Moto lesson

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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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.