Africa Divided
Would readjusting Africa's colonial borders contribute to solving the problems that have beset Africa and the Africans to date?
Today, the AfroDiscourse republishes an old post (originally published on 16th August 2021) by the late Silvano Borruso, a brilliant scholar and beloved friend.
(Reading time: 9 minutes)
I claim no scholarship for writing what comes below. My only sources are direct observation and physical contact with the continent and its people over a period spanning 60 years. I have read few (but relevant) books.
Published in Paris in 1984, L’Afrique, malade du management by Henry Bourgoin, an Ivorian, maintains the thesis that the pre-independence decision to keep the colonial boundaries is at the bottom of most, if not all, of the problems besetting Africa and the Africans today.
Whether done by mistake or deliberately can be debated, but not here. What has happened ever since cannot be denied by anyone who has followed African affairs from close-by, as I have. Let us then tackle some relevant ones.
Unity
The terms tribe/tribalism, nation/nationalism, fatherland, ethnicity, imperialism, apartheid, and such are given conventional meanings, but remain insufficiently analyzed. The result is an intractable confusion of thought marching hand in hand with equally intractable social evils: rampant kleptocracy, political assassination, neo-colonialism, war, ethnic cleansing, plus what can be gleaned from the mainstream media and, increasingly, from the social media since their 2006 advent.
Let us begin with the term nation. It is usually assigned to a territory, on the grounds that it was so decided at the 1960 Lancaster House Conference. A real nation, however, is not the product of geography but of culture. A nation is a people, with its own world-view and traditions, wherever we look. So defined, the nations of Africa are catapulted from the conventionally acknowledged 50 or so to 3000 plus, two orders of magnitude higher. With few exceptions analyzed below, every African country is thus a multi-national state[1].
Three nations: the Sotho, the Swazi and the Tswana of southern Africa escaped being press-ganged into politically joining South Africa. As true nation-states, they have their problems, but live in acceptable peace and prosperity. The name of the move was apartheid, in its original meaning of separate development.
When the S. African government of the time attempted to extend the same policy to other nations, all hell broke loose. Apartheid was suddenly -and surreptitiously- made to mean “racial discrimination”, a linguistic sleight of hand still in force. The rest is history.
One African nation: the Somali, have persistently refused to accept elections, presidential mandates, parliament, “loyal opposition”, separation of powers, and like “democratic” trappings of state, maintaining their economic and political independence in the face of a hostile “international community” presumably meaning the United Nations. They have returned to their preferred system of clans, proclaiming Somaliland and Puntland independent states in the real sense of minding their own business without outside pressure.
The Libya of Gaddafi was also organized into clans, with the Colonel acting as a broker for their interests, without the Westminster model of governance. Libya was by any standard the most prosperous country in Africa - until the “international community” decided to reverse the trend.
Bourgoin has an enlightening, useful excursus into the pre-colonial forms of African governance. He mentions three differing types of monarchy and several of clans Somalia- and Libya-like.
Would this mean that readjusting borders accordingly to nature could contribute to solve the problems that have beset Africa and the Africans to date?
My answer is in the positive, but the task falls to young, politically mature Africans well versed in history and philosophy, and daring enough to think outside the box. Mine is only a suggestion.
Politics
The definition of classical politics as “the art of solving conflict in the interest of the common good” did not form part of the colonial baggage of political ideas thrusted on African education. That baggage contained ideas that long antedated the 1885 Berlin Congress that partitioned Africa. Two of these ideas are worth looking into for a proper understanding of the issue. They are the political party and the Constitution.
The Political Party saw the light in 17th century England for reasons that had nothing to do with “representative democracy” and similar buzzwords. The real reason was that the land grabbers of the previous century saw in it a way of getting the people to pay taxes that they, the grabbers, wanted to be exempt from. In time, the pill was sugared with illusions of power (dubbed “democracy”) and change such as elections, majority rule, separation of powers, etc.
The Constitution was born in 18th century France among les philosophes of the Enlightenment. A major feature of the Enlightenment was, and still is, the refusal to accept the proposition that all authority originates with God. Hence a man-made document, dubbed Constitution, had to be put together as a perennial, if human, source of political power.
My observation is that no African thinks like a philosophe of the Enlightenment, unless he (or increasingly she) has been brainwashed in some western outfit once upon a time known as university. The logical conclusion is that Africa does not need Constitutions, a thesis that finds no debaters but that I think crucial to the question and therefore go on defending.
Economics
The acting of human free will in this field denies economics the status of “science”. Economic analysis unveils two factors of wealth production: work and land, and two of distribution: wages and rent. This observation is not scientific but philosophical, the more so on observing that wealth production is a physical affair, whereas its distribution is a moral one. There is therefore far more than meets the eye in this issue.
The initial task is to define the terms “work” and “wealth”. We can take the first as “any activity that modifies the environment into a more amenable place for the practice of human virtue”, and the second as “services exchanged person-to-person or incorporated into objects now termed “economic goods”.
I have deliberately left money and finance out of the analysis because in Africa we have large scale examples of economies that do without them. Where money and finance intrude in the world of work and land, they risk acting more as a hindrance than as a help.
The large scale African example I refer to is the pastoralist economies of the ASAL, Arid and Semiarid Lands of 100 000s of square kilometres between Kenya, Somalia, Uganda and Sudan. What do we observe there?
We observe how only work and land act as factors of wealth production and distribution. To work means simply to walk after cattle, after pastures and water points. Wealth is cattle itself, nine million heads of which in Kenya alone. Let me remind the reader that the word “pecunious”, i.e. wealthy, derives from pecus, the Latin term for cattle.
Pastoralists do not need money for the simple reason that there is no division of labour: everyone raises cattle, which also acts as a medium of exchange. Complexity increases alongside with the division of labour, to which we now turn.
The basic economic truth is therefore that work, and only work, produces wealth. In a moneyless economy this wealth appears physically as herds of cattle growing to the absorbing capacity of the land on which they roam; beyond that, conflict arises, to be sorted out by bow and arrow, and today increasingly by AK47.[2]
In a multi-faceted economy wealth appears as rent, i.e. the value of land on which people work.[3] The distribution of wealth is no other than the distribution of that rent among social services, wages and infrastructures. The difficulty lies in two things: a) doing so according to the virtue of justice, and b) having to use money, the only means so far devised by human ingenuity for the purpose. This proposition is valid globally, not limited to Africa.
Rent distribution
Ideally, there should exist two algorithms: one crafted by economists, to facilitate the distribution of rent among the aforementioned factors; and another, crafted by governments, to prevent rent from being diverted to parasites intending to enjoy its benefits without having worked for them. Whether this double purpose will ever be achieved only time will tell. Meanwhile, let us focus on procedures.
In order to distribute rent, it is necessary to know its amount. As vested interests are in the way, scholars Fred Harrison (d.2017) and Mason Gaffney (d.2019) did it for the UK[4]. They reckoned that in 2013 it amounted to 493 billion pounds, and remarked that the bulk of it flows into private accounts instead of the Exchequer. It is a covert form of wage robbery, in action since Henry VIII’s plunder of the monasteries in 1536-1541.
Now economics can be re-defined as “the allocation of abundant rent” instead of the present “allocation of scarce resources”. Even in a modestly populated country like Libya rent, albeit helped by some 30% of oil revenues, covered social services, wages and infrastructures. Monetized rent gave Libyans free electricity, education, health, water, agricultural land, subsidized baby care, and family formation. It also financed and built the Great Man-Made River project without borrowing.
Other African countries have proved impervious to Libya’s example. Their revenues come from taxes on labour and from borrowing from banks domestic and foreign, instead of readily available ground rent created by their own work forces.
Money and Finance
It is evident that, to carry out what has been sketched above, the rent has to be monetized, i.e. made to correspond to a monetary sum judged equivalent to the value of the wealth produced by work. The allocation of money is truly one of a scarce resource, but money is not a natural but an artificial resource. Who should allocate it?
In Africa as anywhere else, the issuing of money is a duty of government, corresponding to the right to tax. But perversely this is not what happens. That power has been usurped by finance for centuries, and the perversion was imported into Africa with colonialism. Independence has thus been nominal, for whoever controls money controls politics, regardless of space, time, forms of government and appearances.
The history is too long to be told here. I can only conclude with a prophecy of Lord Acton (1834-1902), who as 1875 Chief Justice of the UK, said:
“The issue that has swept down the centuries, and which will have to be fought sooner or later, is the people versus the banks.”
In Africa, that issue can only be fought by Africans properly instructed and motivated.
[1] Why the African nations are still dubbed “tribes” is an enigma worth solving, but not by me. The term was used first by Servius Tullius ,sixth king of Rome, who divided it into four tributary (L. tributum, tax) districts.
[2] One such weapon can be purchased by a pastoralist for two cows in milk.
[3] This English term is unfortunately ambiguous. It means also the price paid for the temporary use of durables.
[4] Beyond Brexit: The Blueprint, Land Research Trust 2016