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The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa, by Célestin Monga, translated by Linda L. Fleck and Célestin Monga
7. A Theory of Disenchantment and Violence: Rwanda and Other Tragedies
| Le pouvoir est plus fort que tout, hormis le péché. |
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| Power is stronger than anything, except sin. |
| —Bamanan proverb, Mali |
Washington, D.C., July 1995. A Cameroonian businessman now living in Maryland as a political refugee told me his bitter tale. Although he had once enjoyed a prosperous existence in Yaoundé and been considered a darling of the Biya administration, he had had to leave his country abruptly after the rigged 1992 presidential election. He had “compromised” himself with opposition parties, and the government would not forgive him for having betrayed his friends in the upper echelons of the regime, for having bitten the hand that had fed him for years. Ill-prepared for his new life as a nomad, he said what bothered him most was his friends’ and family’s lack of understanding concerning his decision to join the fight for democracy. Over and over again, people told him: “Why on earth would you risk your fortune, your important political connections, your reputation, and maybe even your life to become an opposition party activist? Business doesn’t mix well with politics. You stand to lose a lot more than the intellectuals and the unemployed who are lining the streets. Don’t get involved! We’re all in favor of democracy. But why should some people have to sacrifice themselves for the cause? When democracy comes, we’ll all rejoice. In the meantime ...” Comments like these were especially disturbing to him because they often came from people in the lower ranks of society, from the very disenfranchised whose plight had sparked his desire to rebel and who stood to benefit the most from democracy.
My friend’s words reminded me of the advice I myself had received from the Cameroonian authorities, who had tried to put a lid on my political activism. “Who would think that a man like you, a young executive, the director of central Africa’s largest commercial bank, with a great career ahead of him, would sacrifice both his own future and that of his family by getting involved in politics?” Albert Ekonno Nna, governor of the Littoral province in Douala, asked me in 1991. “I’m speaking to you now,” he continued, “not as a political opponent but as a father, or an older brother. Don’t you see that your so-called supporters are pushing you into a suicidal trap? You’re the one who’s sleeping in a prison cell. The machinery of the state is going to come down hard on you, not them. Does it give you pleasure to destroy your own future? Are you a masochist? What about your wife? Your children? Your family? I can’t believe they let you do so many reckless, unnecessary things. Stop opposing the government. Beware of all your friends who are encouraging you to commit suicide. You’re an intellectual. You know all about the French Revolution. You’ve heard Georges Brassens’s song, ‘Die for ideas, yes, but die a slow death,’ because dying for the sake of ideas is what all those people who are exploiting your enthusiasm and naïveté live for!”
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These anecdotes illustrate the two most serious types of problems threatening the democratization process now under way in most African countries: disenchantment with democracy and the possible eruption of naked violence, which can only complicate an already delicate process of social restructuring. They also suggest a paradox as well as questions that might be raised at the end of this work: Why has African inventiveness, which has been celebrated in the preceding chapters, not yet had a positive impact on the social dynamics of the day? How will Africa survive its at once complex and ephemeral democratic dreams? How will Africans avoid becoming like Nitu Dadou, the protagonist in the novel by Congolese Sony Labou Tansi, l’Anté-peuple, who, in his relentless search for a better world, ends up drowning in his own desire for freedom?
In this final chapter, I propose several theoretical frameworks for an understanding of the pervasiveness of disenchantment and the tendency to resort to violence. The first section explores the problem of disaffection with the new political actors: Some populations come to terms with this painful emotion, managing as well as they can their fears and disappointments and directing their energy and creativity away from politics and toward other goals; in so doing, they reinvent uses for disillusionment. Others are less fortunate: Led by unscrupulous or unimaginative political entrepreneurs, they pervert political disenchantment, transforming their disappointments in the political field into cynicism toward society in general. Citizens attempt to profit from the democratic idea but are not willing to pay the price for it, treating it as one might a public good. The second section presents an anatomy of conflicts in Africa. Recommendations on how to solve the problem of violence are offered in the third section.
Interpreting Disenchantment
Numerous scholars and journalists fear that democratization may derail because there is no popular support for the human, material, financial, and other sacrifices that are required to obtain institutional and political concessions from ruling autocrats. Notice, first of all, the sadomasochistic nature of the implicit assumption that African peoples ought to accept collective flagellation stoically in order to prove to the world their allegiance to the democratic idea. Not only is such an argument politically unrealistic and intrinsically incompatible, the ethical imperative around which it is constructed is selective: It expects of African peoples that which would never be asked of others. Disenchantment with democracy is found not only in Russia, former Soviet bloc countries, and Latin America but also in the “great industrial democracies” such as France, Japan, the United States, and Germany. But African societies, far from systematically resigning themselves to the disillusions of democracy, attempt to reinvent and recreate the spaces of political transformation outside the political arena. The real problem facing them in this new adventure is their capacity to engage in a collective ethical pursuit in these uncertain times. To understand this, it is necessary to see democracy for what it is at bottom, that is, a public good. Economic theory elucidates these new challenges: When freedom and social well-being are conceived as public goods, this necessarily leads to the emergence of free riders, who use the goods but do not pay for them. Their existence, in turn, may increase the risk of disenchantment.
The Pervasiveness and Reinvention of Democratic Disillusionment
Let us suppose that the anecdotes related at the beginning of this chapter are representative of a general disaffection toward the democratic idea—a tremendous supposition to which I will later return. Even if this is so in the absolute, the phenomenon is in no way confined to Africa. Empirical research on the subject looks like a transnational kaleidoscope of political disaffection. Numerous signs of skepticism toward democracy are found in all of the world’s industrialized nations.
In a recent report, the New York Times summed up the situation in Japan:
Politics in Japan in recent decades has mostly been a struggle for power among factions, rather than a competition among people with different ideas. That has added to the perception that Japan is really being run by bureaucrats, and that politicians are a kind of second-tier imperial family—granted fine titles and lots of television time, but entrusted with little power.... Polls find comparatively low satisfaction in Japan in the way their democracy works. Only 35 percent of Japanese say they are satisfied with their democracy, one of the lowest figures in any industrialized country (Kristof 1996).
A journalist’s account is by definition impressionistic. But the deep feeling of collective disillusionment with democracy that Kristof captures is confirmed in the writings of numerous scholars, notably Johnson (1995).
In the United States, although a greater number of citizens say they are satisfied with the democratic system (64 percent according to Kristof), empirical studies substantiate the prevalence of disillusionment. Statistics on voter turnout show that, of all countries considered to be democratic, the United States is at the bottom of the list in the area of political participation (Wolfinger et al. 1990). Powell (1986) has linked this phenomenon to class: The poorest and most numerous members of society are disproportionately excluded (the unemployed and those with the lowest incomes vote the least). According to Powell, this phenomenon is explained by U.S. political culture, which privileges active involvement by the individual in the voting process (voter registration, the act of voting itself) and sanctions gerrymandered voting districts (and hence structural inequality in the intensity of political competition), as well as superficial relationships between the political parties that dominate the political game and the social groups whose interests they are supposed to defend. The political system also allows for institutional conflicts (acknowledged or implicit) that weaken in the end the sentiment of democratic legitimacy.
Though he does not share Powell’s view that a correlation exists between political culture and voter turnout, Jackman stresses the importance of political institutions and the electoral technostructure (political parties, voting laws, fair competition): “Where institutions provide citizens with incentives to vote, more people actually participate; where institutions actually generate disincentives to vote, turnout suffers. Thus, the meaning of national differences in voting turnout is rather clear: turnout figures offer one gauge of participatory political democracy” (1987:419). 1
The same debate exists in Germany—which Carr (1984) sees as a country on the verge of becoming “a society of conditioned reflexes,” and where Habermas (1984) addressed political modernity and its discontents—France, and many other countries with a long democratic tradition. Even the shortest trip across any of the world’s great democracies reveals political disillusionment and causes one to raise two essential questions: “How much nonparticipation can a democratic system tolerate? Does participation fundamentally affect the quality of representation?” (Crotty, 1991:19). Before addressing the specific question of democratic disenchantment in Africa, let us recall how the general debate has been framed and interpreted by scholars in the social sciences.
Numerous hypotheses have been advanced to explain disenchantment with society. Among the most compelling is Bell’s (1960) thesis concerning the end of ideology. In his assessment, liberalism and socialism, the principal ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each conceived as “a set of beliefs, infused with passion, and seek[ing] to transform the whole way of life,” finally lost their power to mobilize the masses during the 1950s. Bell cites two main reasons for this: (1) their failure to prevent world wars, economic depression, and the emergence of dictators; and (2) structural changes in capitalism, summed up in the expression “the welfare state.” Bell also contended that the overall rise of ideology during this period was a phenomenon geographically limited to Africa and Asia—in the West only “‘piecemeal’ change in the social-democratic direction” occurred.
The logic of this thesis, in reality a rather old one, caused some writers to applaud, others to lament, the idea of a social order stripped of great ideological struggles and dominated by what might be called an ideologically transparent technological fervor devoid of true political substance. 2 Other writers such as Lipset (1960) and Aron (1966) expressed concern about the ravages of unchecked industrialization, which they saw as leading to the creation of a society based upon an apolitical, administrative consensus among elites. They predicted that the West would henceforth be immune to ideological frenzies and that “pragmatic” utopias (that is, adapted to reality) and an ethics of responsibility would alone guide politicians in industrial democracies.
Repeating Max Weber’s words of caution in The Ethics of Capitalism, Birnbaum (1975) warned us twenty years ago about the dangers of such a reductive, linear approach to the history of humankind. The debate over the “end of ideology” thesis, which I shall not discuss in detail here, led some to conclude that the end of ideology was no more than the end of certain ideologies and a way to legitimate U.S. ideological dominance (Meynaud 1961), that is, the emergence of a new ideology that preferred to disguise its name (Haber 1968). Providing an explanation for the decrease in political participation, the end-of-ideology hypothesis foresaw a depoliticization of society, a uniformization of political programs, and a decline in ideological debates, hampering the emergence of coalitions. Let us now discuss these predictions within the African context.
Is this paradigm borne out south of the Sahara? Has disillusionment with democracy caused nameless freedom fighters in Dakar or Djibouti to adopt the types of behavior described by Bell and Aron? The answer varies from one country to the next, sometimes from one region to the next in the same country. True enough, a slackening of political involvement has occurred in large African cities—either because the sacrifices the population made between 1990 and 1995 did not succeed in toppling the authoritarian regimes (in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Zaire, Kenya, etc.) or because the change in government did not bring the hoped-for increase in political, economic, and social well-being. But beyond the feeling of discouragement, there is a surprising reinvention of everyday ways of being—as if political disenchantment had been a socioeconomic and cultural wake-up call to African peoples.
In some regions, it would be a hasty generalization to say that a depoliticization of the electorate had occurred, as the classical view on political disenchantment predicted, because Africans are much more likely to vote than people in Europe and the United States. African authoritarian regimes are so very aware of this tendency that they do their best to discourage people from voting, by manipulating the size of the electorate, by passing laws limiting the eligibility and rights of voters, or even by blocking access to the polls (Monga 1995b). Though voting habits sometimes appear to reflect membership in a social group rather than an ideological choice, the social groups with which citizens wish to associate themselves are dynamic. The notion of ethnic voting blocs, for example, does not withstand scrutiny, for, like all group labels, ethnicities are not monolithic entities: Voters are, of course, Yorubas, Bamilekes, Kikuyus, or Zulus, but these labels represent only a part of their civic identity, which also includes their professional and religious affiliations as well as their philosophies on life. In addition to being Yorubas, Bamilekes, Kikuyus, or Zulus, African voters are taxpayers, employed or unemployed, Catholics or animists, inhabitants of large cities or small towns; the competition between the multiple aspects of their identity make them less likely to vote automatically with their ethnic group, which may not represent their self-interests. The results of the Nigerian presidential election, nullified by the army in 1993, confirm the absence of polarization along ethnic lines. In the words of Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka:
The “robust detonation” of the myth of the North-South dichotomy took place finally on 12 June 1993.... On that occasion, Nigerians voted across so-called ethnic divides and declared themselves a nation. We cannot ignore the treason represented by the annulment of that election, for it was more than the election of an individual. It was the annulment of Nigeria’s declaration that it wants to be one nation (1995:8).
Neither does the uniformization of political programs correspond to the end of the right-left ideological debate, as one might have thought. For one thing, there have never been ideological struggles per se in African nations, because independence has rarely been synonymous with freedom on the continent. For another, political parties have only recently become the framework in which public discourse is developed and alternative ideas are legitimated: The political parties created during the colonial era were embryonic, belonging to those “culturally premature institutions” the colonists bequeathed to Africa (Michalon 1995). The uniform quality of the few political programs published by certain parties is attributable to the single economic agenda international monetary institutions have forced upon most African nations (the infamous structural adjustment programs proposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Their uniformity reflects the reality of international politics and the incompetence of opposition party leaders, not the exhaustion of thought or a breakdown in the production of new ideas.
Another feature of the paradigm of disenchantment fails to apply to Africa, namely, the sociocultural aspects of depoliticization described by Lavau (1962). Literature, music, painting, and film on the continent have not disengaged themselves from politics; rather, they have increasingly become a platform for the expression of political demands. Artists have invented so many new and subversive political languages suggestive of another possible reality that African governments have sometimes had to commission artists to create “political” works of literature, music, or even sculpture celebrating their regimes. 3
Finally, the emergence of urban and rural elites is neither the consequence of disenchantment nor the result of a clash of sterile doctrines held by various camps: This phenomenon has always existed, even under single-party rule. What we are witnessing now is an actualization of the practice of negotiating political power, which long allowed autocrats to present themselves to the people as representing all ethnicities and regions in the country (the former president of Côte d’Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, was a master of this method of governing). What has changed is the more inclusive and unstable nature of political coalitions, which bring together many more people exhibiting a greater range of sociological profiles—those who yesterday fiercely opposed the government align themselves with it tomorrow in order to get a piece of the national cake. Notable examples of this are Abdoulaye Wade, who, overnight, swapped his status as public enemy number one for that of chief sycophant to President Abdou Diouf; Bernard Zadi Zaourou, who, after having symbolized for decades intellectual rebellion against single-party rule in Côte d’Ivoire, suddenly and remorselessly joined the Henri Konan Bédié administration; and Dakolé Daïssala, a Cameroonian political prisoner who, after having undergone state-sponsored torture, exchanged his filthy jail cell for a luxurious ministerial office located within a few yards of his former prison. Examples such as these are endless and demonstrate that today’s coalitions are modeled after an old practice and in no way derive from but rather contribute to public disenchantment with politics.
If the end-of-ideology thesis is not a valid or sufficient explanation for the disenchantment of African peoples, who deal with their disillusionment as well as they can and daily reinvent other spaces of political contestation, then what accounts for the deceleration of the democratization process between 1993 and 1995?
My thesis is that beyond disenchantment there is another, more important factor that has weakened democratization in Africa: the thankless nature of the democratic idea itself. However appealing that idea may be, it is nevertheless a collective pursuit, an endless fight that must be of concern to the largest social groups. By its very nature, it elicits the tendency toward discouragement. A paradigm borrowed from economics helps explain why: the concept of public goods.
Democracy as a Public Good: Implications
The social scientific definition of public goods or collective goods, when applied to democracy, helps illustrate the tendency toward discouragement that I view as consubstantial with the idea of citizenship itself. 4 It inhabits citizens in all parts of the world, notably those who are fighting against authoritarianism. As opposed to a private good, which is supposed to be consumed individually, a public good is a good whose consumption by person A does not affect its consumption by person B (Samuelson 1954). This definition, which borders on tautology, nevertheless has some important features that economists have found useful. 5 I describe two of these features, both of which may seem obvious and useless, and subsequently apply them to the analysis of democracy in order to demonstrate more clearly their theoretical and practical implications.
A collective good is also indivisible: It cannot be produced, bought, or sold in small quantities. Thus, for each user of a public good, it is virtually impossible to determine the fraction of the cost corresponding to his or her consumption.
This framework may also be used to understand the internal contradictions within the dynamics of the democratization process in Africa. If each African citizen living under a dictatorial regime is seen as a political agent who is seeking to maximize his or her political well-being while limiting the costs it implies (the risk of police reprisals, brutality of all kinds, etc.), the problems involved in the pursuit of any collective good are made clear: 6
Democracy is also an indivisible good: It may not be satisfactorily acquired in small doses; it may not be cut up into pieces. A citizen in Kinshasa could not accept a “piece” of voting right or a tad of freedom of expression. Similarly, the Zairean state oppressing him or her could not decide to “produce” only a limited quantity of democracy, in the form of a selective lifting of oppression or a reduced level of torture. It is likewise impossible to calculate the cost incurred by each citizen in the struggle for democratization.
In the early 1960s, Olson proposed an elegant mathematical model based on these features and on the behavior of social groups composed of individuals seeking to maximize their self-interests. It elucidates the intrinsic problems of collective goods. Summing up the main lesson of his model, Olson writes:
The necessary conditions for the optimal provision of a collective good, through the voluntary and independent action of the members of a group, can ... be stated very simply. The marginal cost of additional units of the collective good must be shared in exactly the same proportion as the additional benefits. Only if this is done will each member find that his own marginal costs and benefits are equal at the same time that the total marginal cost equals the total or aggregate marginal benefit. If marginal costs are shared in any other way, the amount of collective good provided will be suboptimal [or inefficient] (1965:30–31).
If we assume that the citizens who are pursuing freedom behave rationally, and that democracy is a collective good with a cost (if only in terms of the punishment those fighting for change stand to suffer at the hands of the autocratic regime), one may extrapolate from Olson’s theory of groups a theorem of the political efficiency of democratic movements in Africa: When the marginal political benefit of democratization (that is, the hard-fought additional gain in freedom and social justice) is not shared in the same proportion as the marginal cost (the additional pain and deprivation suffered daily by those fighting for change), then there is a possibility of inefficiency in the social dynamics at work. But by its very nature, the democratic idea necessarily educes such distortions: Given that its cost and its benefits per citizen are not quantifiable or measurable, it necessarily gives rise to mixed feelings. It is therefore to be expected that even those who are fighting for democracy greet its arrival with ambivalence or even rejection.
Applying Olson’s model to the study of democracy as a collective good, the obvious “scientific” explanation for political disenchantment is the perception of a poor distribution of the political benefits of freedom. To this I would add another reason: the various ways in which well-being is experienced by the citizens and main political actors, even within the same country. These different political utility levels (Monga 1996) explain the differences in behavior and internal contradictions in social groups whose members all face the same problems. The different levels increase the likelihood that there will be disagreement over the estimated costs of achieving democracy and the expected benefits of democracy once it has been won. The fundamental incompatibility of the various methods and premises advocates of democracy use to calculate its risk-return ratio explains why democratization appears to have stalled in certain African nations: Many citizens who, between 1990 and 1995, fought hard against authoritarianism and made physical, financial, and psychological sacrifices “now prefer to concern themselves with other things and to let time take care of things” (Nantang Jua 1995). They figure that democracy will come sooner or later—others will take care of it and everybody will benefit, so why should they make sacrifices?
This is known as the free-rider problem. As Frey puts it:
The basic problem of public goods is that the prospective consumers have no incentive to reveal their preferences for such a good and are thus not ready to contribute towards financing the provision of the good. In the extreme case this incentive to act as [a] “free rider” leads to no supply of the public good at all, although everyone would potentially benefit from its provision (1988).
The following example, drawn from recent political events in Côte d’Ivoire, is a good illustration of the problem. Only a few weeks before the presidential and legislative elections, President Henri Konan Bédié prohibited opposition parties from organizing public rallies in the streets of the capital and other large cities. “Fear of the disorder” that mass demonstrations might cause in a tense political climate was the official reason for the ban—the real reason was the possible mobilization of a majority of the urban population against his regime. For the opposition parties, the measure was all the more capricious and unjust in that it took effect right before an important election and did not apply to the president’s own party. Thus, opposition leaders decided to ignore the ban and organized demonstrations in various parts of the country, instructing activists to participate in the marches in Abidjan. The decision of whether or not to participate was difficult for every activist. To take the risk of publicly revealing one’s convictions by following party instructions was to confront, head on, a brutal administration well versed in punishment techniques. The Bédié government’s reaction could range from professional and administrative harassment to imprisonment, physical torture, and even assassination (unauthorized demonstrations in Côte d’Ivoire have always led to violent clashes with the police and armed forces, generally resulting in bloodshed). Figure 7.1 shows how the situation presented itself to each opposition activist.
| Figure 7.1 |
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Let us call our activist Mr. Kouassi, a member of the Ivoirian Popular Front, one of the main opposition parties to the Konan Bédié regime. Let us assume that under ordinary circumstances it is possible for the opposition to mobilize 500,000 people in the capital. There are four possible outcomes:
If Mr. Kouassi does not take part in the demonstration, he runs no risk (he will not have to pay the price of democratization). His absence will not affect the success of the operation if he is the only one who decides not to participate: If 499,999 people show up rather than 500,000, the media will not notice the difference. But if all activists follow suit, each one assuming that his or her presence will not make any difference and that it is not worth taking such an enormous, unnecessary risk, no one will be in the streets and the result will be a fiasco.
The incentive to act as a free rider is clear: In a situation such as this, Mr. Kouassi and other opposition activists tend to analyze the possible outcomes in a self-interested way; they want to reap the benefits of democracy without helping to finance its costs, without paying the price for it.
Figure 7.1, based upon the principles of game theory, provides a rough sketch of the different hypothetical scenarios and payoffs from which our opposition activist has to choose. Roughly speaking, these are the four possible outcomes from which Ivoirians had to choose in 1995. Many chose not to take the risk of participating. Large numbers of people did show up at some demonstrations, but these numbers did not reflect the mobilization potential of the opposition parties.
The same is true for many other African countries in the past few years. Far from being a childish display of ill humor or discouragement, the political disenchantment that many Africanist political scientists have noticed is above all attributable to a reshuffling of individual preferences, a reevaluation of probable collective behavior, and a cost-benefit analysis (sometimes instinctive, of course) of the desire for freedom.
Is it possible to alter the determinants of individual attitudes in such a way as to change the terms of the equation that people living under a dictatorship and dreaming of freedom must work out for themselves? Here again, economics provides a host of techniques that open onto diverse possibilities. The most obvious solution would be to change the structure of the political game in each country so that the outcomes of the four possible scenarios listed in Figure 7.1 would advantage risk takers. The idea would be either to diminish the the authoritarian regime’s capacity to do harm or to give citizens more incentives to take risks in order to win their freedom—or a combination of both.
Taking our Ivoirian example, the idea would be to arrive at a matrix like that shown in Figure 7.2.
| Figure 7.2 |
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How does one arrive at a political game structured in this way? The current balance of power in African political markets obviously does not allow for such an arrangement. Authoritarian regimes still have a solid grip on the reins of power, thus disequilibrating political competition. The democratization process, which in many respects resembles the transition from a controlled economy to a market economy, takes place in the context of a monopoly on state power held by an elite who does not wish to introduce competition. African citizens are rational and fairly well informed—despite governmental control over the media. The missing ingredient is acceptance of the principle of competition—the adoption of and adherence to commonly agreed upon rules as well as “market” (that is, voter) approval. 7 In advanced industrial nations, it is generally the role of the administration (which is neutral despite the fact that it is composed of individuals with their own political convictions) to ensure respect for the political process. Pope John XXIII uttered words to this effect, basing his argument on the implications of the inherent properties of public goods: “There exists an intrinsic connection between the common good on the one hand and the structure and function of public authority on the other. The moral order, which needs public authority in order to promote the common good in human society, requires also that the authority be effective in attaining that end” (quoted in Rosen 1988:62).
But in African countries where the state is both the arbiter of and a major player in the political game and is often the principal obstacle standing in the way of democracy, there is little hope of seeing an improvement in the efficiency of the political market in the short term. This necessitates the endorsement of any foreign intervention that might alter the balance of power between democrats and advocates of the status quo. I am well aware that this proposition will ignite the indignation of some theorists, who consider that Africa’s current political and economic impasse is due exclusively to the weight of history and to the interventionism of foreign powers. From this point of view, it would be naive to think that foreign intervention, whatever form it might take (diplomatic or military), could be carried out without harming the interests of African peoples. My own view is structurally less pessimistic, because I do not believe that African interests are automatically opposed to the interests of foreign powers. Furthermore, I do not subscribe to a static view of world history: The balance of power between great powers and small countries evolves over time in unpredictable ways. 8
The postcolonial African state serves to reveal and catalyze social tension rather than acting as a buffer or arbiter. It might thus be said that it has disqualified itself from spearheading the democratization process in sub-Saharan Africa—and this for a number of years. Often partisan, actively engaged in the political battle (generally siding with the autocrats in power), the postcolonial state was unable to foresee and forestall the political consequences of social disenchantment and the sometimes horrifying implications of the avenues into which African peoples have channeled their disillusionment.
The international community has also failed to shoulder the moral and political responsibilities it has taken on in other parts of the world. By refusing to regard human rights violations in Zaire as equivalent to those that occurred in Romania, by refusing to treat Nigeria’s General Sani Abatcha in the same manner as Poland’s General Jaruzelski, the UN, international organizations, and Western political chancelleries have left African peoples to their own devices, to a chaotic handling of their disenchantment. The growing intensity and multiplication of forms of political violence, witnessed of late in Rwanda and elsewhere, derives from the abdication of responsibility on the part of the state and the so-called developed world.
Anatomy of Political Violence
Oddly enough, the eruption of violent conflicts in Africa always seems to take the world by surprise. Whereas the existence and evolution of social tensions are well documented in other parts of the world, it appears that people are invariably astonished by the turn of events in Africa. As a result, and in spite of the good will and sincere compassion of international opinion, foreign intervention is more a function of media coverage (what might be termed the “CNN Curve”) than of policy considerations.
Generally speaking, internal disputes (such as those in Cameroon, Togo, and Kenya) rarely pique the interest of the international community. Even when these disputes involve significant loss of life and property, the great powers and international institutions do not always become involved. The Congolese 1992–1995 civil war, for example, elicited little reaction from the UN. As a rule, it is only when the media turn on their cameras that international opinion begins to put pressure on Western policymakers to act. And, of course, no sooner are the cameras turned off than interest begins to wane; this is presently the case for Rwanda and Somalia. The programming directors of large television networks such as CNN have become some of the most influential actors on the international scene.
Figure 7.3 illustrates the “CNN curve,” the indifference and slow reaction time of the international community, which, even when it perceives the emergence of a serious social problem in Africa, generally contents itself with short-term solutions until social unrest paralyzes the country and causes the economy to collapse. When such countries are no longer able to make foreign-debt payments or to absorb, through importation, production surpluses that the West could not sell elsewhere, they become problem cases. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are then charged with the task of “adjusting” them, not developing them over the long term but reducing the size of the budget and the government, which artificially stimulates economic growth and makes them “solvent” again (Tchundjang Pouémi 1980). Figure 7.4 may be used to illustrate the Western reaction to African conflicts.
| Figure 7.3 |
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| Figure 7.4 |
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Before offering a few suggestions on the possible uses of economic means to resolve the problem of community violence in Africa, I will first examine the mechanisms triggering the disputes, which will help explain why disenchanted citizens express themselves collectively through acts of political violence. I will then analyze the soundness of theories on violence in Africa and conclude by proposing another approach to conflict resolution.
In the Beginning Was the Alibi
There are “objective” conditions—historical precedents, political maneuvers that play on “philosophical” disagreements between neighboring peoples, cultural differences, economic and social injustice, etc.—that cause conflicts to grow in scale. But however intense a conflict may be, there are always clearly identifiable harbingers of it before it erupts. Most often local media—including the most powerful of all, public rumor—give a clear account of its existence, but the international community does not pay attention. Then the opposing parties start engaging in psychological manipulation, informal information and disinformation campaigns, and mudslinging and insults, which increase tension and strengthen bonds within social groups, divided not along class lines but along those of the tribe, of the clan, of religion, etc.
It is at this moment, when the troops for the future conflict are being assembled, that the international community should intently focus on the situation and intervene in some way. It might attempt to catalog the types of situations that give unscrupulous political entrepreneurs the dynamite they need to ignite a conflict. The World Bank employs doctors, sociologists, and anthropologists; it might ask a few of them to conduct socioeconomic studies on the risk of turmoil in countries and regions of Africa where the clash of cultural identities or different itineraries tends to erode the social fabric. They might also examine the distribution of public utilities, roads, schools, clinics, etc. Tremendous holes exist in the economic and social infrastructure of certain communities and regions, whereas others have an overabundance of underutilized resources. A case in point is the small Ivoirian village of Yamoussoukro, where, among other grandiose public works projects, six-lane expressways, which no one ever uses, crisscross the town. Countless other examples could be cited.
Similarly, the fact that legislation is passed in some countries favoring certain social groups (in such areas as taxation, credit, regulation of commerce, and tariffs) and harming others creates tensions that can lead to vendettas between these groups. The resurrection of past injustices that few even remember appears incomprehensible, yet this is exactly what happened in Ethiopia, Chad, Rwanda, Nigeria, and Kenya. The memory of the pain and suffering one social group suffered at the hands of another suddenly comes to the fore and the “victims” discover that their exploitation dates back several decades or more. When this happens, we have on our hands the makings of a lengthy conflict.
Unfortunately, the Western backers who discuss and finance public works projects are not interested in these sorts of problems. For institutional and political reasons, it is no doubt understandable that they do not wish to decide for the government of a sovereign state, which has the right to define its own priorities and plan its own development. It is nevertheless clear that an effort to take account of the economic and social disparities in the budget, fiscal and credit policies, and investment codes would weaken the argument of warmongers who play on the social misery of their communities and the “normalization” of injustices to increase their political clientele.
The prevention of conflicts through the use of economic instruments may take various forms: setting up projects, creating exchanges and markets between opposing groups, and financing information campaigns and civic education programs. Such readily financed microprojects designed to fight misery, disenfranchisement, and ignorance would help channel the energies of civil society in positive directions. One might try to take advantage of the fact that the intensity of a conflict ebbs and flows over time (Kriesberg 1991:5) by implementing some new strategies. For example, if international monetary institutions sponsored a civics program on the rights and responsibilities of citizens, underwriting the design, publication, and distribution of a pamphlet in comic book form, their advice on good governance and democratization would appear more credible and reach more people.
But what should one do when latent conflicts explode and degenerate into civil wars, as they did in Rwanda, Burundi, and Liberia? The first priority should be to set in motion emergency mechanisms. (The absence of structures allowing for the implementation of community violence “stabilization” measures was painfully obvious when the crises in Rwanda and Burundi broke out.) Though the role of international monetary institutions is somewhat limited at this stage, they still have some room to maneuver. Numerous studies have shown that lulls in fighting most often occur when there is a shift in the balance of forces. Zartman and Aurik argue that in the case of a “stable and intense” conflict, the chances for a successful settlement or deescalation of the conflict are greatest when the two sides have equal military capabilities—otherwise, the stronger has no incentive to negotiate (1991:152). This observation underscores how important it is for the international community—notably, international aid agencies—to adopt a less partisan position and to refuse to take sides in a conflict, which they invariably do either directly or indirectly. For example, when institutions operating under the Bretton Woods system grant a warring country credits known as “balance of payment support” even though they are aware, on the one hand, that the money goes to finance the political battle in which the leaders are engaged and, on the other, that they have no control over the use of the funds, they implicitly take part in the conflict and de facto finance violent operations. In so doing, they tilt the balance of forces to one side and effectively torpedo the chances for a sustained negotiation. They also alienate leaders in the opposition and civil society, who then find it necessary to take a more radical position and cease to trust the international community, which only further complicates the search for a compromise. 9
Do Theories of Violence Apply to Africa?
The preceding remarks underline the necessity of reexamining the theoretical framework that shapes thinking on the prevention of conflicts. The literature on the subject is voluminous. A brief look at the present state of knowledge in the field allows one to pinpoint both the main causes of conflicts and the determinants of sustainable peace.
Causes of War
The use of quantitative methods to analyze systematically the structure of conflicts and the mechanisms for their resolution is a burgeoning area of research in the social sciences. 10 The interest of researchers has grown since the end of the Cold War has given rise to new tensions in the Balkans and in the former Soviet bloc, but which has elsewhere ushered in an era of peace that has presented new challenges to public policy-makers in various parts of the world. 11 Recent studies allow one to understand better the dynamics of social violence and to identify which types of economic interaction may be engaged in in wartime to promote peace.
What is known as the realist paradigm dominates thinking on the causes of international conflicts. The various models of this paradigm fall into two main categories: structural realism, which attributes war between nations to the structure of the international system, and deterrence theory, whose variants are based on an evaluation of the distribution of power (the military capabilities of each nation).
Combining variables from each of these two theories, Huth, Gelpi and Bennett (1992) have developed a model designed to test the hypotheses underlying both arguments. They studied ninty-seven great-power militarized disputes between 1816 and 1984 and decisively concluded that the evolution of the international environment contributes less to the emergence of a conflict than do changes in the military and deterrent capabilities of the parties involved. In other words, monitoring the military power of nation-states and social groups allows one to predict with a high degree of accuracy whether a conflict is likely to break out.
At the individual level, the decision to wage war is often motivated by what specialists in systems dynamics call “obstacles to the understanding” of real-world phenomena. Leaders who advocate violence are generally unable either to sift through and comprehend the various levels of information they are receiving or to extricate themselves from the whirlpool of complex systems. In Figure 7.5, Sterman (1994) provides a graphical representation of the complexities of our time:
| Figure 7.5 |
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Causes of Peace
Does the nature of a political regime affect its propensity to wage war? Empirical studies have shown that a strong correlation exists between peace and democracy. The fact that a regime is democratic does not automatically prevent it from waging war; however, the intrinsic properties of democracy contain stabilizing mechanisms and tend to reduce the probability of war. As Maoz and Russett put it, “There is something in the general makeup of democratic states that prevents them from fighting one another despite the fact that they are not less conflict-prone than nondemocracies” (1993:624).
Which factors precisely account for this peculiarity of democratic regimes? Researchers generally answer this question in one of two ways. Those who rely on normative models argue that democratic countries tend to export their political principles, such as the regulation of political competition; the settlement of conflict by peaceful means; the almost systematic recourse to compromise; the maintenance of spaces of freedom and power for all, including the conquered; the refusal to annihilate physically opponents and minorities; and the perspective of future victories for the losers. 12 Such norms ensure the psychological stability of all political actors, at the personal level as well as at the local, regional, and national levels. A virtuous circle is thereby created: The more citizens adhere to democratic norms, the more it is in their economic and financial interest to adhere to them and to avoid violent disputes. “Dependence on democratic norms tips rational cost-benefit calculations toward further support of those norms” (Maoz and Russett 1993:625).
Those who have devised structural analysis models contend that it is difficult for elected leaders to engage in militarized disputes. 13 Democratically elected leaders only rarely become warmongers because they must garner tremendous support (public opinion, institutions, dominant interest groups) for the war. As a rule, this is possible only in situations that are widely perceived as emergencies.
Both schools arrive at the same conclusion: democracies are better able to negotiate disputes than are other forms of government (Maoz and Abdolali 1989). As Dixon has reaffirmed in a recent study, “Democratic states locked in disputes are better equipped than others with the means for defusing conflict situations at an early stage before they have an opportunity to escalate to military violence” (1994:14).
The Myth of the African Exception
Can these theories be applied to African conflicts? Some writers think not. The exceptionality paradigm appears to be the dominant framework for understanding conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, most available works on the subject tend to stress the specificity of Africa’s historical background, invoking such notions as the “historicity proper” to African societies (Bayart 1989) so as to provide authenticity and a raison d’être to the conflicts and violent phenomena that have erupted over the past four decades. Yet this literature rests on questionable assumptions and shaky epistemological foundations.
True, it is not easy to classify the African continent. Its narrow, eccentric markets, which fall outside the confines of what Braudel (1979) has termed the “world-economy,” look like veritable fortresses. They are paradoxical: Regulations are endless but are not based on actual norms; networks are invariably aleatory; unstable structures and places abound. The complexity of the decisionmaking process, the multiplicity of social codes, and the mysterious designs of the governors quickly lead one to give up. The coarse exoticism of this indecipherable otherness lies at the heart of the cult of a mythical exceptionality and has disturbing overtones: The racism sometimes present in the celebration of the “virtues” of African specificity is all the more subtle in that it is inverted.
In spite of its strange rituals, Africa is not always resistant to theories; there are no particular ingredients conducive to a bellicose spirit in Africa (Deng and Zartman 1991). The aforementioned determinants of war and peace apply in all parts of the world. The social dynamics that create conflicts and lead to revolution (Brinton 1965; Brown 1994) are virtually identical to those described in this study. 14 Consequently, conflict resolution and prevention measures should be based on general principles that promote peace: real support for democratization processes and a better assessment of the balance of power between each country’s social actors. African heads of state endorsed such principles themselves in the Document de Kampala, adopted in 1991. One important passage reads:
The concept of security goes beyond military considerations; it encompasses all aspects of social life, notably the economic, political and social dimensions of individual, familial, community, local, and national life. The security of a nation must be interpreted in terms of the security of its citizens, of the satisfaction of their essential needs.... The absence of democracy that alone allows populations to participate freely in the management of public affairs, the denial of individual liberties, the abuses of religion, the preeminence given to military expenditures to the detriment of other sectors of national life, and the absence of appropriate administrative mechanisms to control the management of public funds are some of the deep-rooted causes of insecurity (O.U.A. 1992:8).
One can only regret that these accurate observations were not followed up with concrete actions.
Surviving Dreams and Nightmares
What can the international community do to help redirect disenchantment and resolve conflicts in Africa? How can the West help lighten the burden of broken dreams and unforgettable nightmares that incited poor peasants in Rwanda and elsewhere to follow blindly political opportunists who led them toward the brink? How can social disenchantment be reinvented positively? This section presents a few concrete measures to prevent violence that might be implemented by the international community.
I see several areas in which the intervention of international development agencies could prove effective. This intervention, however, requires that certain preconditions be met. First, policymakers must be willing to go beyond economism pure and simple, which until now has prevented them from exploring new avenues and methods of intervention. Second, the stated objective must not be to co-opt a few local elites into a so-called unified national government, but rather to convince ordinary citizens that peace is a strong economic asset and that the visible and invisible costs of violence go against their self-interests. Third, the prevention of conflicts must be placed within the larger framework of political and economic reforms aimed at consolidating democratic processes and affirming all dimensions of citizenship.
Of course, a separate methodological framework must be devised for each specific situation, but the seven following points should guide one’s course of action:
It is important to take into account the immediate and distant causes of conflicts:
Causes of conflicts in Africa
Given the diversity of causes, it is essential to develop both short- and long-term prevention strategies. I propose a few measures that might be taken by international organizations involved in the prevention of conflicts in Africa. These measures seek to forestall the usual causes of escalation.
Strategies for prevention
The tremendous challenge of dealing with disenchantment and potential violence in Africa has caused some analysts to question the effectiveness of all measures of “preventive diplomacy.” Stedman typifies this view: “Violent conflict of the type found in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda is a combination of the predictable fault lines in societies and the unpredictable world of individual and group decisions. The former adheres to the mechanical world of clocks; the latter, the complex world of clouds” (1995:16). Of course the present state of knowledge in the social sciences offers few certainties and does not allow one to venture into the realm of predictions: which is what conflict prevention theories implicitly do. Furthermore, the linear and teleological view of the world that is contained in some of these theories invites caution. But if it is true that hastily devised prevention measures may aggravate the very conflicts they are supposed to forestall, then it would be pure fatalism to accept calmly the prospect of the worst.
Empirical research devoted to the study of conflicts has shown that violent disputes erupt under certain precise conditions. The speed with which the military capabilities of potential belligerents evolve and the absence of stabilizing mechanisms to defuse the explosive rhetoric flowing from different sources of authority are among the most important (Kim and Morrow 1992). This confirms what Olson (1993) and others have written about the importance of democracy: Far from being a by-product of economic development, as recent theorists of authoritarianism have affirmed, democracy is an important factor in economic growth. 17 As such, it is a powerful tool for resolving social antagonisms.
Conclusion
Having reached the end of this study, I would say, somewhat surprisingly, that the old debate on how effective Western democratic models are in Africa is beside the point: the U.S. presidential system or the British parliamentary government could easily be transferred to any African nation provided the social actors involved in implementing these models were truly committed to setting up the proper institutional framework. Conversely, no system of government, however just or well suited to the cultural environment and historical background it may be, has a chance of succeeding in Africa as long as the various elite factions spend most of their time undermining institutions in order to serve the exclusive interests of the networks they claim to represent.
The success or failure of an imported model depends foremost on the will of those charged with its implementation. The pursuit of the balance of powers that legitimated and validated the presidential system in the United States and the parliamentary system in Great Britain is not fundamentally incompatible with the various social structures, modes of collective action, philosophical systems, or need for justice found in African societies today. This is all the more true in that “the [legal] principle of state sovereignty,” according to Badie, “does not hold up well to empirical evidence” (1992:17). Nations, peoples, and systems of thought are not discrete chemical substances—interdependence is now an obvious political and ideological reality.
Whether it is a matter of the political, the economic, or the social, the real issue is the capacity of the current elements of social change to increase the public’s involvement in political process. On the political chessboard, urban elites attempt to confiscate the democratic project, writing rules of the game guaranteeing that representatives of only the most turbulent groups will attain to positions of power. Everywhere there seems to be a consensus that the exercise of government belongs exclusively to elites who are chosen by co-optation. One of the reproaches leveled against leaders who are truly popular in Africa is that they draw in the masses: Not only is popularity suspect, it is said to constitute populism and to contain the seed of fanaticism and violence. The foreign decisionmaking bodies that heavily influence the pace of political change may “forgive” new African leaders their political ideas and gradually come to tolerate their presence on the political chessboard they have long controlled. However, new African leaders are harshly condemned by these bodies if their actions lead more citizens to take an interest in the management of state affairs. This is yet another paradox of contemporary Africa, where leaders have a greater need for legitimacy than do leaders elsewhere in order to alert their peoples to urgent problems as they arise.
The fact that the real power to generate ideas and manage society is held by a small group of people limits the cognitive framework in which solutions may be devised. Given the implosion of the state, the globalization of difficulties, and the effects of transnationalization, decisions concern all the more directly the fundamental levers of the economy (international commerce, capital flow, interest and exchange rates, etc.). The gulf between the political realm and the rest of society is so large that the concept of citizenship remains a slogan. The tendency to resort to violence in numerous countries is a simultaneous reflection of the people’s desire for revenge against illegitimate governments and of the governing elite’s inability to see what is really at stake. Recognizing this simple truth would be enough to move things forward, for Africa is no more cursed than any other part of the world.
Endnotes
Note 1: Basing his beliefs on statistical estimates, Powell thinks that institutional problems and the party system account for 13 percent of voter abstention in the United States and that 14 percent is attributable to administrative formalities. Back.
Note 2: Birnbaum (1975) traces the beginning of this idea to the early 1940s, when Karl Mannheim proclaimed “the crisis of values,” and shows how Raymond Aron’s hypothesis concerning the “suppression of the ideological debate” contributed to its development and how it began to be articulated clearly in the mid-1950s, when Edward Shils spoke of the end of the ideological age in Western industrialized nations. The same types of arguments are used in the less compelling “end of history” thesis put forth by Fukuyama (1992). Back.
Note 4: Mishan (1981) and others think that the expression collective goods should be used in place of public goods because it is more accurate and precise. Back.
Note 5: See, e.g., Miller (1982:107–109) and Rosen (1988), especially chs. 5–7. Back.
Note 6: This premise overgeneralizes somewhat, for it assumes that political well-being is conceived of and structured in the same way in all areas of the world, an idea I have elsewhere refuted (compare Monga 1996). Back.
Note 7: In Wittman’s view, the absence of monopolies, agents with good information, and limits on rent-seeking are the three main factors contributing to the success of the market economy. He writes: “Political and economic markets both work well. I show that democratic political markets are organized to promote wealth-maximizing outcomes, that these markets are highly competitive, and that political entrepreneurs are rewarded for efficient behavior” (1989:1395–1396). Stigler (1972) also held that political markets function in the same way as economic markets. Back.
Note 8: Twenty years ago, who would have thought that countries such as Singapore and Korea would figure among the most important in the world? Both Botswana and Côte d’Ivoire have the means to make the same politico-economic leap if the main local political actors decide to focus on this objective. Economic theories dealing with convergence (Barro and Sala-i-Martin 1992) and economic backwardness (Gerschenkron 1962) amply demonstrate that this is not a utopian idea. Back.
Note 9: One of the most popular election campaign themes in Africa is fierce criticism of international monetary institutions. This is explained not only by the social costs of structural adjustment programs but also by the widely held view that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund support the sitting authoritarian government, despite all their words about “good governance,” which strike people as nothing but demagoguery. Back.
Note 10: A substantial body of literature on this question exists in English. Researchers use, most notably, models drawn from game theory. See, e.g., Huth, Bennett, and Gelpi (1992); Morrow (1989); Levy (1983); Gurr (1980); and Stohl (1976). Back.
Note 11: See, e.g., Fischer, Hausman, Karasik, and Schelling (1994); and Fischer, Rodrik, and Tuma (1993). Back.
Note 12: Normative models date back to Kant. For an overview, see Doyle (1986). Back.
Note 13: See de Mesquita and Lalman (1986) and Rummel (1979). Back.
Note 14: See, e.g., Deng’s (1995) superb monograph on the war in Sudan. Back.
Note 15: Radio des Mille Collines, for example, was frightfully successful in igniting Rwanda in 1994 (compare Willame 1995). In many African countries today, tribal hatred and calumny are propagated by the “private” newspaper industry the government has set up as a defense against the other private press, the one they cannot control. Examples of such newspapers are Le Témoin and Le Patriote in Cameroon and Le Démocrate in Côte d’Ivoire. Back.
Note 16: Here again, the example of Rwanda is instructive. It is now clear that the reaction of the leaders of various factions to the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana poisoned the political climate. For a succinct account of this, see Awwad (1994). Conversely, the call for calm and moderation by Cameroon’s chief opposition leader, John Fru Ndi, no doubt allowed Cameroon to avoid bloodshed when the results of the rigged October 1992 presidential election were announced. Back.
Note 17: Wade (1990), for example, maintains that the Taiwanese government’s success in restructuring the economy is above all attributable to the inability of public opinion to influence and possibly block the implementation of necessary reforms. Przeworski and Limongi (1993) see no correlation between the type of government and economic growth, even though political institutions clearly affect the latter. Back.
The Anthropology of Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa
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