Easily Distracted

Many moons ago, in my first teaching gig at a New England prep school’s summer session, I was responsible for a unit on Africa. I poked around in the school’s library and found an old educational film intended for American kids that had been made in the early 1960s.

It was a quintessential bit of Cold War geopolitics. The film’s basic presentation of contemporary Africa went something like this:

1. Africa has huge untapped natural resources that will benefit American industries!
2. There are many new nations in Africa that have just been freed from British and French imperialism. They are full of hope! We are their friends!
3. But: watch out for Commies.
4. There are huge untapped natural resources!
5. There are dams and railroads and a few skyscrapers in Africa, all of them brand-new! Also: people there have many age-old traditions which will fade as there are more dams and skyscrapers and cars.
6. There are huge untapped natural resources!

The narrator’s voice as he said “huge untapped natural resources” (at least six times in a ten-minute film) was so full of unironic lust and desire that the students in my class were howling with laughter by about the third time he said it.

This particular trope applied to Africa may have felt new to American audiences, but it certainly went back to the mid-19th Century and the origins of modern European imperialism on the continent. Africa’s untapped resources weren’t always seen as mineral or natural: in late 19th Century British politics, Joseph Chamberlain made a lot out of the idea that future African workers would be important consumers of British manufactured goods.

Still, I think the most interesting or characteristic working out of the trope during the imperial era of African history came in Frederick Lugard’s Dual Mandate. I’m reminded of Lugard’s tortured and contradictory thinking about the question of Africa’s material wealth and its relationship to imperial rule because it very much echoes, in depressing and ominous ways, the manner in which Afghanistan’s resource wealth has been suddenly “discovered” by the New York Times at a moment of political and managerial crisis for American military power in Afghanistan.

Lugard was writing in part to justify the continuation of British imperial rule in Africa to a public that sometimes viewed Africa as a secondary or burdensome commitment (as opposed to India). He was also writing to try and solidify what he considered to be the orthodox managerial strategy for British officials in Africa, a sort of “operator’s manual” for future bureaucrats.

Lugard’s central contradictory argument went something like this:

1. The British Empire rules in Africa primarily as part of a “civilizing mission”. Its presence is substantially for the benefit of Africans themselves. British rule is intended to gently modify African institutions, society and culture so that Africans can enter the modern world without changing their essential beliefs, culture or identity. This process is expected to take a long time. Africans who already act like modern, liberal individuals, who demand political and civil rights, who are urban, cosmopolitan and ‘detribalized’ are inauthentic, un-African individuals who are the unfortunate result of missionary education or other intrusions by alien institutions, and should be ignored or contained.
2. The British Empire rules in Africa primarily for the benefit of Great Britain itself. African societies were incapable of making proper use of their enormous material wealth or labor power and because of their violent, disorganized character, posed a serious threat to the security of any effort to develop that wealth or use that labor for the good of the global economy. The British Empire will maintain the peace and organize economic enterprise in Africa through firm imperial control, which will in the long run benefit Africans themselves.

Some scholars, most particularly Mahmood Mamdani, see in Lugard’s formulation a totally instrumental kind of conscious contradiction that strengthened imperial power, as opposed to mere cynicism or a more accidental, incoherent kind of contradiction. I tend towards that latter interpretation: I read Lugard as switching helplessly between the humanitarian and nationalist explanations (and between the internal contradictions that attend on both logics of imperial rule).

Anyway, it seems pertinent today because both of these ideas are raging like a forest fire through American policy at the moment, in ways that are almost direct reproductions of Lugard’s rhetoric. “We’re here to help reconstruct Afghanistan’s government and culture so that it can be a productive part of the global system!” and “Hey, there’s a lot of lithium in them thar hills, and they’re not really mining it properly by themselves! This is how we’ll get rewarded in the end for spending blood and treasure now.”

If you take Mamdani’s view, this contradiction is entirely to be expected, a revelation that American intervention is and has always been imperial in character. I also think it reveals that there’s an imperial element to Afghanistan and Iraq, but one that is as confusing to American policymakers and military officials as I think it was to Lugard. The impulses that drive the decision to intervene aren’t the same as the forces that shape the management of an intervention. Since I tend to think there’s something to the proposition that modern European imperialism involved the proverbial “fit of absent-mindedness”, I tend to think that Lugard was more or less throwing every justification he could think of at the wall to see what would stick.

As are American policymakers. Because every action of this kind, whatever its initial justifications, creates a clientele of officials, consultants, experts, lobbyists, politicians, demagogues and so on who become dependent on its continued existence. So when there’s a political threat to the ongoing operation, they throw everything you have at the wall to see what sticks. And the “wall” in this case is the New York Times or whatever other publication or reporter they can get to compliantly print leaks or briefings without asking inconvenient questions. Say, in this case, questions like “Um, haven’t we known about these resources for at least three years? Or maybe more like twenty years?”

I joined in a conversation in Second Life about Obama’s speech in Ghana over the weekend. Due to some technical snafus, I had trouble participating in the panel early on, so one of the basic reactions I had to the speech didn’t really come into play. Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses a good deal of what I was thinking at his blog, though.

It was a fine speech, delivered with Obama’s typically crisp and efficient demeanor. Aside from the historic dimension of the speech being delivered by an African-American President of the United States to an African audience, however, the content was pretty much a tour of contemporary middle-of-the-road orthodoxy concerning African politics and African economic development. I teach a class every three or four years where one of the major themes is African-American encounters with and visions of Africa. Obama’s speech struck me as being pretty far down the list of emotionally and politically momentous episodes in that history, almost a coda rather than a milestone.

Some of that has to do with the content of the speech, which aside from Obama’s discussion of his personal connections to Africa could largely have been delivered by George Bush. I don’t mean that as a critique, I just mean that it was very much a shared governmental perspective steeped in of-the-moment policy initiatives, the Washington Consensus 2.0. Obama didn’t even really take a strong side between some of the contending factions within development circles, instead making little grace gestures towards various pet projects or arguments.

Ta-Nehisi suggests that some of the commentary on the speech saw Obama as more able to scold Africans for their failures in the same way that some prominent African-American spokesmen are allowed to critically address black fatherhood or other issues. Maybe, but the basic message that in the 21st Century, the structural consequences of the colonial era or Cold War geopolitics are less consequential than the internal dynamics of African societies is something you’ll hear from Western politicians across a pretty wide political spectrum. It’s heard as having a different significance, or a different authority, when it’s seen as coming from a racial insider.

I also think, however, that Obama demonstrated that younger political leaders in the African diaspora have less and less of a sense of having travelled through the same historical trials that African leaders of the same generation have experienced. The older generation still has some of the cadences of a pan-African nationalism rolling around in their heads. That imagined sense of a shared project is what produced so many misrecognitions between Africans and African-Americans from the 1960s to the 1980s, but even confusion creates a connection. Even given his personal history, you can feel a distance between the historical evolution of Obama’s political moment in the U.S. and the diverse political moments that many Africans of his generation are experiencing in different nations. Even his father’s involvement in Kenyan nationalism recedes into a prologue to Obama’s journey into an American identity. Which is, again, fine: that’s an ur-narrative of American immigration, which often kicks over the traces and contexts of the political and social histories of the immigrant generation, turning them into heritage rather than ongoing experience.

The upshot, though, is that Obama’s speech struck me as a standard address by a Western leader to Africa that happened to have a big footnote. As far as truly unusual Presidential speeches in Africa go, Bill Clinton’s apology for slavery (to a somewhat bemused audience of Ugandans, a country with little historic connection to the Atlantic slave trade) was more notable.

I’ve been struck in the past week at some of the similarities between Iran and Zimbabwe. Yes, there are vast differences in geopolitical status, economic health, histories of 20th Century statehood, religious and social ideology and much else besides.

But in both places in the last few years, you’ve had some similar kinds of reformist movements that looked to elections as a possible window of opportunity for changing or eroding the power of an authoritarian state elite. Similar in the kinds of claims and strategies they’ve employed, similar in being forced to rely on a figurehead opposition figure whose future commitment to liberal political values is at the least ambiguous. Similar in the social composition of the strongest underlying constituencies pushing for reform: urban populations, educated elites, aspirant cosmopolitans.

And the consequence of both reform campaigns has been broadly similar: to reveal that the state they critique is even less ideological than it appears and that the chief authoritarian or his closest associates is only partially in charge of a state apparatus that has largely been taken over by a silent coup d’etat of securocrats who have connections to paramilitary or irregular forces which draw from different social foundations than the reformers do. And that the securocrats are determined to stay in power regardless, and have the means, lack of scruples and competency to do so, perhaps indefinitely.

Some critics charge that liberals or the left are silent about Iran (or Zimbabwe) because they have a double standard, or even because they have a kind of bizarre sympathetic view of nationalist autocracy in developing nations. I’ve agreed that there’s something to this charge when it comes to Zimbabwe. I don’t feel competent to say the same about Iran. But the substance to this critique strikes me as complicated.

More importantly, there’s another layer of silence that comes from feeling an echo of the same futility and despair that’s clearly affecting reformist actors in Iran or has affected them in Zimbabwe. Beyond saying for the umpteenth time that the upper echelons of state power and securocrat authority in both states are morally contemptible, destructively short-sighted, grotesque, and so on, what’s left to hope for or advocate? Every avenue of international or local action seems played out. The people in control of both states don’t appear likely to allow themselves to be tricked into letting a process of change develop so far that they can’t stop it. They don’t seem to have any interest in the long-term sustainability of their economic or social policies. They seem to have a strong enough internal organization of the state’s capacity for violence that they can’t be challenged effectively by militant or violent action from within. We’ve already seen where most kinds of external intervention lead; even strong diplomatic suasion arguably has a rebound or self-defeating effect in some cases.

Many postcolonial regimes which have organically collapsed from within have done so in many cases because they commanded states with little internal coherence or capacity for directed force, not because they were challenged by strong local social movements, international pressure, or more competent rivals intent on reorganizing and reforming the government. I can think of some important exceptions, but even a few of those seem to me to have given way over time to a recurrence of the same kinds of regimes that they originally displaced.

This is where Iran is a really different kind of case: not contemporary Iran but the beginnings of the current regime. Depressingly similar as it might appear now in its resistance to some kind of liberalization or democratic reform, the current government was the consequence of a pretty genuine bottom-up revolution which gained important traction from international pressures against the Shah’s regime. What I’m struck by, though, is how impossible that kind of successful bottom-up social upheaval against an oppressive state feels to me now, if it is limited to an alliance between urban populations and educated elites. (Which, importantly, the Iranian Revolution was not, though it incorporated those constituencies.) All around the world, it seems to me that states dominated by military or police power have learned how to resist, frustrate, suppress and isolate that kind of transformational pressure from loosely “liberal” constituencies pretty much indefinitely. The only real threat to most regimes are illiberal social and political movements: national or ethnic resistance or religious fundamentalism primarily.

I think a lot of the starry-eyed fetishization of Twitter and other new media in the case of Iran is simply about a hope that a magic technology will come along and make liberal revolution or transformation plausible where social organization has not. As we’ve seen, the technology for organizing smart mobs works for as long as a securocrat state will tolerate it working, and no further. If shutting it off and violently crushing public dissent costs such a state some kind of economic opportunity in the global system, that’s clearly a cost that these states are prepared to pay.

So all of this thinking is also why there’s silence of a kind. Getting up with a bullhorn and declaring one’s outrage slides pretty quickly into self-parody, into a public confession of impotence. Knowing that, what is there to say? I suppose one could get busy with the five-point plans and communiques and various inventories of miniscule carrots and eeny-weeny sticks, but it seems all rather futile. Or, as a lot of blogspheric hot air producers seem to prefer, one could just recycle ire and outrage into wholly domestic attempts to gain miniscule political advantage over local opponents.