any details about the quid pro quo the US offers to countries that accept ex-Guantanamo prisoners. It probably consists of money, or military aid, or some such tempting perk. With a system like that, it seems likely many detainees will end up in Africa. Perhaps I'll come across one in CAR. Stranger things have happened.

Hague visit

2009-08-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

Photo: Wikimedia

It would be challenging to design a less-peaceful-looking building than the Vredespalais (Peace Palace) in the Hague. Spiky crosses jut out of the severely-angled roof like the barbs on the back of a horse-shoe crab, and a single tower on the left-hand side dominates the rest of the building (the architect had envisioned two towers, but but the project ran out of money, despite Andrew Carnegie's founding gift of what would in today's currency equal 200 million Euros). It was completed in 1913, just in time to stand sentinel beside the carnage of WWI. Tragi-irony.

The Peace Palace was intended as a solution to the problem that loomed large for the first half of the 20th century: wars between nation-states. It was to provide a neutral, posh meeting ground on which world leaders could unite to work out their disagreements civilly. As such, its failures dwarf its successes. But the threat of nation-state war has faded nevertheless.

Today, the Palace's main occupants are the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Most of the cases are secret, but the tour guide gave as an example a recent non-secret hearing between the Khartoum government and the government of South Sudan over a site of potential oil exploration.

Overall, the Peace Palace stands as an aesthetic monument to a bygone, short-lived era of nation-state grandeur and jostling. The tour guide's narrative directed my gaze from the mosaic floor (a gift constructed with the labor of "15 French girls") to a giant cross-carrying statue of Christ ("It stands only for peace, not religion -- it was a gift from Argentina and Chile commemorating the end of their border dispute") to a set of stained glass windows (thanks, England). Then we arrived at the "Japanese room," which houses silk tapestries made, our tour guide said, by 48,000 artisans (which seems ridiculously high, but they were definitely ornate), as well as a giant kilim from Turkey and Ming dynasty vases, each the size of an obese ten-year-old, from China. This chamber provided the tour's most intriguing mystery: each chair was donated by a particular country and bore an embroidered back with a flag or a crest, most of them immediately recognizable. But one contained a diamond shape half-filled in turquoise and half in white, with a pole with a red ski cap perched on top bisecting it. Any ideas who this might be? Argentina, perhaps?

On my way from the Peace Palace to Malakkastraat, in search of the home of a long-lost friend, I passed the embassy of Chechnya. From the staid, frozen-in-time pompousness of the Peace Palace, which struck me as an anachronistic artifact in an era marked by non-state enemies and the blurring of public/private distinctions, the Chechens' outpost reminded me of the intensity and ardor behind struggles for statehood, which are ongoing and play out far from the Hague's plush halls.

Dependency, extraversion, and all the rest

2009-08-14T08:14:00.001-07:00

With my seminar on Law, Culture and Language here at the University of Osnabrück winding down, I finally have a moment to turn away from frantically playing catch-up on course topics like cultural rights (still not sure what those are, or why they are rights, a topic to which I will return) and intellectual property and instead return to working through questions nearer to my own project, here on my blog.

Today's topic: extraversion. Such a richly descriptive term, one wishes it were not a neologism, a category that too often consists of jargon created as a way of circumventing accessible, precise description.

I spent a fair amount of time in the archives reading about how the concessionary company officials interacted with African leaders in the areas they sought to exploit. What struck me was the entrepreneurial attitude with which the most powerful African leaders met the European newcomers. For instance, with no roads, few navigable waterways, and far-flung outposts in need of equipment, the sultans of Haut-Mbomou (Bangassou, Rafai, Zemio), saw an opportunity and became "veritable entrepreneurs of transport," in the words of Louis-Bernardin Metefia. In practice, this meant they excelled at (forcibly) conscripting porters. The epic story of the Faidherbe, a tugboat the French sought to transport from the Congo to the Nile, rivals Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo debacle in the South American jungle, and was possible only with the sultans' collaboration. The first concessionaires to arrive in Haut-Mbomou in the 1890s found the sultans had, to varying degrees, adopted European style of dress (Bangassou wore a British general's tunic) and spoke excellent French.

All of this seems a perfect illustration of political scientist Jean-François Bayart's concept of extraversion. Bayart proposes the term extraversion to describe the ways in which Africans have actively participated in the processes that created and maintain the continent's dependent position within the global system. The continent is not marginalized or marginal, he maintains, but in recent years there has been an "aggravation of its dependence." Rather than indulging the "meanderings of dependency theory," however, he argues for the importance of analyzing the dynamics of dependence. Such an approach enables a historical reading of change, participation, and movement. Extraversion, as he terms African participation, consists of six sets of strategies: coercion, trickery, flight, mediation, appropriation, and (its opposite) rejection. Overall, then, these are rent-based modes of action. Bayart maintains that in Africa sovereignty is defined by the ability to manage dependence through rents. On the one hand, Bayart seeks to make sense of Africa's inferior position in the global economy; on the other hand, he wants to take seriously the ways in which Africans have taken external constraints and re-made them into new creations (for instance, through emulation of attractive colonial "life-styles" and religions). But in the end, he is pessimistic, describing strategies of extraversion as "pathetic when not frankly tragic" and ill-suited to solve problems of "accumulation, representation, and legitimacy" that currently plague the continent.

Extraversion is a brilliant theory. It describes some large portion of the processes through which democracy, development and other donor-fed buzzwords become so hijacked. And it describes many of the dynamics of war on the continent. Sometimes, such as when thinking about the ways armed group leaders play with qualifications in order to obtain the recognition of the international system, I wonder what remains for me to find out and describe besides the ways these strategies represent extraversion. Extraversion can seem to encompass everything.

Any totalizing theory makes me inherently suspicious. What might it miss, or distort? For one thing, it ascribes all developments in Africa as in some sense responsive/reactive to stimuli from the exterior. Bayart would take issue with describing an "interior" and "exterior" to Africa, because he sees the continent as constituted by sets of relationships whose parties cannot be isolated for the sake of analysis. Point taken. But extraversion remains a reaction, whether within the continent or beyond.

Extraversion also misses the unpredictable processes of governance and collaboration that one finds on the ground. (Foucault termed systems of governance techniques "governmentality," but in an attempt to minimize jargon on this site, I'll stick to dictionary-available approximations of this term.) Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan provide a telling example in their article "Local Powers and a Distant State in Rural Central African Republic" (1997). They describe the differences between two types of Groupement d'intérêt rural (GIR, rural solidarity groups). In the associations, membership may be required (as is the case for cotton producers). The cotton producers' association is the real village treasury (the village chief gets nothing from the central state), able to raise substantial sums, thanks to inputs from members. Recognizing the importance of these associations to village life, aid donors began creating and subsidizing additional associations with organizing aims such as pig-raising or small business support. The donors bring with them large sums of money and seem to require nothing in return. Except in the case of a pig-raising project that trained a particular set of already resource-strong individuals, the outputs of these projects are next to nil. The few successful projects became sites of development tourism, with officials from Bangui and Washington (including the president of CAR) making visits, which rapidly inspired copy-cats eager to get in on the action, who used the all the trendy buzzwords like "participatory" and "community-based" to woo funds their way. In a word, these copycats are engaging in extraversion, and next to nothing remains in the village to show for it besides the installation and maintenance of a "subsidy-based mentality." The extraversion lens does not make visible the non-aid funded associations, however, which seem to be the real locus of political struggle in the village. They are there not just during the aid donors' pop-in assessment visits but all the rest of the time as well.

A full discussion of the drawbacks of aid is beyond the scope of this post. Because the roles and effects of international agencies are one of my interests, Bayart's theory of extraversion will in all likellihood be an important element of my analysis. But I hope that by drawing attention to the governance effects that accompany strategies of militarized extraversion in particular locales I might also reveal more about the ethics and political structures that organize people's daily lives.