Those were the days, Burundian peacekeeper edition

Hearing reports about Burundian peacekeepers in Bangui battling anti-Balaka has made me think of a conversation I had with a Burundian military observer in Kaga Bandoro at the end of 2010. In theory, he and his (DR) Congolese associates were to verify ex-combatants for disarmament and oversee their demobilization, but stalling on the part of the DDR Steering Committee meant that they sat idle for months on end.

I met them at their base for sodas and a chat in the wan shade of their paillotte. After a few minutes I looked over and noticed that the Congolese officer had fallen asleep. The Burundian officer glanced at his dozing colleague and reflected, “This isn’t a real war. We [Congolese, Burundians] know real war.” He spoke with the dismissive authoritativeness of the battle-scarred. “This is just a peasant rebellion. They have old-fashioned homemade guns, not armes de guerre. Here, there are some skirmishes, but not a real war.”

He’s long since back in Burundi. But his MISCA compatriots must now acknowledge that CAR, too, is home to a “real war,” and that the peacekeepers are actively a part of it. So much for sleeping on the job.  

Recent Writings +

I have a piece up on African Arguments about why the genocide talk about the CAR is misleading.

...And a Blogging Heads interview with Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch about similar topics.

And, finally, I'll be giving a lecture at the University of Leiden today for anyone who happens to be in the area.

Reflections on Roadblocks

As a supplement to my May 2013 article ("Navigational Tools for Central African Roadblocks") in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, I have a short essay/reflection on my own experiences traversing roadblocks, available on the PoLAR website. The roadblockers who stopped me are no longer operating barriers; the aftermath of Seleka's takeover of power "has left a new landscape of roadblocks. ...The mutual sizing up that occurs on roadblocks, and its uncertain outcomes, yet again require the development of new navigational tools."

My new favorite book

Every now and then someone will ask me for recommendations for books about the Central African Republic. There aren't a whole lot, but there are some good ones, particularly among the historical volumes (Zoctizoum, Cordell, Mollion...). Among the anthropological accounts, look out for Rebecca Hardin's books, which should be published soon.

But this is all just background for the real subject of this post: the book I can't stop talking about, the book that countless friends have had to endure hearing me rhapsodize about lately. It's called Bagara, and it's by Ed van der Elsken. Van der Elsken was a Dutch photographer probably best known for his work on jazz musicians. But he took one trip to Africa, to the colony of Oubangui-Chari in the mid-1950s, and Bagara is the result. The book is divided into two sections. The first covers a journey he took in the area around Bria, as he accompanied the local administrator on a tournée, walking from village to village, participating in funeral ceremonies and the colonial cotton-buying scheme. The second part covers safari hunting trips van der Elsken took together with guides' paying clients, also in the eastern part of the country. As you flip through the pages, you encounter not a single word -- only people in all the fullness of their varied personalities and the situations they find themselves in. Inside the back cover is a small booklet that flips out to reveal van der Elsken's narration of his travels and the stories behind each photograph. In this way, it's possible to sync your reading of the text with the viewing of the photos, without either distracting from the other. This format comes as close to hearing the author tell the stories of these people and animals, as close to being there with him, as is possible with a printed book. I read the book cover to cover the moment I opened it; the whole experience was incredibly powerful. The photos are arresting, of course, but it is also the mixture of self-awareness and naivete with which van der Elsken recounts his adventures that makes the book so compelling. He knows how little he knows. But he also has an openness toward people and experiences that helps him learn quickly.

OK, OK -- I'll stop proselytizing here.

Bagara is not an easy book to find (after borrowing a copy from the library, I bought my own on eBay for about $60), but if you have any interest in the CAR I can't recommend it more highly. Here are a few of my favorite shots:

CAR in the news

I have a piece up on Africa is a Country about some of the misleading ways that CAR has been covered in the media lately.

And if you're interested in hearing more, tune in to PBS Newshour tonight (18:15 EST) -- I'll be giving the 4-minute synopsis of CAR's recent and longer-standing troubles.

The Usefulness of a "Bad Neighborhood"

Central African politicians recognize that one of the best ways to draw attention to their beleaguered home is to play up the “bad neighborhood” they found themselves in, through no fault of their own. In 2010 and 2011 donors and diplomats in Bangui became increasingly frustrated with then-President François Bozizé’s not-quite-overt-but-nevertheless-obvious efforts to stack the National Assembly in his favor so he could change the constitution (which he had himself written!) and stay in power longer than the two-term legal limit. But they felt their hands were tied. Better undemocratic Bozizé than the further encroachment of regional anarchy -- the Lord’s Resistance Army, Baba Laddé’s Peuhl freedom fighter-bandits, and so forth -- this usually unstated reasoning seemed to go.

In the end, Bozizé overplayed his hand. He kept tightening his grip on power without realizing that at some point he would be straining so hard that even just a tickle would cause him to lose everything. The result, as we all know, has been a huge amount of suffering over these past months of violence, mistrust, and uncertainty in the country.

I have had occasion to (re)immerse myself in the classics of CAR history, and I’ve been struck by how longstanding the problem of regional politics determining donor stances toward the country has been. Throughout its history as an independent country, interested outsiders (bi- and multi-lateral diplomats) have allowed concern over conflict and instability in the region more broadly determine their positions on CAR leaders’ maneuverings.

David Dacko, the country’s first president, played this card expertly, as colonial administrator-turned-CAR-historian Pierre Kalck described:

A select constitutional committee met in October 1960 to define the means of choosing the first President. Goumba suggested that a minimum age of forty should be fixed, thereby putting both Dacko and himself out of the running, but the committee could not arrive at a decision. Dacko consequently felt more encouraged to work out his own way of staying in power, knowing he could count on the support of the French circles in Bangui, who were prepared to do all they could to strengthen his authority if it meant avoiding a crisis like that in the Congo. In effect, over the last few months, Dacko had been drawing up a number of measures that were destined to put an end to the democratic regime Boganda [the incarnation of the independence ideals] had cherished so dearly (120-121).  

Dacko went on to place his adversary Abel Goumba under house arrest. Meanwhile, the Assembly debated what was of utmost importance to them: “namely, the sale-price of whisky, champagne, and lemonade, and why the prices were different in the cafés in the town and in the bar attached to the Assembly” (124). Dacko lasted four years in power before being ousted in a coup.

My discipline, anthropology, is far better suited to describing problems than finding solutions to them. As Clifford Geertz, writing in 1966, memorably reflected on the aporia of the research on development challenges facing the “new states”,

one result of very extended, very thorough, periods of careful research is usually a much keener realization that the new states are indeed in something of a fix. The emotion this sort of reward for patient labors produces is rather like that I imagine Charlie Brown to feel when, in one “Peanuts” strip, Lucy says to him: “You know what the trouble with you is Charlie Brown? The trouble with you is you’re you.” After a panel of worless appreciation for the cogency of this observation, Charlie asks: “Well, whatever can I do about that?” and Lucy replies: “I don’t give advice. I just point out the roots of the problem” (142).

That being said, I’ll hazard a suggestion. It would appear to be possible to draw from the unfortunate pattern of CAR politics described above the conclusion that regional stability would ultimately be better served by substantive democracy in CAR, not by the propping-up, however half-hearted or ambivalent, of an antidemocratic president.  

RIP Tjostolv Moland

This morning, the family of Tjostolv Moland, a Norwegian man sentenced to death in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), released a statement in his memory explaining that he died in prison yesterday. Moland’s father’s statement does not give the cause of death, but his castigation of Doctors Without Borders for failing to minister to his deathly-ill son suggests sickness was the cause of his passing. I have enormous sympathy for all who die in Congolese prisons, whether guilty or not. To describe the conditions as abysmal is an understatement. The physical facilities are appalling, of course, but it’s the opacity and lack of accountability of the legal system that I imagine inflict the harshest torture.

Moland’s case contains so many inconsistencies and holes it seems it will never be possible to know the full story. Together with his friend and business partner, Joshua French, he was convicted of spying for the Norwegian government and murdering their driver, Abedi Kasongo, in May 2009. Moland and French received the death penalty, and the military court that convicted them (never mind that military courts are supposed only to try the Congolese security sector) demanded $500 billion in damages from the Norwegian government, a request later reduced but never received. Moland and French had been setting up a private security company in Kampala at the time of their arrest. Their driver was killed near the Ugandan border. Moland and French say the culprits were unidentified armed men, who attacked them on the road. One of the prosecution’s key pieces of evidence, a photo of Moland smiling and washing what is alleged to be their driver’s blood from the interior of their car, seems open to interpretation -- to put it mildly. At the same time, police investigating Moland and French’s lodgings in Kampala found a bunch of weird stuff: ID badges for their security firm, for instance, with pseudonyms beside their photos. And they had some weapons -- a rifle, for instance.

I followed the case only intermittently, and I’ll avoid pronouncing my own judgment. What prompted my post was rather Moland’s father’s biographical reminiscences of his son. He remembers Moland as a young man passionate about hunting and the outdoors who, after serving in a hunting batallion in the Norwegian military, worked at game lodges in South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia, and went on to train game park guards in multiple African countries. It was this last piece of information that piqued my interest. Over the course of my research on violent conservation in the Central African Republic, I have met a number of men with biographies similar to Moland’s. They are complicated individuals (as we all are), many with loving families and gentle ways alongside their more militant practices. But I’ve also frequently noticed a cowboy mentality among these guys, an attitude that the bush of remote African spaces is effective camouflage for all that happens there. Frequently, it is. But not always. And in those cases, the camouflage of the bush itself becomes dangerous, as it actively obscures the omniscient view that court procedures are tasked with putting together -- even if the court officials were running proceedings transparently, which, in this case, they were not.

My sympathy, then, to Tjostolv Moland’s family, and my hope that his example discourages others from taking their rifles to Africa, however idealistic (or not) their reasons for doing so.