African Affairs - recent issues
Fri Jul 8 23:45:54 EDT 2011
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Peasant grievance and insurgency in Sierra Leone: Judicial serfdom as a driver of conflict -

Was the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) fought for diamonds, or was it a peasant insurgency motivated by agrarian grievances? The evidence on both sides is less than conclusive. This article scrutinizes the peasant insurgency argument via a more rigorous methodology. Hypotheses concerning intra-peasant tensions over marriage and farm labour are derived from an examination of the anthropological literature. These are tested using econometric tools, applied to data from a randomized survey of 2,239 households in 178 villages surrounding the Gola Forest in eastern and southern Sierra Leone, the cradle of the war. It is shown that a decade after the war ended peasant disputes over marriage continue to mark out an incipient class divide in isolated rural communities, as evidenced by cases presented in local courts and family moots. Disputes mainly involve a village elder suing a young man with weak social protection. Fines are exceptionally high, and mostly paid off in the form of coerced farm labour. It is argued that grievance over this long-standing form of labour exploitation fed insurgency, and contributed to the otherwise puzzlingly high levels of peasant-upon-peasant violence associated with the war in Sierra Leone.

However destabilizing illegitimate regime changes are for Africa, they have not caused China to change its policies. Examining five coups that occurred in Africa between 2003 and 2010, this article argues that China did not see the coups as major threats to its interests, but accepted instability as a part of doing business in Africa. China remained sceptical of democracy as an antidote to instability and deeply distrusted the effort of Western countries to promote liberal political standards. China therefore continued to display conservative self-restraint, a preference for unilateralism, and a pragmatic mercantilist policy intended to strengthen its economic presence. If China is guided by any strategy, it is the strategy of adapting to political realities, rather than trying to shape them.

Though peace and a new inclusive form of politics were promised, Museveni's Uganda has been plagued by a series of civil wars. This article explains the continuation of and propensity towards conflict by focusing on the country's ‘elite bargain’, defined as the distribution of positions of state power between contending social groups.  Analysing Uganda's elite bargain in terms of political, economic, military, and territorial power sharing,  the article argues that it has been only partially inclusive. Political, military, and economic power have remained ethnically biased in favour of groups from western and central Uganda, and this in turn has been a major driver of recurrent civil wars. Increased territorial power sharing since the late 1990s helps explain the recent decline in violent conflict,  and may also help prevent new civil wars.

This article investigates the cultural dynamics and tensions of efforts to reform African tax bureaucracies according to contemporary global standards of independence, transparency, and efficiency. Focusing on the controversial establishment of a semi-independent tax authority in Mauritius, the article perceives tax reform as an uneasy and unstable meeting of different organizational cultures and epistemic communities. Unlike much existing literature – which understands public sector reform within the dichotomy of the modern and the traditional, and a resulting hybridity of bureaucratic culture – the article suggests that the notion of ‘tribidity’ better describes the reformed Mauritian tax authority. Here, three bureaucratic cultures interact: a global semi-private sector, centred on the performance-based culture of New Public Administration (NPA); a communal culture, emphasizing loyalty, ethnic identity, and union solidarity; and a Weberian culture, where process, hierarchy, and security are fundamental. The unsettled interplay of these overlapping bureaucratic cultures determined the fate of Mauritius's tax reforms, showing how such reform cannot be approached as entirely technical and apolitical.

The government in post-genocide Rwanda stakes its moral claim to legitimacy on a policy of national unity and reconciliation, claiming to create a ‘Rwanda for all Rwandans’. This article investigates peasant resistance to this policy. Focusing on everyday acts of resistance among the rural poor, it demonstrates that despite the appearance of widespread popular support, many peasant Rwandans consider the various mechanisms of national unity and reconciliation to be unjust and illegitimate. Obedience to the dictates of the policy of national unity is frequently tactical, rather than sincere, as peasants employ various strategies to avoid participation. Through a focus on everyday acts of resistance, the article reveals how the post-genocide state through the policy of national unity and reconciliation seeks to depoliticize peasant people by orchestrating public performances and by closing off the possibility for individuals to join together to organize politically.

This article traces how African incomes have been measured through history, and shows that there has been a conflict of aims between producers and users of national income estimates. Politicians and international organizations seek income measures that reflect current political and economic priorities and achievements. Thus the importance given to markets, the state, and peasants in the estimates varies through time and space. Meanwhile statisticians aim to produce a measure that gives the best possible reflection of the economy given the available data and definitions at any time. Scholars prefer a measure that is consistent through time and space so that ‘progress’ can be measured, compared, and analysed, while not being able to reach consensus on how ‘progress’ is best calculated or defined. The result is not an objective measure of progress, but rather an expression of development priorities determined by changes in the political economy. The article provides a much-needed study of the ability of the statistical offices to provide income statistics independently and regularly. These data are of crucial importance as they enter the public domain in policy evaluations, political debates, and progress towards lofty aims such as the Millennium Development Goals.

As socio-medical phenomena, epidemics are revealing of the cultures in which they are experienced. The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa exposes antecedent tensions between state and society, and, on a broader canvas, between the global north and south. As a contribution to the emerging literature on the social ramifications of HIV/AIDS, this article examines the saga of the Nigerian physician and immunologist, Dr Jeremiah Abalaka, who like other innovators in sub-Saharan Africa claims to have developed a curative HIV vaccine. Whilst articulating the social conditions that enabled Abalaka to thrive, the article explores the marked differences in the reaction to his ‘discovery’ among state representatives, the scientific establishment, the general public, people living with HIV, and the media. Finally, the article valorizes the emergence of new actors in the African health sector, and the diversity of strategies used by ordinary people to achieve and maintain wellness.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the state administration has retreated from much of the public domain. The specific case of the education sector – a domain traditionally reserved for the state – shows how public services continue to be provided, and how the Congolese state continues to survive and transform itself. Although no overall power governs the system – there is no overall regulatory authority – this does not mean that the education sector is ungoverned. The state survives as an administrative framework whose role in providing public services has been redefined rather than evaporated. This article describes the organization of the educational system as the direct result of an evolving negotiation process between state and non-state actors. It shows how this negotiated nature of statehood, and the power differentials between the various actors, involve constant renegotiation. Instead of producing uniform results within the education sector, this form of regulation depends on power configurations in particular localities at particular times.

Following advice from the World Bank, and hoping for economic growth and independence from donors, a number of African countries have opened up opportunities for large-scale mining by foreign investors over the last decade and a half. Tanzania, one of the ‘new’ mining countries, is now among the largest gold producers in Africa, but investor-friendly contracts have resulted in extremely low government revenues from mining, totalling less than 5 percent of what the country receives in development aid. In response to widespread discontent, and acknowledging the plight of affected communities, the government amended the 1998 Mining Act in 2010. However, improved legal provisions may have limited effect if the present governance challenges are not resolved. The article demonstrates that the legal provisions meant to protect the rights of affected people are not followed, and that poorly functioning local democracy is particularly dangerous for pastoralists who are ‘represented’ by local authorities often dominated by non-pastoralist immigrants. Compensation to smallholder farmers is either non-existent or too low – or the compensation money is embezzled by the authorities entrusted to distribute it.

In Ethiopia, as in other parts of Africa, relations between Christians and Muslims show a new dynamic under the impact of both state policies and global connections. Religious identities are becoming more dominant as people's primary public identity, and more ideological. This development has ramifications for the ‘public sphere’, where identities of a religious nature are currently presented and contested in a self-consciously polemical fashion. This shared space of national political and civic identity may become more ‘fragmented’ and thus lend itself to conflict and ideological battle. This article examines recent developments in the polemics of religion in Ethiopia, and the possible role of the state as custodian (or not) of an overarching civic order beyond religion, as well as the emerging rivalries between communities of faith. A crucial question is what social effects these polemics will have on communal relations and patterns of religious coexistence. Polemics between believers have a long history in Ethiopia, but a new and potentially problematic dynamic has emerged which may challenge mainstream believers, their inter-group social relations, and Ethiopian state policy. Polemics in Ethiopia express hegemonic strategies and claims to power, and are rapidly evolving as an ideological phenomenon expanding in public space. The secular state may need to reassert itself more emphatically so as to contain its own erosion in the face of assertive religious challenges.

This article examines the United Kingdom's Department for International Development's understanding of the correlations between security and development at the policy level, and contrasts this with on-the-ground experiences in Sierra Leone. Drawing on fieldwork from Sierra Leone, the article shows how DFID policy appears to have taken the correlation between security and development for granted. As the lead international actor implementing Sierra Leone’s security sector reform programme, DFID relies upon the validity of the security–development nexus to justify time, money, and expertise spent on issues of security. The relationship between these phenomena is presented as commonsensical and uncontested, but the specific nature of the relationship has been glossed over, with little real empirical evidence to demonstrate nexus claims. In Sierra Leone newfound security has so far failed to produce the anticipated development, suggesting that the causal link between security and development may not be as straightforward as implied. The article concludes that more precise investigations of the manner in which security and development interact in practice are needed.

Post-genocide Rwanda has become a ‘donor darling’, despite being a dictatorship with a dismal human rights record and a source of regional instability. In order to understand international tolerance, this article studies the regime's practices. It analyses the ways in which it dealt with external and internal critical voices, the instruments and strategies it devised to silence them, and its information management. It looks into the way the international community fell prey to the RPF's spin by allowing itself to be manipulated, focusing on Rwanda's decent technocratic governance while ignoring its deeply flawed political governance. This tolerance has allowed the development of a considerable degree of structural violence, thus exposing Rwanda to the risk of renewed violence.

In 2007, Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) took its work to the Liberian diaspora in the United States. Judging by levels of public participation, the campaign was poorly received. This article tells two parallel stories. The first recounts the pressures that compelled the TRC to go to the United States. The second is an account of conflict in a Liberian community in New York. The article's denouement is the moment the two stories meet: the arrival of the TRC in New York and the Liberian community's response to it. The article's goals are twofold. In documenting a diaspora community's ambivalence to the work of its TRC, I offer a critique of the genre of transitional justice bequeathed to the world by South Africa's TRC and inherited by Liberia, one in which a promiscuous collection of vaguely defined ideas relating to truth, healing, and reconciliation is deployed to conceal pragmatic compromise. Second, I capture a distinctive feature of life in exile: the constitution of a theatre of power that mimics the trajectory of political life back home, and yet uses issues germane to the host country as matters of controversy.

Under former President Mbeki, South Africa provoked international dismay and criticism when it tried to block United Nations censure of Burma, Sudan, and Zimbabwe for gross human rights abuses. In the case of Sudan, Pretoria stood accused of turning a blind eye to Khartoum's excessive and indiscriminate violence in Darfur, betraying South Africa's own struggle for democracy and commitment to promoting human rights. This article seeks to shed light on Pretoria's foreign policy by explaining its position on Darfur and exploring the relationship between ideas and interests in shaping the policy. I argue that the position on Darfur was not unfathomable or realist, as some observers claimed, but was based on the core ideas of South Africa's foreign policy: the African Renaissance; quiet diplomacy as the most effective means of dealing with pariah regimes; solidarity with African governments under pressure from the West; and an anti-imperialist paradigm that provided the lens through which the government viewed the global order, defined the country's interests, and conceptualized human rights. Whereas most studies of Pretoria's foreign conduct pay little heed to the policies of the ruling party, I show that the conduct flowed logically from the party's anti-imperialist ideology.

This article examines a development initiative spearheaded by the members of a transnational diaspora – the creation of a medical hospital in the holy city of Touba in central Senegal. Although the construction of the hospital is decidedly a philanthropic project, Hôpital Matlaboul Fawzaini is better understood as part of the larger place-making project of the Muridiyya and the pursuit of symbolic capital by a particular Mouride dahira. The dahira's project illuminates important processes of forging global connections and transnational localities, and underscores the importance of understanding the complex motivations behind diaspora development. The hospital's history reveals the delicate negotiations between state actors and diaspora organizations, and the complexities of public–private partnerships for development. In a reversal of state withdrawal in the neo-liberal era, a diaspora association was able to wrest new financial commitments from the state by completing a large infrastructure project. Despite this success, we argue that these kinds of projects, which are by nature uneven and sporadic, reflect particular historical conjunctures and do not offer a panacea for the failure of state-led development.

Desegregation of South African schools is creating new geographies of education. Parental choice of school in the context of continuing spatial inequalities of educational provision encourages considerable movement of pupils from outside traditional catchment areas, as parents send children to distant schools formerly intended for members of other racial groups. To explore the socio-economic context of such choices, and the costs of making them, this article uses survey data from ten secondary schools with differing apartheid histories, in different socio-economic neighbourhoods, and with differing racial compositions. The findings reveal both the progress made since the end of apartheid and the limitations of change. Pupils travelling to distant schools in white areas appear to be coping well with the potential pressures, but remain a small, largely middle-class minority of black and coloured children, while friendships still appear to be made mainly within rather than across racial groups. Genuine educational choice and class mobility will depend on more fundamental reduction of educational inequality.