The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

  Despite all these troubles, there were signs, immediately after the ceasefire, that things might be getting better in Angola. Exhausted and hungry rebels surrendered and handed in their weapons. Angola’s roads suddenly became safe from ambushes, which allowed families separated by the war to hop onto rusty minibuses and reunite. Commerce started to flow again. Trucks began carrying corn and peppers from rural areas to coastal cities and fish and electrical goods in the opposite direction. Prices in some towns halved. In Luanda, carjackings suddenly increased, a sign that there was now somewhere to drive the stolen vehicles.

  African wars usually end for much the same reasons that wars elsewhere do. Either one side wins, as happened in Angola, or the two sides tire of fighting and try to resolve their differences through dialogue, as happened in Mozambique.

  Outsiders can play a useful role. Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, and Ketumile Masire, the former president of Botswana, have both worked tirelessly as neutral intermediaries between warring groups in Burundi and Congo. Western countries sometimes provide an incentive for peace by withholding aid from governments that fight and showering it on those that stop. Such tactics may have helped to persuade Ethiopia and Eritrea to cease shooting in 2000 and Rwanda and Uganda not to go to war with each other in 2001. Campaigners against “blood diamonds” may also have helped by prompting the more reputable parts of the global diamond industry to adopt, in 2003, a system of certificates to keep stones from war zones out of Western jewelery shops.

  If they really wanted to, Western governments could probably stop most African wars simply by sending in their own vastly superior armed forces. But they don’t, because however much they may deny it, since the Cold War ended they have had no big strategic interest in Africa. The continent produces little that foreigners cannot buy elsewhere. Voters in rich countries may feel compassion for the starving, but they rarely have strong views about which side deserves their support in any given African war.

  Occasionally, when television cameras publicize some particularly awful tragedy, Western consciences are pricked and Western troops are sent to Africa on what are called “humanitarian” missions. President Bill Clinton sent American soldiers to protect food-aid deliveries to Somalia in 1993, but when eighteen were killed and their naked corpses dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, the rest were pulled out. The experience probably helped to persuade the Clinton administration not to dispatch troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda the following year.

  With more political will, humanitarian interventions can work. In 2000, a mere 800 British troops turned the tide of Sierra Leone’s ghastly civil war in a matter of days. The Revolutionary United Front, a band of rebels notorious for cutting off hands and slapping their owners’ faces with them, looked set to overrun Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown. The British stopped them and, with the help of a larger number of UN peacekeepers, pacified the country. Two years later, Sierra Leone was calm enough to hold an election. But that calm is enforced by up to 17,500 blue helmets, and no one knows what will happen if they leave, which they are bound to do eventually.

  For the cold, hard truth is that the world’s great powers no longer want colonies. Although a few controversialists advocate it and a few conspiracy theorists think it is already happening, there is not the slightest chance that Britain or any other Western country will try once more to rule Africa. Western governments are reluctant to sacrifice even a single soldier to resolve the continent’s feuds.

  So Africans will have to solve their own problems. Many African leaders realize this, and some have sent troops to try to keep the peace in other African states. Nigeria dispatched soldiers to Sierra Leone and Liberia; South Africa sent some to Burundi. But no African country is powerful enough to impose peace on any but the tiniest neighbor.

  To stay peaceful in the long term, countries need governments that serve their citizens instead of robbing them and that can be removed without violence. Not only must these governments be elected; they must be elected under rules that more or less everyone agrees to be fair. Countries need constitutions that provide reasonable protection for all citizens, regardless of whether they support the ruling party. Governments must respect the constitutions under the terms of which they govern and should stand down when they are voted out.

  This may sound like a tall order, but it is not impossible. South Africa managed it. In 1991, the last white government, under the presidency of F. W. de Klerk, organized a “Convention for a Democratic South Africa” (CODESA), at which representatives of twenty-five political parties and various anti-apartheid groups hammered out the framework for a new constitution and set a date for all-race elections. No party was excluded – though some ultra-nationalist white parties boycotted the discussions. CODESA’s decisions were binding on government, and de Klerk bowed to them. The intermittent fighting between anti-apartheid guerrillas and the government ceased, and full-scale civil war, which many predicted, was averted.

  A similar procedure could help resolve other conflicts, too. Ghanaian scholar George Ayittey argues that big, inclusive national conferences ought to succeed in Africa because they mesh with pre-colonial tradition.

  When a crisis erupted in an African village, the chief and the elders would summon a village meeting. There, the issue was debated by the people until a consensus was reached. During the debate, the chief usually made no effort to manipulate the outcome or sway public opinion. Nor were there bazooka-wielding rogues intimidating or instructing people on what they should say. People expressed their ideas openly and freely without fear of arrest.15

  Such nation-building conferences can only work, however, if the men with the bazookas agree to participate and to be bound by the decisions that emerge.

  And even if rebel leaders agree to make peace, their foot-soldiers are sometimes reluctant to disarm. A freelance photographer called Sven Torfinn once sent me a snap from eastern Congo that encapsulated the difficulty of peace-making. It shows a young Mai-Mai warrior with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder. Lashed to the magazine is his only inoffensive possession: a yellow toothbrush. A boy whose only livelihood is his gun may be slow to lay it down.

  3. NO TITLE

  Why Africans need property rights

  When I asked the nomad how much his house cost, he had no idea what I was talking about. He looked at me quizzically and explained, as if to a fool, that he had built it himself, with materials he had at hand. The walls were of sticks, woven together and curved into a dome. For added protection against rain and sandstorms, he had laid animal hides over the top and skillfully lashed them in place. He could not put a price on the place, because it would never have occurred to him to sell it. When he moved away in search of better pasture for his cows, he simply dismantled his house, loaded it on to a camel’s back, and took it with him. I had asked a stupid question, perhaps because I had house prices on the brain. My wife and I were trying to buy a place in London that month, which was such a huge undertaking that it was hard to think of anything else.

  In the midst of this domestic maelstrom, I was dispatched to cover a peace conference in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. None of the important delegates (all parties to Congo’s civil war) showed up, so I abandoned the conference and flew off into the desert to write a story about food shortages instead. I went to Gode, a small town in the Ogaden, the arid space that separates Ethiopia from Somalia. The people there were mainly ethnic Somalis: statuesque nomads in brilliant purple, green, and orange shawls. They were as courteous as they were proud. When Askar Ahmed, the acting provincial governor, and his entourage came to dinner with me and some UN workers, they arrived on the dot at 7 p.m., chatted seriously over the chicken and rice, said “thank you,” and left by 8:30.

  For all their dignity, however, the nomads were not doing well. A drought the previous year had killed perhaps 5,000 of them. A swift airlift of food aid saved thousands more. But the governor told me that the crisis was far from o
ver. Most people’s cattle and goats had died during the drought, so they had no way of coping if the rains failed again. With no beasts to herd, the nomads clustered around the town in their portable shacks, hoping to grow enough corn to sell, buy some more cattle, and resume their wandering, pastoral way of life. For this they needed water, of which there was little to be had. Just to get enough to drink people took potentially mortal risks.

  Standing on the shore of the murky brown river that flowed past Gode, I saw a young woman throwing stones vigorously into the water. I could not figure out what she was doing until my guide explained that there was a crocodile lurking beneath the ripples. The young woman needed to scare it off before she could fill her plastic jerry can. Then she turned and started to walk home. It was so hot that I could barely stand up, but she seemed unruffled as she put the heavy jerry can on her head and turned her feet towards the horizon. Her home was too far off to be visible. In fact, nothing was visible in the direction she was heading, nothing but miles of searing sand.

  The nomadic lifestyle is probably doomed. Itinerant pastoralists need a lot of space to keep their livestock alive. Crop-growing societies can feed a much denser population on the same patch of territory, which is why sedentary folk outnumber nomadic herders everywhere on earth. Sheer weight of numbers has allowed tribes of farmers, over the last few thousand years, to grab the best land from nomads and push them into the driest, least fertile quarters of the planet.1 The process is almost complete. Nomadic hunter-gatherers are almost extinct, and nomadic herders have been squashed into such harsh patches of terrain that they are increasingly forced to mix their traditional livelihood of cattle-rearing with a bit of sowing and reaping. It keeps them alive, but many find the idea of putting down permanent roots repellent. Hence the nomad’s bewilderment when I asked him, in my intrusive journalistic way, how much his house was worth.

  Intrusive though it was, the question was important. One of the reasons that Africa is so poor is that most Africans are unable to turn their assets into liquid capital. In the West, the most common way to do this is to borrow money using a house as security. This is how most American entrepreneurs get started, and without such loans America would be much less dynamic and rich than it is. But most Africans cannot do the same thing because even if they own their homes they usually do not have the title deeds to prove it. And since they cannot prove it, banks will not accept their homes as collateral for a loan. Africans are thus deprived of capital – the lifeblood of capitalism.

  Somali nomads are an extreme example, but even the most settled people in Africa, as in much of the developing world, do not usually own the land they live on, at least not in the formal, documented way that Emma and I own our home in London. Indeed, most economic activity in Africa is unrecorded. The man selling fruit at the traffic lights in Lusaka is not registered as a grocer. The minibus driver who brakes suddenly in your path and nearly causes you to crash takes his fares in cash and files no tax returns. Subsistence farmers grow most of the starchy food in Africa but eat most of it themselves, barter much of the rest, and make no impression on the continent’s fledgling stock exchanges.

  Economists tend to think of the informal economy as a marginal phenomenon, of interest only to missionaries, aid workers, and the police. But in most African countries, the informal economy is larger than the formal one. Barely one African in ten lives in a formal house with title deeds, and only one African worker in ten holds a formal job. The remaining nine tenths are usually ignored.

  This is a mistake. The poor have assets – plenty of them. In towns, houses as flimsy and biodegradable as a nomad’s are the exception, not the rule. Many Africans toil for years to save enough to build brick-and-timber homes in the shanty towns of Nairobi or Cotonou. Since there are so many of them, their houses are collectively worth a great deal of money. But since they do not formally own them, they cannot use them as collateral.

  According to Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, the total value of Africans’ informal urban dwellings in 1997 was $580 billion. The value of rural land which African farmers ploughed or grazed their cattle on, but did not formally own, he estimated at $390 billion. This is a phenomenal sum. It adds up to almost a trillion dollars. To put this in perspective, a trillion dollars is roughly three times the continent’s entire annual gross domestic product. In 1998, Africa attracted net foreign direct investment equivalent to less than a hundredth of this.

  The failure to extend formal property rights to the bulk of the population is not a uniquely African problem. It is a feature of all poor countries. Include the rest of the developing world, and the total value of dead capital is over $9 trillion, according to de Soto. Third World leaders wander rich-country capitals begging for aid and investment. All the while, they fail to notice a much larger source of potential wealth at home. “In the midst of their own poorest neighborhoods and shanty towns,” writes de Soto, “there are trillions of dollars, all ready to be put to use if only the mystery of how assets are transformed into live capital can be unravelled.”2

  To investigate these ideas, I went to Malawi, a country I picked because it is peaceful, stable, off the beaten track, and fearfully poor. The capital, Lilongwe, is leafy and sleepy. By day, sunlight bounces off a million palm fronds. By night, the city is so dark you would not believe you were in a city. I don’t think I saw a single working street lamp, although a couple of restaurants cast a faint light on the crater-ridden sidewalk.

  Lilongwe’s grander buildings were largely paid for by the old South African regime, to reward the late Malawian dictator, Hastings Banda, for not supporting sanctions. Banda was unusual among African leaders in that he refused to condemn apartheid. But in other respects he was a typical dictator. He murdered his opponents, grabbed whole industries for himself, and started a youth movement that was somewhere between the Boy Scouts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts. As he entered his nineties, he started to lose control. In 1994, he succumbed to pressure to allow elections. Malawi is now more democratic – but not much richer.

  My first destination was a shanty town called Mtandire, not far from the capital. I hired a big Toyota with plenty of clearance, cajoled a civil servant to skip out of work and act as interpreter, and set off bright and early. The roads in Mtandire were unpaved, bumpy, and wet. Corn sprouted in every backyard. Cars were so rare that children waved excitedly as we drove by, and chickens fearlessly blocked our path. A slum in one of the poorest countries on the world’s poorest continent: you would expect the people who live there to be very poor indeed. You certainly would not expect to find a large store of hidden wealth in Mtandire.

  Killing two goats with one loan

  The meaty scent of goat stew hung in the air. This delicacy, with its rich gravy mopped up with handfuls of nshima (a kind of sticky corn paste), is served at Malawian weddings, or indeed almost any other celebration. The lumps of goat-on-the-bone are chewy but worth the effort. Malawians love goat stew, which is why Grace and John Tarera’s goat-slaughtering business was thriving.

  The Tareras bought goats from farmers, chopped them up, and sold chunks at the nearest market. Demand was brisk, and they wanted to expand the business. But they lacked capital. Grace Tarera told me she thought they needed about 20,000 kwacha ($250). This may not sound like much, but in Malawi, where the average annual income is only about $200, it can take years to raise such a sum.

  I asked Grace Tarera how much her house was worth. The question meant something: Malawian slum-dwellers do buy and sell houses. The Tareras had bought a piece of land five years before and thrown up a sturdy brick bungalow, fussily furnished with lacy tablecloths and painted a restful shade of light blue. This pleasant structure was worth about 25,000 kwacha, she reckoned – a figure which tallied with what other people in Mtandire told me their places were worth. Since this was more than the sum the Tareras wanted to expand their goat-slaughtering business, surely they could use the house as security to raise the necessary cash? No, they couldn
’t, because they had no formal title deed.

  The Tareras’ house, like all the others in Mtandire, is built on “customary” land, which means that the plot’s previous owners had no formal title to it. The land was simply part of a field their family had cultivated for generations. About two thirds of the land in Malawi is owned this way. People usually till the land their parents did. If there is a dispute about boundaries, the village chief adjudicates. If a family offends gravely against the rules of the tribe, the chief can take their land away and give it to someone else. In effect, the chief holds all the land in trust for the tribe, as kings did in feudal Europe.

  The system worked well enough when Malawians were all farmers and there was plenty of land to go around. But it is ill-suited to a crowded urban setting. As people flock to Lilongwe in search of jobs, they increasingly settle on the farmland that surrounds the city. Peasants are happy to sell them plots, but informally. Would-be buyers and sellers approach the local chief, who confirms that the seller owns the land he is selling and gives him permission to sell it. The contract may be oral, or it may be written in one of the local languages and signed by the chief. The chief often takes a cut – anything from a modest 5 percent to an exorbitant 40 percent.

  This was how John and Grace Tarera bought the land beneath their house. They have a contract signed by the local chief, but no bank will accept it as collateral because it is not enforceable in a court of law. Rather, it is an expression of traditional law, which is usually unwritten, unpredictable, and dependent on the chief’s whim. The chief may be a wise, just, and consistent fellow. But the bank does not know this. So the Tareras’ house is dead capital. They own it, but they cannot make its value work for them.