And Guinea slides further down the scale:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8280603.stm

Is this the next Mugabe in the making? Why is it that so many African states end up military dictatorships like this?

I believe it lies in large part that many African states went through colonialism accustomed to autocracy and it was the only side of modernism they saw. Opinions of others, especially our resident African members, would be appreciated.

Comments

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Your resident African member would say that you're expecting a field of cabbage to grow on a lawn where you haven't even bothered to hoe the terrain, neither to water the ridges, nor put any fertilizers. /To paraphrase an old Zulu tale/. You can't just go away and tell them "Now, we're leaving you on your own, here's the definition of Democracy, read it carefully in the political-theory books, now go ahead, build your democracy". Doesn't work like that. Leaving sudden vacuum behind creates such awesome creatures like the many Dada-s and Mugabe-s that we've been seeing popping up like mushrooms after rain. Or to continue the Zulu tale, you got a field full of useless weeds, some of them poisonous.

As to solutions, I've addressed the matter before.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Which is a concise, logical, and sensible answer. So seldom found anywhere on the Internet.

This was less the solutions, the ones you provided are good, it was more "OK, why so many despots?"

And that question you've already answered.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Always willing to help.
Btw you've been feeling quite talkative lately? :-)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have.

This is one of the better political forums I've been in, too. Having different people of the kind of different opinions that co-exist is always good. ^.^

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Oh don't flatter them too much or someone might cum in their pants.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

...not to mention sowing the cabbage seeds, right? Or whatever they sow in order to grow cabbage.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

Or whatever they sow in order to grow cabbage.

Probably it's tomato seeds.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Could be carrots.

[redheadrat.livejournal.com]

as was said vacuum of power in addition to some very cheap resources that can be had for free with application of AK-47 power

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

This too; the quest for monopoly profits over natural resources is strong..

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Tribalism found pre-colonialism wasn't exactly the opposite of autocracy.

If anything colonialism worked against autocracy. While certainly authoritarian it set in place rules of governance that pushed for localized rule (as long as the locals were willing to be subservient to the colonials).

If anything this is just the slide back towards tribalism with modern tech to make it more pronounced.

Not quite.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Autocracy is very much a product of state systems, not of non-state ones. A tribal situation would create a mess of local bands, whose subservience to the overall tribal leader is less pronounced than that of a confederation like Switzerland's cantons. Pre-industrial societies and tribal societies in fact are notoriously difficult to control, a factor that often contributed to the Indian Wars here.

Colonialism is responsible for this in areas that were actually tribal. Much more of Africa had standard pre-modern state authorities than is commonly recognized today. The Zulu were a noticeably recorded form of what happened often elsewhere, too.

[acesspadesdice.livejournal.com]

this

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except tribalism and autocracy are incompatible. It takes a true state to have an autocracy, tribes are incapable of enforcement to the degree even that the rudimentary states of Sumeria were. Afghanistan is one of the more notorious tribal regions here, is that an autocratic system or anarchy?

[slacker22.livejournal.com]

Autocracy is a pretty natural evolution of tribalism.

The problem is that the African states were not prepared for independence like India was. Without putting too fine a point on it, the best thing would've been another 30 or 40 years of colonial rule in the region, with gradually more and more Africans having a role in the government. It worked in India, it could've worked in Africa.

Another big problem were the absolutely arbitrary borders drawn up in the Congress of Berlin. Ethnically and culturally speaking, most of the countries in Africa are a complete mess.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

'Another big problem were the absolutely arbitrary borders drawn up in the Congress of Berlin.'

Pretty much. Ideally had Africa been made a continent of a thousand cantons it would be a lot more stable. But the powers that be just carved whole territories into singular countries and forced the people to accept it. Well as we can see only the dominant folks in the new countries seem to have accepted it. If the colonial powers had just disengaged slowly while disassembling the nations they created things would be better.

[slacker22.livejournal.com]

Well, there probably wasn't a need for a thousand states, but a very different set of borders would certainly be necessary.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Cantons are more like units of a loose federation. You might still have South Africa as a UN-recognized state, but it'd have semi-autonomous regions beneath that that really do the day-to-day job of running the area. Generally works out better when there are entrenched national identities that prevent easy assimilation into an overarching national identity. South Africa was, in some ways, lucky that it had a leader like Mandela to bind it together, though the circumstances of his rise to prominence were certainly less than ideal for national unity. But compare that to any of the areas of West Africa that still have serious tribal divisions, and you can see where cantons could have been a better choice, properly organized. Really I think the underlying question is how well Westphalia-style nation-states work in the region.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, because a state for every people and a people for every state worked so well in the first part of the 20th Century in Europe. I'm sure the 55 million dead from World Wars I and II in Europe alone would be delighted to know that nation-states work.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying nations populated exclusively with one tribe is a panacea. I'm saying that given the culture of Africa it'd be better to have a thousand nations than a few dozen. Eventually allied tribes would have formed greater nations. Hell, a United States of Africa wouldn't be inconceivable as they'd want a good sizable clout. But having certain tribes that hate each other combined into one nation with the ability to exert force... fucking doomed to failure. It'd be like making Nazi Germany and Israel a single state and wondering why there's such bloodshed.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It is not only not a panacea, it is a recipe for genocide. This kind of mindset caused World War II. I don't understand why the cause for Hitler's war is somehow a good idea when tried elsewhere. >.>

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Oh...ok...I thought WW2 was caused by rampant economic issues fueled by pan-nationalism. All this time it was the hundreds of small countries found across Europe with vastly different identities.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Its root cause was that there were ethnic minorities in certain regions that did not necessarily desire to be in them. Like the Sudeten Germans, and the Danzig Corridor. The reason those issues don't trouble Eastern Europe today was the Victor's Justice in the aftermath of Nazi defeat.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

Yea...but that's what we have today. I'm saying it'd be better if these minorities were never forced into another country.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And that's a counterfactual and a good exercise for theoreticians. The real world, unfortunately, does not offer that.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually, it is not a natural evolution of it at all. The historical autocracies that have existed were in fact natural evolutions of either a city-state (Imperial Russia), forcible unifications of tiny feudal principalities (Imperial Germany), or states like Ancient Egypt which was the most autocratic Ancient World society.

Tribal states that evolve into states tend to end up being relatively freer. An example of such a thing is, ironically, the UK (descended from Germanic and Celtic tribes), the Ottoman Empire (freer and stabler than all of its successors except Israel), or Iran (currently the only Muslim state in the Middle East that is vaguely free).

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Douglas Adams, writing on his experience in developing countries, argued that colonial powers left all the positive rights, the ability to say 'yes', in the hands of the 'white' powers. They were supported by a group of indigenous people's who were granted to the power to say 'no'.

Thus when the colonial powers were thrown out, what made up the local governing class was always in the negative.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

I wonder how his theory deals with the fact that minorities, placed in power by the colonizer, were often overthrown after independence. It was a common British and French tactic to take the smaller local tribe and promote them within local governance. If that's your ruling class at independence, and they get kicked out by the majority tribe who had been oppressed and exploited, how do you explain negatively-empowered rulers? Just based on whatever framework got left behind?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The French actually preferred to try to make their colonies extensions of France. This was especially obvious in Algeria but applied elsewhere, too. In the case of the British....well...they tended to prefer not Africans ruling Africans but situations like what became Ian Smith's Rhodesia. And then there's the Belgian Congo, the 19th Century version of Hitler or Stalin's mass murdering regimes.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

The Congo still scares me. We spent nearly an entire semester on that as a microcosm of all that could possibly go wrong with colonialism. *shudder*

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It doesn't help that the Congo has been the center of two large wars nobody cared about in the last decade......

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You're quite right about the 'divide and conquer' mechanism used by colonisers and the common imposition of a smaller-tribal group in positions of power. I can only assume that the colonial education system, such as it was, contributed significantly.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

With the Hutu and the Tutsi it helped that there were inklings of ethnicity already present. Imposing an apartheid state did not work everywhere, which necessitated different tactics in some places. Then there was Russia which was able to do all that overland....

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

In cases where European colonial powers left their colonies "voluntarily" they often left undemocratic regimes in place to guarantee continued access to resources. In cases where they stuck around, they were eventually faced with popular uprisings which invariably brought strongman dictators, who were generals during the revolution, to power. You can hardly blame people for not having democracy when you created a situation prior to your leaving that prevented democracy from blossoming.