World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire

by Amy Chua

  In Kenya, for example, notwithstanding the disproportionate success of the Kikuyu, an overwhelming percentage of the country’s businesses—from car dealerships to the fish processing industry to the country’s largest corporations, hotels, and banks—are operated by Indians. (A notable exception is the small-scale manufacturing sector, which is dominated by black Kenyans.) “A tiny handful of Asians control the entire economy,” is the common, bitter view among black Kenyans. They “behave like colonizers,” and own “most of the companies, the big companies.” “The whole area is dominated by them. There is not one African. . . . They collude and make sure you go down.”23

  These statements reverberate with prejudice, and most Americans would probably be tempted to dismiss them as groundless stereotyping. Unfortunately, they hold more than a grain of truth. Kenya’s roughly seventy thousand Indians, less than 2 percent of the population, are in fact dramatically more affluent as a group than the vastly more numerous black Kenyans around them. While Kikuyu run Kenya’s tea and coffee plantations, “Asians” (as they are known) comprise most of the country’s merchant class and, partly because of their international connections, benefit extremely disproportionately from globalization and market liberalization. They live, clustered and endogamous, in relatively upscale Nairobi neighborhoods like Westlands, where sari-clad women devouring the latest issue of India Today are driven around in Peugeots by black Kenyan chauffeurs. The Indian community has been a major source of funding for both the Kenyatta and Moi regimes. Most recently an unfortunate number of Indians have been willing to act as frontmen for Moi and his cronies. Moi currently co-owns extensive businesses with several Indian tycoons.24

  It is often suggested—not only by Kenyans but also by Westerners—that Indian economic dominance in Kenya is due to their manipulation of the political process as opposed to any superior entrepreneurialism.25 There is no doubt that some Indian businessmen are thickly mired in the corrupt cronyism of the Moi regime. The infamous “Goldenberg case,” involving allegations that Indian tycoon Kamlesh Pattni siphoned off $400 million from Kenya’s Central Bank with the connivance of government officials, has been in litigation since 1994. Nevertheless, the suggestion that political cronyism is the sole or even principal explanation of Indian economic dominance in Kenya overstates the case.

  Unlike Africa’s white settlers, who came over with guns and the might of Europe behind them, most of Kenya’s Indians descend from “coolie” laborers imported by the British in the late 1800s to build the Uganda-Kenya railway. The descendants of these laborers worked as struggling artisans, clerks, or traders. They rose from destitution not through political favoritism, but rather despite discriminatory restrictions by colonial whites on one side and intense animosity from native Africans on the other. As early as 1924 there were a surprising number of Indian doctors and lawyers, almost all self-made. Indeed, in the same year Indians already controlled a stunning 80 to 90 percent of Kenya’s commercial trade. Few of these early Indian businessmen had anything to do with politics.

  Today in Kenya, not only Moi’s Indian cronies are successful. Indian merchants, famous for their extreme thriftiness and tiny profit margins, dominate commerce at every level of society. The same is true in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar in Tanzania, Uganda’s capital Kampala, and Rwanda’s capital Kigali.26

  Throughout East Africa over the last two decades, the market reforms and globally oriented policies called for by the World Bank and IMF have starkly magnified the economic dominance of the region’s insular and entrepreneurial Indian minorities. In Tanzania, for example, the turn from socialism to markets in the 1980s led to the reemergence of the Indian minority as a powerful economic force. Majority fears that these “outsiders” would “overwhelm and take over everything” led to bitter anti-Indian brutality. Similarly, Zambia’s “very greedy” Indians, who were once accused of purchasing the body parts of mutilated African children, were targeted in bloody mass riots in the mid-1990s. In one furious participant’s words, “Indians are the ones getting the chances. They’ve got millions and millions.”27

  In Kenya, after a failed military coup in 1982, the market-dominant Indian minority was confronted with the unleashed hatred of some of Kenya’s 16 million African majority. Looters and rioters targeted Indian shops and businesses, smashed what could not be taken, and raped at least twenty Indian women. Today, with Kenya’s Indian community prospering visibly from global markets—and President Moi’s billionaire Indian cronies openly looting the country—anti-Indian hostility continues to grow, occasionally exploding in ethnic riots and mass violence. As African opposition leaders intensify their ethnic hatemongering—Kenneth Matiba has promised to expel the Asians from Kenya if he becomes president28—Kenya’s Indian minority finds itself uncomfortably dependent on the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian President Moi. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has for years been calling reflexively for more markets and more democracy, not just in Kenya but in all of Africa.

  Whereas Indians are known as the “Jews of East Africa,” the Lebanese are the preeminent market-dominant minority in West Africa, a term that refers loosely to eleven countries along Africa’s Atlantic coast (Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) and three inland countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger).

  Sierra Leone offers an example that is surprisingly parallel to the Angolan tragedy. Most Americans have some knowledge of the brutal rebel war in Sierra Leone, which has been called “the worst place on earth” and “the darkest corner in Africa.”29 A few may know that the rebels were chopping off children’s limbs principally to gain control of the country’s lucrative diamond fields. But who ran Sierra Leone’s diamond industry for years before the rebels took it over? A tiny handful of principally Lebanese dealers.

  The extent of Lebanese market dominance in Sierra Leone—historically and at present—is astounding. The first Lebanese (then called “Syrians”) arrived in Sierra Leone around 1895, probably at the port city of Freetown, today the nation’s capital. Unlike the Europeans, who were unable or unwilling to penetrate the bush, the Lebanese headed straight for the interior of the country. Before long Lebanese traders could be found on every street corner peddling mirrors, beads, pomatum, iron pocketknives, jewelry, and cheap imported textiles to their African customers.

  The Lebanese did not just sell. They also bought produce (particularly rice and palm products) from African farmers, which they held until prices rose and then transported and sold to European firms. With their profits from street trading, the Lebanese opened shops. Displacing rival indigenous traders (mostly so-called Creoles, from the coast) was easy. The Lebanese worked from dawn to dusk and had much lower overheads. They spent practically nothing on lodging, often sleeping on the same counter where meals were prepared and eaten. Moreover, because of their reputation for industriousness and commercial acumen, European firms were disposed to grant Lebanese long-term credit, an advantage they exploited to the hilt.30

  By the 1920s, the Lebanese had established themselves as indispensable middlemen, linking European firms located in Freetown with African consumers and producers in the interior. By the 1930s, the Lebanese controlled the country’s road transport industry. By the late 1950s, when Sierra Leone was still an English protectorate (independence would come in 1961), Lebanese middlemen dominated the two most lucrative sectors of the economy: agriculture and diamond dealing.31

  The perception of Lebanese economic dominance at this time was vividly captured in Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter, set in a “West African coastal town” that is almost certainly Freetown. (Greene worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone during World War II.) The place is described by one English character to a newcomer as follows:

  “This is the original Tower of Babel,” Harris said. “West Indians, Africans, real Indians, Syrians, Englishmen, Scotsmen in the Office of Works, Irish priests, French priests, Alsat
ian priests.”

  “What do the Syrians do?”

  “Make money. They run all the stores up-country and most of the stores here. Run diamonds too.”

  “I suppose there’s a lot of that.”

  “The Germans pay a high price.”32

  By the early 1990s, on the eve of civil war, the Lebanese—not even 1 percent of the population—dominated all the most productive sectors of the economy, including diamonds and gold, finance, retail, construction, and real estate. During the war, rebel forces—rumored to be funded by Liberia’s president Charles Taylor, who in turn is said to be funded by the Lebanese Liberian businessman Talal El-Ndine—took over the diamond mines for two years, with disastrous economic effects.33 Although many Lebanese left during these years, the tiny, internationally connected Lebanese merchant community in Sierra Leone continues to be the country’s most dynamic economic force.

  As the country struggles to recover, black Sierra Leoneans’ feelings toward the Lebanese are decidedly ambivalent. I had the good fortune recently of meeting with a group of five native Sierra Leoneans. The group’s leader, whom I’ll call Mr. Michaels, was a prominent Freetown lawyer and law professor. The other four were his adulating and exceptionally smart students. All were visiting New Haven as part of an exchange program sponsored by Yale Law School’s human rights clinic. We met in a student coffee bar.

  Filled with ghastly visions of amputees, child armies, and villagers burned alive, I was struck by the optimism of the Sierra Leoneans I met in New Haven. Putting on a good face for the outside world was clearly a priority.

  After discussing at length the latest cease-fire with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the ongoing U.N.-supervised truth and reconciliation process, I turned to the question of economics. “So, who’s rich in your country?” I asked.

  “Anyone who works hard,” one student immediately answered. (English is the official language in Sierra Leone.)

  “Not just corrupt people?”

  “No, this is not Nigeria.” They all laughed—except for Mr. Michaels, who had a lot of gravitas for a thirty-six-year-old.

  “How is Sierra Leone’s educational system?” I asked. According to the United Nations, nearly 70 percent of Sierra Leone’s population is illiterate.

  “We used to be the Athens of West Africa,” they replied, almost collectively. “The best students from Kenya, Nigeria, everywhere in Africa came to study.” Fourah Bay College, they reminded me several times, was established in 1827. “Of course, education has taken a nosedive since the war. But we are on the way back up again.”

  There was more optimism, on almost every issue. When I asked whether some groups in Sierra Leone prospered more than others, Mr. Michaels shook his head, almost as if he disapproved of my question. “Tribalism is not a serious problem in Sierra Leone,” he replied. “We are not like Kenya. We are all first Sierra Leoneans.” Also from Mr. Michaels: “Sierra Leoneans are a very open-minded, hospitable people. We treat foreign investors better than our own kinsmen.” He even said, although 75,000 Sierra Leoneans have been killed and 30,000 maimed in the civil war, “Our country is a land of opportunity. Our constitution bars any form of discrimination.”

  When I specifically mentioned the Lebanese, however, a more complex picture emerged. “What is the status of the Lebanese today?” I asked.

  “Oh, they dominate business. They are very rich,” was the uniform reply.

  But the Lebanese no longer dominated the diamond industry?

  No, the students explained. The diamond fields were now under the control of the United Nations. “Of course,” they added, “the Lebanese are still smuggling.”

  Was there much resentment or discrimination against the Lebanese minority? I asked.

  The students found this question exasperating. “You have it backwards,” they replied. (Mr. Michaels kept quiet.) “It is the Lebanese who are not equitable toward Sierra Leoneans. They feel they are better. Their community is closed. They attend private Lebanese schools. These schools are very expensive, and almost no Sierra Leoneans can afford them.”

  But didn’t Sierra Leone still have laws discriminating against Lebanese? I asked them about section 27(4) of their constitution, which essentially authorizes discrimination against “non-native” citizens of Sierra Leone, including ethnic Lebanese who were born in Sierra Leone and whose families have lived there for four generations.

  “It is the Lebanese who discriminate against Sierra Leoneans,” one of the students repeated while the others nodded. “For example, no Lebanese woman would ever marry a (black) Sierra Leonean man. I have never heard of a single case. Some Lebanese men do marry Sierra Leonean women, but those women are then treated as second-class citizens. Sometimes their children are even taken away from them!”

  The same student then added: “But I like the Lebanese. I have many Lebanese friends, and I discuss these issues honestly with them.”

  Compared to the reviled soldiers of the RUF, the Lebanese today are in most Sierra Leoneans’ relatively good graces; the psychotic brutality of the rebels in many ways unified the country. Nevertheless, in postwar Sierra Leone the Lebanese remain the country’s principal commercial group, controlling access to most international capital. Although not all Lebanese are prosperous, there are several highly visible Lebanese tycoons, and as a group they are starkly disproportionately wealthy. Meanwhile, despite the optimism of the Sierra Leoneans I met in New Haven, 80 percent of Sierra Leoneans continue to live in desperate, disease-ridden poverty. In 2001, the United Nations listed Sierra Leone as the country with the lowest human development index ranking in the world, behind Bangladesh and Rwanda.34

  A similar dynamic holds throughout West Africa, which includes some of the world’s poorest countries. In The Gambia—which sits in the middle of Senegal—the tiny Lebanese community owns nearly all the stores and restaurants in the capital Banjul and controls the groundnut industry, the country’s predominant cash crop. The Gambia’s tourism industry is dominated by foreign investors, mainly from the United Kingdom (although Russians have recently come onto the scene). In relatively prosperous Côte d’Ivoire, the Lebanese (only 150,000 strong) and French multinationals jointly control the modern economy while 65 percent of the indigenous population of 14 million live in extreme rural poverty. Similarly, in Benin, Ghana, and Liberia, tiny numbers of Lebanese, along with a handful of European expatriates and foreign investors, dominate the most advanced, lucrative sectors of the private economy.

  In many of these countries the Lebanese are often regarded as no different from the old colonialists. Living in isolated and heavily guarded villas, they zoom through the streets in fancy cars and glimmering motorcycles while most Africans drive second- and third-hand rusting mopeds. Outside of Sierra Leone many Lebanese businesses are of relatively recent vintage, owned by tycoons in Beirut who send their youngest children to cut their management teeth on the African investments. The youngsters play for a few years, indulging in various excesses, before returning to test their new skills in a business back home. Needless to say, none of this wins them much favor among the locals, even those who chauffeur and guard them.

  Meanwhile, vast numbers of West Africans live so far outside the modern economy that privatization, trade liberalization, and foreign investment have virtually no effect on them whatsoever. Compared to the still largely traditional West African majorities around them, the Lebanese are far better educated (usually abroad or in private Lebanese schools) and have vastly superior access to capital and distribution networks. Sometimes collaborating with, sometimes competing against European investors, the market-dominant Lebanese are West Africa’s link to, and principal beneficiaries of, global capitalism.

  Colonialism and Market-Dominant Minorities

  It is especially appropriate in the context of Africa to add a note about colonialism. From the British in India to the Portuguese in Angola to the Spaniards in upper Peru, all the Western colonizers were essentially market-dom
inant minorities: prosperous, more advanced outsider groups surrounded by generally impoverished and exploited indigenous masses. Indeed, the colonial period, with its enormous cross-border, cross-ocean capital flows, was in many ways the first modern wave of globalization. Like today’s market-dominant minorities, the colonialists profited enormously and wildly disproportionately from international trade and what is sometimes misleadingly referred to as “colonial laissez-faire policies.”

  The evils of colonialism are well documented, particularly the shameless exploitation of natural resources and native labor. The arguable benefits of colonization are also well documented: the establishment of infrastructure and in some selective cases, education for the colonized populations.

  The only point I wish to highlight here is that there are important links between colonialism and the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities. Not only were the colonialists themselves market-dominant minorities, but colonial divide-and-conquer policies favored certain groups over others, exacerbating ethnic wealth imbalances and fomenting group tensions. Indeed, in some cases these policies may have created “ethnic identities” and “ethnic differences” where they previously did not exist. Today, moreover, most starkly in southern Africa but also in Latin America and elsewhere, many market-dominant minorities are the descendants of former colonizers. Thus, the pervasive existence of market-dominant minorities throughout the developing world is one of colonialism’s most overlooked and most destructive legacies.

  Africa and Globalization

  In the West, Africa is often seen as a vast continent of incomprehensible tribalism, endemic corruption, and almost intrinsic misery and violence. Cast in this way, Africa is irredeemable, its problems unique and uniquely insoluble.

  But Africa fits solidly into a much larger global pattern; the same basic processes that are destabilizing Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Russia are operating in Africa, too. In Africa, as in virtually every other region of the non-Western world, market-dominant minorities control virtually all the most valuable and advanced sectors of the modern economy, monopolizing access to wealth and global markets, and producing seething, often unmobilized ethnic resentment and hatred among the indigenous African majorities around them.