Two new books embody divergent approaches to understanding the woes that continue to plague Africa. Andrew Rice considers what's missing from the great debate over how to fix the continent.
Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
Paul Collier
Harper
Dh99
The Antelope's Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide
Jean Hatzfeld tr. by Linda Coverdale
Farrar Straus and Giroux
Dh92
When I was a boy, there was a minor character on the children's show Sesame Street named Dr Nobel Price. A Muppet scientist, he was always summoning cameras to his island laboratory to unveil some invention or discovery. In one memorable installment of the recurring sketch, Dr Price announced he had found a new species of animal that he called "The Great Poonga-Poonga" - a furry creature with a "wiggly little nose" and "two little sharp teeth for biting". The joke was that Price's discoveries invariably turned out to be familiar things. When the scientist whisked away a sheet draped over a cage - asking aloud, "Are you ready, mankind?" - the Poonga-Poonga was revealed to be a rabbit.
Reading Paul Collier's War, Guns and Votes, I couldn't help thinking of Dr Price. An eminent Oxford economist, Collier believes he has hit upon a new explanation for the conflicts that plague the developing world. For the first three decades of the post-independence era, Africa was full of flamboyant military dictators, but since the end of the Cold War, elections have spread across the continent. You might think that you recognise the routine of campaigns and sunny slogans, ballot boxes and inked thumbs as democracy. But Collier argues this is, in fact, a new and malignant phenomenon: his book employs exhaustive economic analysis to prove that most poor countries have bad governments, that bad governments conduct unfair elections, that unfair elections make people unhappy and prone to fight, and that civil wars make such countries even poorer. In countries with the most flawed political systems - what Collier, in an italicised flourish, dubs "democrazy" - he calculates that incumbent presidents have an 88 per cent chance of winning reelection. This is, needless to say, not a huge surprise, but there's no shame in explaining the obvious.
For better or worse, Collier is staking out his own position in an academic argument that, against all odds, has recently sparked a publishing boomlet. The topic of the debate is "What's the matter with Africa?" Most of its contestants, like capos in rival crime families, are aligned behind two New York dons: Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, who believes that massive amounts of foreign aid can solve Africa's problems, and William Easterly of NYU, who thinks that such assistance only exacerbates the root problem of political corruption. Collier purports to be taking the middle ground, by acknowledging that rich nations can't morally cut off aid, while recognising that charity will be wasted on countries that can't govern themselves. "Self-deluding thinking has bedeviled issues of development for decades," he writes. "We have to work within the world as it is, rather than the world we would wish."
In Collier's estimation, bad political behaviour is economically disastrous, but good behaviour isn't always rewarded. Expanding on arguments he first brought to a general audience in his 2007 book The Bottom Billion, Collier divides the world into two unequal parts. In many places, he says, democracy makes life better. But in the countries he's concerned about - he cites a list of 68, most of them in Africa - elections tend to promote many counterproductive habits. With tweedy enthusiasm, Collier recounts his expeditions into thick forests of data, which have told him that African elections are characterised by bribery, violence and tribal appeals.
He has, in fact, unearthed some suggestive relationships. A country that has presidential term limits, for instance, is half as likely to experience a coup. An estimated 40 per cent of military spending by poor countries flows from redirected foreign aid, but for nations with a history of conflict, buying guns actually decreases security, raising the statistical probability of reversion to war. Even these relationships, however, may not be what they appear. In a detailed critique of Collier's previous book, William Easterly questioned whether the economist had fallen victim to the common trap of confusing correlation and causation: is it guns that create wars and term limits that prevent coups, or could it be that term limits are a by-product of wise government, while arms buying is just one symptom of instability?
Collier claims throughout Wars, Guns and Votes that he's taken care with his calculations. "I do not like these results," he writes at one point. But sadly, he concludes, the "societies of the bottom billion may simply be lacking the preconditions" for democracy, so it's up to richer countries to assure they have proper governance. Collier recommends that his bottom billion nations submit to universal election conduct standards and "forensic scrutiny" of their budgets, in return for the international community's commitment to provide vastly increased aid and its promise to intervene militarily if a subscribing government is threatened by revolt. He proposes that adherence to his system could be enforced by a threat: if a president doesn't sign up, the international community will welcome a military coup.
"The international community is going to provide a guidance system that transforms the missile of the coup d'etat into a domestic restraint on misgovernance," Collier writes. This idea, he says, is the book's "core proposal", so it's worth scrutinising. How will Western policymakers feel about picking and protecting leaders in restive African nations? They will be convinced, Collier says, once they see the numbers: reducing the risk of a civil war by one percentage point, he writes, results in a long-term cost savings of $200 million. And what about Africans - won't they object? Their leaders, Collier suggests, have not necessarily earned the right to do so: national sovereignty, he declares, "is not to be a virility symbol with which presidents strut on the world stage". Continuing with this line of thinking, he cites analyses that show small countries are less stable than large ones, and therefore recommends that some nations be urged to federate and create a more manageable Africa. And so, a handful of world powers will sweep aside troublesome local rulers, bringing civilisation and prosperity to a dark continent. Have we seen this invention before?
It's clear there are some practical impediments to building the good-governance contraption that Collier envisions. Luckily, there's another way out of the condition of democrazy: poor countries can get richer. Collier sets down a precise dividing line: in countries that have a per capita GDP greater than $2,700, democracy helps matters, while below that level it makes things worse. He is particularly concerned about the effect of elections on the most vulnerable nations, those just emerging from wars. He writes that post-conflict societies that inherit repressive governments are safe compared to those that have some freedom, which have a 70 per cent chance of slipping back into fighting. "This does not, of course, mean that repression is all right," he hastens to add, but it "can be undesirable without making a society more dangerous."
Post-conflict situations, however, defy unifying theories: some countries end up democratic and chaotic, some dictatorial and stable and most somewhere in between. Collier ignores cases that might add nuance to his account, such as Mozambique, which has an estimated per-capita GDP of $500 and a brutal history of civil war, and where the former combatants, transformed into political parties, have since contested three competitive presidential elections. Though Collier repeatedly says he is not in favour of autocracy, his thought process keeps ending up there. Practically the only sitting African leaders for whom he has laudatory words are two military strongmen, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
The latter country, Rwanda, provides an interesting case study. At one point in his book, Collier breaks down the factors associated with civil wars: tiny countries are more dangerous, as are those with disproportionately young populations, religious and ethnic diversity, a profusion of natural resources and mountainous geography favourable to rebellion. Collier calculates that outside of the kind of Great Power security umbrella he envisions, a country with all of his risk factors has a 99 per cent chance of reverting to conflict. Rwanda is not resource-rich, but otherwise it fits the description exactly.
Yet somehow Rwanda has remained at peace since the genocide of 1994, in which an estimated 800,000 people perished. Its economy has improved dramatically, at least by African standards, growing at an average rate of around seven per cent a year. Western tourists have fanned out across the country's proverbial thousand hills. Most remarkable of all, many of the perpetrators of the genocide - thousands of Hutu villagers who picked up machetes on higher orders and hacked apart their Tutsi neighbors - have been allowed to return to their homes after stints in prison or in exile.
Collier doesn't extensively explore Rwanda, attributing its success entirely to Kagame's policies, which he calls "the leading African example of effective state building." The former leader of a Tutsi rebel army, Kagame holds elections, but he makes sure they don't get crazy. Political opposition is often equated with promoting genocide, and internal critics are sometimes jailed on charges of "divisionism". At first glance, this would seem to bolster Collier's view that a strong hand ensures more security. But perhaps there are other explanations.
The French journalist Jean Hatzfeld presents a far more subtle view of the Rwandan recovery in The Antelope's Strategy. Published in France two years ago, but just translated into English, Hatzfeld's account is narrowly focused on the genocide's enduring effects on a single Rwandan community. The book is the third in a series, and Hatzfeld, focusing on a single town called Nyamata, describes the changes on the ground that have come with postwar economic development. It shows up in the appearance of pharmacies, microloan banks and white SUVs, and in the opening of new bars, including one named Gacaca, after the outdoor courts where freed genocidaires recount their crimes in the name of reconciliation.
Hatzfeld's method is oral history, but his Rwandans speak like no interviewees I've ever heard - more like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, or the retainers of Haile Selassie in Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor, a book that appears to be his stylistic model. As in Kapuscinski's work, the reader has to wonder about fact and fiction, and in a late chapter Hatzfeld admits to "directing and editing the giving of evidence" (the italics are his) as a means of "transforming the witnesses into characters". Some readers will feel cheated by the evident use of poetic license, but Hatzfeld argues that his method is "effective for transmitting information from one point to another when the direct path ? is blocked." And indeed, no one can question his commitment to exploring the incomprehensible. Having spent more than a decade in conversation with both survivors and killers, he has compiled an extraordinarily layered description of a post-conflict society, with a nuance that Collier's extensive economic analyses lack.
Nyamata is at peace, Hatzfeld writes, but any visitor who spends time there will "feel a growing uneasiness". Hutus and Tutsis reside next to one another but live separately. They broach the subject of the killings only at the gacaca courts, or in bars when they're drunk. This policy of silence is enforced not so much by the central government, which is a feared but distant force, but rather by something less tangible, a societal consensus that it's time to move on. "Reconciliation would be the sharing of trust," a Tutsi school principal named Innocent Rwililiza tells Hatzfeld. "The politics of reconciliation, that's the equitable division of mistrust."
Rwililiza is one of the book's major figures - and its guiding spirit, I suspect, in more ways than one. In 1994, his wife and young son were butchered inside the Nyamata church, where they'd gone to seek haven. As Hatzfeld's interpreter, Rwililiza has heard many of the killers of his town recount their atrocities, some of them with shame, others with blunt remorselessness. "Talking is a wind that blows neither forgiveness nor forgetting; that - impossible," Rwililiza says. "But the soothing of peace, yes." At this remove, he heartbreakingly explains, he doesn't recall the killing that much. What comes back to him is the memory of his wife, whom he feels guilty for leaving in the church, where he'd thought she'd be safe, while he ran. "The more reconciled one is with oneself," Rwililiza adds, "the more one thinks of reconciling with others."
This is a simple truth, but one that is impossible to enumerate. In focusing solely on cold measures of economics and governance, Collier - like most of the far-off voices in the great African aid debate - misses something fundamental. It's not that the quality of the president or the economy has no relevance: as one of Hatzfeld's witnesses tells him, it's "when a drought settles in, when money goes into hiding, when food becomes scarce" that "all the memories of the genocide come swarming back to plague us". But questions of peace and war, and especially peace after war, appear to be decided by a calculus that is infinitely complex. Reading Hatzfeld's book won't bring you to any definitive conclusions, except one: that a better African future, if it comes, won't be the product of a professor's devising. It will come into being through the unrecorded accumulation of countless human decisions, made freely by Africans on their own.
Andrew Rice is a journalist based in New York. His book about a Ugandan murder trial, The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget, will be published in May.