Nigeria & the Anglican schism
April 30th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Whilst looking around on Worldmapper for my recent post on liberation theology in Africa, I found this map of the global distribution of Anglicans, which makes clear why the Church of Nigeria has played such a pivotal role in the potential schism in the Anglican Communion:
If you haven’t been following this debate, there’s a brief overview here. To generalize a bit, there’s a conservative-progressive split in the communion that roughly corresponds with Southern and Northern churches, and it intensified over the Episcopal Church in the USA’s ordination of an openly gay man as the Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. I certainly think the ECUSA is on the right side of history on this point, but, as this thoughtful article from Killing the Buddha relates, African resistance to Northern theological hegemony is also tied in to historical legacies of colonialism and contemporary local-level struggles to expand the reach of the Anglican church. Just like everything else, there aren’t any easy answers.
What happened to African liberation theology?
April 22nd, 2011 § 5 Comments
I’ve been puzzling over the titular question for a few weeks now, ever since reading about the connection that Samuel Huntington drew between the evolving Catholic church (with regard to Vatican II and liberation theology) and democratization in Latin America. Liberation theology sprang up from the 1950s – 1970s as an intense critique of the church’s role in abetting oppression and poverty, of which there was plenty in both Latin America and Africa at the time – but whilst it left a lasting impression on both faith practices and (selon Huntington) politics in LatAm, it didn’t seem to spread across the Atlantic in any meaningful way. (The exception appears to be South Africa, where “liberation” had an unusually clearly defined sense.)
This might go back to the general debate over why Africans don’t protest more (see here and here), but I’m also wondering about the specific political facets of religious life in Africa that might have incentivized religious leaders not to adapt and adopt this type of faith-based social movement. Were organized faiths regularly co-opted by by the state during this period? Or did religious leaders & laypeople face the same incentives against rebellion as any other citizens? Science Encyclopedia offers some stylized facts about religion and the state in Africa, but nothing systematic enough to draw conclusions.
With regard to Catholicism specifically, January Makamba points out that this tradition was not nearly as deeply entrenched in Africa as it was in Latin America, which could be relevant if theologians are less likely to adopt new ideas across denominational lines (or across different faiths all together, given that there are estimated to be more Muslims than Christians in Africa). Check out Worldmapper’s depiction of the distribution of Catholics around the world:
For comparison, here’s a map of global population distribution:
Latin America clearly has a greater-than-proportional share of Catholics, although central and east Africa also appear to be holding their own, making it less immediately obvious that “lack of Catholicism” is a good explanatory variable. Thoughts and recommendations for further reading would be welcomed!
Resources & the ease of doing business in Africa
April 17th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Afrographique is well-worth checking out for its gorgeous representations of various African statistics. Take a look at this graph of foreign investment in 2009 (original post here):
Investment levels seem strongly correlated with natural resources (no surprise there), but don’t appear to have much relation to the ease of doing business in a country. Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, and the Republic of Congo are all major oil exporters, even though of the 46 African countries the World Bank included in its 2011 Doing Business rankings*, they were respectively rated #17, 25, 31 and 40. Chad, at #46, had more investment than Botswana at #3. And Somalia, a failed state that didn’t even make it into the Doing Business rankings, had only a touch less investment than vaunted reformer Rwanda. Fascinating stuff.
*Only the current year’s data are up on the Doing Business site, and some countries have shifted rankings between 2009 (for which we have investment data) and 2011 (the business rankings). For instance, I know that the DRC went from 183 of 183 in the world in Doing Business 2009 to a less whopping 175 of 183 in 2011. That said, with the exception of unusually rapid reformers such as Rwanda, I doubt the investment climate has changed that significantly (with the exception of political unrest) in most countries over the last two years.
Africa Association Happy Hour
March 30th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
If you’re in DC this Friday, stop by SAIS after work and support the Africa Association! $3 drinks, music from across the continent and as much Tusker as we can get our hands on.
UPDATE: The SAIS student government just informed us that we can only serve alcohol from 5.30 – 8 pm (long story), so come by early!
The postbellum lives of child soldiers
March 23rd, 2011 § 1 Comment
Chris Blattman’s fame as a development blogger is such that I think the rest of us development-types sometimes give short shrift to his published research. Thus it was with interest that I read his 2008 article on “Child combatants in northern Uganda: Reintegration myths and realities” (PDF) co-authored with Jeannie Annan. B&A identify a rather surprising natural experiment, arguing that LRA abduction of young men was so widespread as to be essentially random. This allows them to make relatively clean estimates of the impact of child soldiering on comparable groups of young Ugandan men, using a mixed-methods approach with approximately 1000 respondents.
What they find is more complex, and perhaps less dramatic, than many mainstream accounts of child soldiering suggest. Children were most likely to be abducted in early adolescence, as younger boys were inefficient fighters and older boys were more difficult to indoctrinate & posed greater escape risks. 80% of abductees eventually escaped, with most of the remaining 20% presumed dead.
Upon returning home, however, the former abductees were generally not received as the “damaged, uneducated pariahs” that the NYT had assumed them to be (quoted in B&A, p. 1). 94% of interviewed abductees said that their families had accepted them back without censure, and three quarters reported that they were generally treated well by their communities. Only one sixth of former child soldiers reported elevated levels of psychological distress, and on average they were no more likely to behave violently than non-abductees.
Unfortunately, the economic outlook for returned child soldiers was not quite as bright. B&A note that, whilst the average abductee only missed 9 months of education, abduction in early adolescence meant that that missing year of schooling was generally the 6th or 7th grade, when Ugandan students typically learn to read and write. Thus former abductees were “twice as likely to be illiterate” (p. 16) The educational gap also explained nearly two-thirds of the observed earnings shortfall of child soldiers, which found them “half as likely to be engaged in skill- or capita-intensive employment, and [to] have a third lower daily earnings” (p. 16) than non-abducted young men. Interestingly, shortfalls have also been found found in the earnings of American veterans of the Vietnam War. In both cases, “the source of this earnings gap appears to be time away from civilian education and work experience” (p. 22). The authors close with a set of useful recommendations for tailoring ex-combatant reintegration programs to these realities.
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Additional thoughts on African protests
March 11th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Some thoughtful responses to the post on why more Africans don’t protest bad governments:
- Cyrus Samii says that protests occur too infrequently for surveys like Afrobarometer to have much value, and suggests a case-control study design for people who do protest.
- Jay Ulfelder notes that urbanization is “almost a precondition for movements,” and points out that Africa was only ~39% urbanized in 2008, whilst Latin America was ~66%.
- @coldtusker wonders about the role of ethnic politics, whilst @nairobinotes isn’t sure that ethnic politics is the best explanation for lack of protest in Zimbabwe.
- One of my classmates, who’s originally from Zimbabwe, added that the country is quiet precisely because its Central Intelligence Organization is so widespread and so ruthless. Stories abound in Harare of people who made a single anti-government comment and were never seen again.
- The Monkey Cage has linked to an interesting new database on social conflict in Africa.
Other ideas?
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Why don’t Africans protest?
March 10th, 2011 § 7 Comments
Thus asks Lisa Mueller, a PhD student at UCLA, in a paper presented at a meeting of the Working Group in African Political Economy last year. She notes that theories of deprivation and protest clearly predict that the poor, who are worse off in absolute terms, should protest their living conditions more often. However, Africans on average protest no more than Latin Americans, who are approximately 5 times as wealthy.
As Mueller points out,”people rise up (1) because they want to and (2) because they can” (p. 4). Addressing the first part of this statement, theories of relative deprivation suggest that people might want to rise up when they feel that they are currently worse off than other groups in society. Similarly, theories of the prospect of upward mobility predict that people might protest when they feel that their standards of living will not rise in the future. Using Afrobatometer data, Mueller finds that Africans who are either absolutely or relatively deprived are no more likely to rise up than people who are not. (However, she does find that people whose standards of living have absolutely declined in recent years, rather than remaining stable at a low level, are somewhat more likely to protest.) She also reports that people who believe their prospect of upward mobility to be low are about 2% more likely to protest than those who believe their prospects are better.
One reason why more impoverished Africans do not protest may be the difficulty of organizing collective action in remote rural areas, where poverty tends to be worst. Mueller finds that people who have reported attending community meetings are approximately 3 times more likely to protest than those who have not – a much more substantive effect than found for either relative deprivation or upward mobility. However, she doesn’t address the probability of attending a community meeting conditional on urban or rural residency, so this doesn’t do much to tease out the predictors of protest in different locales. She does note that urban Africans are no more likely to protest than rural, but drops this interesting finding rather quickly with a comment about fear of police reprisals.
All in all, it’s a very interesting paper on a timely topic. However, I do question the conclusion she draws: “Africans seem to be refraining from protest because they anticipate changes in their living conditions” (p. 17). This sits a bit oddly with the fact that “65 percent of respondents in the most recent round of surveys said they believe that government economic policies have hurt most people and benefited only a few” (p. 18). A discussion of the role of government reprisal would slot in extremely neatly here.
That said, this also put me in mind of a recent post by one of IPA’s staffers in Uganda. He wrote of Museveni’s re-election that “there are too many people who lived through the terror and who are thus easily enough appeased by ‘peace and stability’ campaign platforms. Change, to the generation(s) that lived through the bad, is synonymous with ‘danger.’” The welfare improvements of stability might outweigh the problems of bad policy in some cases.
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The state of tertiary education in Africa
September 8th, 2010 § 5 Comments
It’s not looking so good, according to this graph showing gross spending* on higher ed in PPP terms, from Understanding Society:
It puts me in mind of a chapter from Easterly’s Elusive Quest for Growth, wherein he asks if it’s the case that African investment is low because there’s insufficient skilled labor on the continent – or whether Africans see few incentives for education when their job prospects on the other end are dim. The obvious vote is for both. See also Iyinoluwa Aboyeji on why the development industry should be funding universities in Africa rather than additional Centers for the Study of Development at Western universities, and Marginal Revolution for some interesting general thoughts on incentives for education in low-income countries.
*Thanks to Alison Cummins for pointing out that this is gross expenditure and not per capita!
A comparative taxonomy of African cliches
April 28th, 2009 § 11 Comments
A bit of a rant, so feel free to find the egress if that’s not what you’re here for. But: beyond the standard stereotypes (either “savage tribal wars” or “happy villagers living in harmony with nature”), there are several slightly more complex cliches about Africa that make me want to grind my teeth. In fact, one could create a taxonomy of the African Cliche (genus Africanus) as follows:
- Africanus stereotypicus: The most common type of cliche, the Africanus stereotypicus typicus feeds off of broad generalizations of African history. It is characterized by its Manichean coloring, varying between the black of moral depravity and ancient ethnic hatreds, and the snowy white of peaceful farmers who live “as nature intended.” Other subspecies include the Africanus stereotypicus puerilis, known for its grating proclamations that Africans are too childlike to make decisions about their own lives, and the Africanus stereotypicus type-419, which exhibits severe distrust of Africans in the belief that they are all corrupt, dishonest, and/or Nigerian scam artists.
- Africanus journalisticus: Cliches of the the journalisticus group are most often found lurking in the mediocre Africa coverage of otherwise well-respected news publications. The Africanus journalisticus natura is frequently sighted in Madagascar, where international coverage of recent coup attempts uniformly begins with glowing descriptions of the country’s vibrant plant and animal life, in the belief that they must suck readers in with images of lush vegetation before seguing into actual African politics. The Africanus journalisticus spillover, on the other hand, is more often found in Congo and Somalia, where articles on the real suffering of millions of human beings justify the space they take up in Western newspapers either by A) referring to the current conflict as the spillover of a more interesting conflict (e.g. the Rwandese genocide), or B) explaining that the conflict is important because it could create terrorist threats that might spill over into the readers’ comfortable lives. A final subspecies, the Africanus journalisticus darfurensis, has seen a dramatic fall in its numbers after the population explosion of 2003-2004. However, the darfurensis still retains its unique ability to reduce the interwoven political, economic, environmental, and social roots of the genocide in Darfur into a simple morality tale of evil Arabs and innocent Africans.
- Africanus occidentalis: This cliche is at home in a broad variety of habitats, be it among development practitioners or wide-eyed teenagers visiting Africa for the first time. It can be distinguished by its prominent belief that concerted Western action can solve all of Africa’s problems. The Africanus occidentalis studentia lives a peaceful life in the dorm rooms of university students, who often react to its presence by talking at length about the spiritual connection and cultural vitality that they experienced while visiting one country in a very large continent for two weeks last summer. (The tragedy of receiving a university education whilst children in Africa are dying is an alternate topic, although this should not be confused with actual discussions of Rawlsian justice.) The Africanus occidentalis interventionis, on the other hand, prefers to settle among career development workers who really should know better. These include advocates of poorly thought-out boycotts that don’t address the roots of the labor issue in question, World Bank officials who support oil pipelines in Chad, and bloggers who duly repeat that the West must pay more attention to Africa’s suffering, as though the Western gaze has always been the missing ingredient for African development.
- Africanus impecunius: The Africanus impecunius is a specialized breed, whose natural habitats include NGO websites, blogs written by economics professors, and the Twitter streams of thousands of people with a passing interest in African poverty. Many subspecies in the impecunius group appear outwardly similar, but the practiced African Cliche-ist can easily spot their differences. For instance, the Africanus impecunius donatio is usually spotted at fundraisers in major Western cities, wooing potential donors with pictures of malnourished African children and practicing its “you have the power to save a life” call. The donatio‘s primary competitor is the Africanus impecunius entrepreneurius. The entrepreneurius prefers a stealth attack, often sneaking up behind the donatio at conferences and beating it over the head with large sets of panel data on import substitution policies. (Meanwhile, the Africanus impecunius polisci avoids these territorial clashes in favor of migrating from think tank to think tank, seeking a credible way to actually implement all of its theoretical insights about the importance of good governance.)
Ok, taxonomic rant finished. (Although I guess the entrepreneurius and the polisci are more stock characters than cliches.) The common thread among many of these tropes is my impatience with people who don’t make an effort to move past their Western points of reference when studying/discussing/visiting/speaking with/working with Africans. And I am saying “Africans” and not “Africa” very intentionally. There’s a large lexical difference between thinking of a place primarily in terms of the people who live there, and thinking of it almost as an anthropomorphized piece of suffering land. Consider sentences like, “Africa is unlikely to achieve the MDGs,” or “Africa suffers disproportionately from AIDS.” They don’t make any sense unless one interpolates some people in there to do the suffering, but this type of statement – endowing the continent as a whole with sentience and linguistically skipping over the people who actually live there – is usually taken at face value.
Anyway, I mention the perils of not questioning Western frames of reference not because I believe Western capitalist culture is evil, but because it’s at the least misguided and at the most dangerous to view everything in the world through the lenses of one’s own national affiliation. Misguided is assuming that Western actions are the only important actions in the world, as though non-Western political leaders or private individuals can’t impact a situation as well. (C.f. the movement for American companies to boycott Congolese minerals, which I guarantee will accomplish nothing besides making a bunch of Chinese manufacturers happy about their increased access to the mines.) Dangerous is failing to move beyond assumptions in situations where one’s actions actually may have a large impact – and where one is working in the midst of great power disparities to boot. (C.f. the assumption that structural adjustment would provide sufficient trickle-down benefits for the poor to counterbalance the loss of government-funded social services in the short run.) The fact that cross-cultural work is difficult doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. But cross-cultural work in the face of extremely uneven power relations demands that one actually take the time to thoroughly learn the environment in which and the demands of the people with whom one will be working, instead of resting on cliches.
