Comments on: Gordon Brown and Omar Bongo

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:30:59 +0000

“why should anyone suppose that fringe parties would not quickly find ways to spend public funds on their own follies”

The experience of fringe parties in German state parliaments is that they find ways to spend public funds on their own follies even more quickly than the larger, established parties.

By: NadavT

NadavT — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:40:17 +0000

Oh man, was this a depressing read. Turns out, the only thing more disheartening than considering the governance problems in Africa is realizing that Africa’s problems are not at all unique to Africa. Isn’t there some silver lining we can cling to?

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:32:43 +0000

Oh, I can think of other people whose deaths I wouldn’t really mourn that much.

I do agree that “corruption” is defined very narrowly and myopically in many respects. Think about settler states with strong color bars in employment: what is that, by liberal standards, but corruption, e.g., privileging people not because of their skills or talents but because of a kin-like connection through race. Somehow when the media conceptualizes corruption, it becomes strictly postcolonial and a characteristic problem of poor societies, rather than a wide range of illiberal governance and economic practices that have a deep history and wide distribution.

On a slightly separate track, I’ve thought occasionally of trying to compare South Africa’s current political turmoil with that of the U.S. after the creation of the Constitution, to inject a bit of proportionality into the reaction that some people have. Think of the viciousness of the political struggle between Adams and Jefferson and maybe Mbeki and Zuma don’t look so extraordinary. Think of the Alien and Sedition Act and maybe the democratic character of American governance doesn’t look so established at that point. The problem with the comparison though is its typical teleology: the West did something first, now Africa undergoes the same history on the same track. This is 2009, not 1800, so things play out differently now. Still, the comparison does maybe help to put some of the political struggles of the moment into perspective of some kind.

By: kwame

kwame — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:29:04 +0000

Most of your article does a good job of shortening the yardstick between Bongo and Brown. But then why start with “I hope it hurt a bit”? Black people in America have been, in real terms, sub-human and then, slightly better, second class citizens right up until the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was passed in the early 1970s. My mother remembers Jim Crow vividly. So, yes, as you indicate there is a vast difference in “scale,” but I think you tilt the scale in the wrong direction. If we Americans were to look at the issue of “corruption” more comprehensibly (annihilation of the “Natives,” Slavery, Manifest Destiny, imperialism, assassinations of foreign leaders, Jim Crow, prison industrial complex, redlining and so on, it would be clear that any American president has been worse than 10 Bongos. k

By: jfruh

jfruh — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:59:16 +0000

During the parade of nations in last summer’s Olympics (which I watched all the way through — yes, I am a huge dork), I was actually particularly struck by the chatter when Team Gabon walked in. Obviously the sportscasters have to come up with something interesting to say about all 200+ countries and territories, which can get dicey; but when they saw Gabon, Bob Costas said “Every four years when we prepare for this job, we check to see if Omar Bongo is still President of Gabon, and every four years he still is,” and then riffed on that for a minute or so. It actually got a little uncomfortably “Oh those Africans and their wacky dictators,” exacerbated by his name being inherently funny to English speakers (at one point they referred to him as “the wily Bongo”).

Sadly, this was the first thing I thought of when I heard about Bongo’s death. I’m vaguely interested to see if they’ll mention it in 2012.