“The Enemy Within” or “Look, Mom: Proof That I’ve Been Reading”

A common thread common running through much of the reading, both assigned and personal, that I’ve digested since arriving has been a sustained, biting critique of the political elite of post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa. The main elements of the attack are as follows. The African state is defined by neopatrimonialism (pervasive patronage). Bratton and van de Walle writing on the “Third Wave” of democracy that resulted in multi-party elections in several African nations in the early 90s, argued, “State elites in Africa have sought political power primarily to obtain and defend economic benefits, to the point that they have blocked private accumulation by independent groups in society thus undermining the entire project of economic development.” Another scholar (Sklar) has asserted that accessing political power has been the primary means of class formation in Africa. African scholars have been no less acerbic in their criticism. Mamdani claimed that the post-independence state de-racialized but didn’t democratize. I think the most damning indictment has been the call for a “second independence.” Petals of Blood and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born transform this criticism into great, if not exactly uplifting, fiction. My understanding is that Fanon writes along these lines as well.
Why didn’t the idealism of the independence struggle translate into good post-independence governance? First of all, I’m not prepared to endorse such a sweeping generalization. Africa is not one big country. We can’t just pay lip service to the diversity here. At a minimum, if we’re going to speak about Africa as a whole, we at least need to qualify our statements.

But why generally did elites look first to consolidate power and second to development? I know the answer that I don’t like. I’ve read/heard an argument that culture has a role to play in all of this, and I’m extremely wary of that one. The idea is that a “big man” has expectations to take care of his kinship network, and these social obligations are carried into the political realm. This hypothesis was advanced by a student in my sociology class and seemed to be favorably received. I specifically asked, “What do I tell my friends back home when I tell them about that argument and they say, ‘Of course. Africans are corrupt.’ I still have more reading to do on this, but here’s my preliminary answer. Colonialism destroyed and distorted indigenous political institutions, many of which had checks and balances interwoven into them. Huntington also notes that modernization happened in the developing world a lot faster than it did in the West. The rapidity of social change further dissolved indigenous institutions before new ones could arise. Institutional weakness opens the door to corruption.

So to state that response as an answer to the above question: I’m inclining more towards the “perverse incentives” argument that institutions constraining the top echelon of government are extremely weak (in large part because colonialism vested absolute power in individuals at all levels of government) which means opportunities to derive rents (for corruption) are manifold, and the executive needs those rents to maintain power because of the deep, often non cross-cutting cleavages in many of these nations (ethnicity and rural/urban).

This set of arguments should be put alongside dependency and modernization theories, which I will post on soon. So just withhold judgment for a bit. In the mean time read Mamdani, Citizen/Subject; van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis; and Young, The African Colonial State in Historical Perspective.

Campus Sunset After the Rain

Kick Polio Out of Ghana

On Saturday I had the privilege to participate in an iconic Rotary event: polio immunization. Rotary has dedicated itself to eradicating polio from the world. It has mobilized considerable resources for the effort and perhaps even more importantly brought considerable attention to the opportunity to ensure that no child ever has to lose her life or ability to walk to this scourge. I joined another Ambassadorial Scholar and two Rotarians from the Rotary Club of Accra in a neighborhood of southern Accra for the last day of immunizations. Most of the children had already received the oral vaccine, deworming tablet, and Vitamin A dosage at their schools on Thursday and Friday. Led by three volunteers from the area, we moved from house to house “mopping up” any children who didn’t have the tell tale purple ink stain on their left pinky finger.

I would never have been able to get as intimate look at the communities we visited without this program. At the same time, I did feel a bit uncomfortable at times tramping into people’s homes and looking around to “see how they live.” I have no aspirations to be a poverty tourist. I suppose I can justify my presence there by sharing it with you. Life is difficult for many in these communities. They are literally on the city’s margins, in this case the southern margin, next to the coast. Mothers were genuinely happy to see us. No one questioned the value of the service or hesitated to have her child vaccinated.

I was glad to see that Rotary’s polio vaccination initiative had really transformed over the years into a true partnership with the Ghanaian government. A local government clinic provided much of the logistical support for the vaccination. I’ve been doing research on aid and debt forgiveness, and too often the provision of a key public good like health or education by a foreign or private donor ends up eroding government capacity. Because the government can depend on the private sector to provide the service, it diverts its resources to other endeavors. See van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-1999 if you’re interested. That did not appear to be the case here. The Rotarians whom we accompanied told us that polio has become exceedingly rare in Ghana, the last recorded infection incurring a few years ago.

Polio Vaccination in Mamprodi

The Fleet Feet of Akuafo Hall

White Lightning Strikes University of Ghana. 37 Escape, Barely.

That's the top headline in all of the national media outlets today. Yesterday the University of Ghana held its interhall 12 kilometer cross-country race. Though I live in a graduate hostel, I've been training early, early in the morning with a group from an undergraduate dormitory, Akuafo Hall, laboremus et sapiamus.

I am proud to report that despite difficult conditions including heat, hills, and many faster, more athletic runners I persevered and came in first. First of all international students running in the race. First of all masters students running in the race. First of out of the 10 runners who finished last. So just 37 other runners barely finished ahead of me by only a matter of tens of minutes. So you can see my hearty dinner of fufu and goat meat was well deserved. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my fans and to announce my retirement from long distance running while I am at the top of my field - my field consisting of other slow, American, African Studies students.

Bridge Over the River Volta

Parlez vous francais? Non. Wote Twi? Daabi. Do you speak English? I thought so…

I’m learning as I go on a number of fronts, not the least of which is language. Soon after arriving, I learned my first Twi phrase: eti sen? (ehtee sayn, how are you?) to which the appropriate response is eye (ay-yay, fine). I can’t reproduce Twi orthography on this keyboard so you’ll have to accept the anglicized version. After starting strong, my Twi vocabulary building entered a drastic recession, which was especially unfortunate given how little there was to recede from. At the university, everyone speaks English. You hear people conversing in Twi and other languages with regularity, but no one has trouble understanding you or (seems to) holds it against you if you use English. So instead I focused on French.

French will serve a few purposes. Most practically, I’m planning on traveling to Cameroon over the winter holiday. I may want to work in Francophone Africa at some point, so brushing up my very dusty French skills which were never very well polished to begin with seemed like a logical strategy. Additionally, the French Club is very active here, so I’ve used that as an opportunity to meet and interact with other students. My French is improving slowly, but I was reminded that I still have a long way to go the other night when I attended a lecture on writers of the African diaspora delivered by a professor from the Sorbonne. I thought I understood or had at least previously heard 75% of the words he was using, but I was considerably less successful in piecing together their meaning. So I have a few more hours to devote to Radio France Internationale and the works of Leopold Sedar Senghor.

Recently, I’ve realized that although I may not require Twi to survive in Accra, by not studying it, I’m missing something important. My catalyst to start learning was the woman who sells me porridge in the morning. Every day, she would greet me in Twi and then throw out a few extra lines with an expectant look on her face. I felt like she was testing to see how serious I was about being here. I’m serious about being here, so I tracked down a copy of “A Comprehensive course in Twi (Asante)” with the accompanying cassette. I’ve been devoting a little time each day to teaching myself. It’s already made me feel much more connected to this place. The benefits have been, and I expect will continue to be, small, piecemeal, and realized over the long term. And that’s ok with me.

My biggest linguistic surprise has come from the language with which I expected the least trouble. English is English, or so I thought. I’m realizing more and more that even when I’m communicating in English there are subtle gaps in meaning that can often bedevil the conversation. So I’ll think that I’ve scheduled to meet one of my friends at a certain place only to find that he’s somewhere else. Or I’ll plan a route to run with one of the guys on the cross country team only to find out that we meant radically different courses. It’s hard to explain because I don’t understand what’s going on myself. Part of the story is that the vast majority of homes do not speak a European language as their first language. But I don’t want to imply that the gaps in communication are emerging because the people I’m talking to somehow have an inferior grasp of the English language. Quite the contrary. To hazard a terribly speculative guess, I think that languages are systems of meaning and that you impose your mother tongue’s system of meaning onto your new language, but the overlap isn’t perfect.

One final thought on language. Ghana has about forty different ethnic groups. Although a strong plurality of them speak Twi, linguistic fragmentation is a fact of life here as in much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. English as a national language is problematic, but I wonder if without it, would the nation even be possible?

Akuafo Hall Fountain

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Eid Mubarak, a few days late. Tuesday was Eid al-Fitr, the conclusion of the month of Ramadan, which means that many of my friends on campus (Yes, I do have many friends) can now partake in food and water during daylight hours. President Kuofor declared Eid al-Fitr a national holiday just a few years ago.
Speaking of the President, I just learned that he was an active member of the Rotary Club of Accra, my very own host club. Continuing the free association, I just joined two other Ambassadorial Scholars in giving brief presentations on our backgrounds and respective cultures to the club. I exchanged the flag of the Downtown Greenville Club with the President of the Accra club.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading since I arrived. I just completed Ayi Kewi Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Armah (b. Takoradi, Ghana 1939) penned this scathing critique of political corruption in post-independence Ghana just eleven years after the country attained independence. The novel’s setting straddles the end of the Nkrumah regime and the first military government, so circa 1966. Images of pollution and filth permeate the work. It is a book about life after the death of hope, of a dream rotting on the vine. I highly recommend it.

I was startled to come across such a direct indictment of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party. Dr. Nkrumah is afforded a great deal of respect throughout Africa. In a BBC poll a few years ago, Africans rated him as the continent’s Man of the Millenium. He is often referred to with his honorary title, Osagyefo, “the victorious one.” The new African Studies building, my academic home, at the University of Ghana is called the Kwame Nkrumah Complex. An informal survey of my classmates generated an acknowledgement that ministerial corruption was a black mark on the CPP reign, including one minister who notoriously purchased a golden bed. However, they were quick to stress Dr. Nkrumah’s unparalleled contributions to the nation’s infrastructure. They told me that he was also something of a progressive in terms of gender. He established a quota system that resulted in the election of a number of female MPs, and he secured places for the training of several female fighter pilots. Nkrumah’s role in the struggle for independence and his commitment to forging Ghanaian and Pan-African identities secure him a prominent place in the history of the continent.

The political science literature, at least until recently, has not been so kind to Dr. Nkrumah. It tends to stress the flaws in the CPP’s state-directed development policies and points to a creeping authoritarianism in the administration’s attitude toward political opposition. At least one of the works that I read, however, referred to something of a revisionist movement of late that sought to rehabilitate the former leader’s image.

Regardless, my impression is that the legacy of Nkrumah and the tumultuous years that followed his ouster is a complicated one. That’s about as deep as my assessment goes for the moment.