GFFL

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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".