Rebels, Revolutionaries, Rappers

“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.

Bangui on the Potomac

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.

Privatization of the state

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?

Alex de Waal on Jean-Francois Bayart

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.