Discussion Board Week 5

From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:56 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:56 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:56 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:56 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:56 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. 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From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234 From Global Shadows by Ferguson, James. DOI: 10.1215/9780822387640 Duke University Press, 2006. All rights reserved. Downloaded 29 Apr 2017 01:57 at 155.247.166.234

1

GlobalizingAfrica?

OBSERVATIONS FROM AN

INCONVENIENT CONTINENT

The enormous recent literatureonglobalization so far has had re-

markably little tosayaboutAfrica.Astonishingly, theentireconti-

nent isoftensimplyignoredaltogether,eveninthemostambitious

andostensiblyall-encompassingnarratives.Popularbestsellersthat

seek toexplain thenew‘‘global’’world—whether incelebrationor

critique—havemuch to sayabout thenewly industrializing coun-

tries of Asia, the manufacturing boom in China, the European

Union, the causes of MiddleEastern ‘‘terrorism,’’ jobs gained and

lost in theUnited States, theNorthAmerican Free TradeAgree-

ment (nafta) and its effects in Mexico, and the spread of Dis-

neyland and McDonald’s to France. But they manage to charac-

terize ‘‘the globe’’ and ‘‘the entireworld’’ inways that say almost

nothing at all about a continent of some 800 million people that

takesupfully20percentoftheplanet’s landmass.Academicblock-

bustershavenotbeenverydifferent in this respect. SaskiaSassen’s

Globalization and Its Discontents(1999), for instance,hasnothingto say aboutAfrica, except to note thatAfricanmigrants sometimes

showupin ‘‘globalcities’’ likeLondonandNewYork. JosephStig-

litz’s influential book, also titled Globalization and Its Discontents (2003), deals almost entirely with the operations of the Interna-

tionalMonetaryFund(imf) andWorldBank inAsia andEastern

Europe, with only a few pages devoted to the African countries

that have arguably suffered themost from the lethal imf dogma-

tismhe isconcernedaboutdocumenting.1 Fromtheself-described

radical left,meanwhile,MichaelHardtandAntonionNegri’s cele-

brated tome Empire (2001), despite itsnearly 500pagesof text and abundant concern forwhat theauthors term ‘‘themultitude,’’ can-

not muster even a paragraph’s worth of analysis concerning the

continent. Again and again, it seems, when it comes to global-

ization, Africa just doesn’t fit the story line. It is an inconvenient

case.

This neglect is perhapsunderstandable at the level of real-world

politics. Defenders of neoliberal structural-adjustment programs

naturally findAfrica an inconvenient example; they prefer to talk

aboutAsian tigers andSoutheastAsiandragons, since theyhave a

hard time finding any lions among themanyAfrican nations that

have taken the imf medicine and liberalized their economies in

recent years. ButAfrican examples are equally awkward for those

termed‘‘anti-globalization’’ critics,whooftenequateglobalization

with an expanding capitalism in search of new cheap labor for its

factories andnewmarkets for its consumergoods (stereotypically,

Nike sweatshops and McDonald’s hamburgers). Here, of course,

the inconvenient fact is thatAfrica’shardshipshavevery little todo

withbeingoverrunwithWestern factoriesandconsumergoods. It

is hard to find evidence of the depredations of runaway capitalist

expansion in countries that are begging in vain for foreign invest-

mentofanykindandunable toprovideasignificantmarket for the

consumer goods stereotypically associatedwithglobalization.

But if Africa is an awkward case for globalization’s polemical

boosters and detractors, it seems equally inconvenient for more

analytical theorists of globalization,whoaspire toplanetary ‘‘cov-

erage’’ but somehow do not quite know what to do with Africa

(cf.Paolini1997).Here,AnthonyGiddens’sapproachistypical.He

begins his short bookof lectures onglobalization (Giddens 2002)

with an anecdote that claims a planetwide scope for the analysis

to follow.A friend,he explains,was conductingfieldwork in avil-

lagewhose locationhedescribesonlyasa ‘‘remotearea’’of ‘‘central

Africa.’’Shewas invitedtoahomeforaneveningofentertainment,

but insteadofthetraditionalpastimessheexpected,shediscovered

26 GlobalizingAfrica?

that the familywas towatch a video of a newHollywoodmovie

that at that point ‘‘hadn’t even reached the cinemas in London’’

(Giddens 2002: 24). The point, clearly, is that even the ends of

the earth—that is, the remotest villages of (what is identifiedonly

as) ‘‘central Africa’’—are today swept up within a globalized so-

cial order.Yet the rest ofGiddens’s book does notmake somuch

as a passing reference to Africa. Instead, the narrative repeatedly

describes theworld in termsof a traditional ‘‘before’’ andaglobal-

ized ‘‘after’’ that leavesnoplace formostcontemporaryAfricanso-

cial realities except in the putative past.The collaborative volume

onglobalizationbyDavidHeld,AnthonyMcGrew,DavidGold-

blatt,andJonathanPerraton(1999)isamorescholarlyaccount,but

it builds on a similar slippage. The volume’s introduction claims

to explicate a globalization explicitly defined bywhat the authors

term ‘‘worldwide interconnectedness’’ (Held et al. 1999: 2; empha- sismine), but this is followed by substantive chapters that are ex-

plicitly restricted to what they call ‘‘states in advanced capitalist

societies’’ (and it soonbecomes clear thatAfrican societies arenot

‘‘advanced’’enoughtoqualify). Interconnectednessamongsixrich

countries is documentedmost effectively, but the reader is left to

wonderwhat, exactly, is ‘‘worldwide’’ about it.

Africa’s inconvenience isnot surprising ifweconsider thatmost

of thedominant theoriesofglobalizationhavebeentheoriesabout

worldwide convergence of one sort or another. From the earli- est European projects of colonization to the latest structural-

adjustment programs, Africa has proved remarkably resistant to

a range of externally imposed projects that have aimed to bring

it into conformity with Western or ‘‘global’’ models. It is strik-

ing thatAfrica today is the onlyworld regionwhere onewill find

hugepopulated swathsof theearth that areunder theeffective au-

thorityof no central, nation-state government (includingmost of

the Democratic Republic of the Congo [drc] at present, huge

areasof southernSudan,andnearlyallofSomalia). It isworthem-

phasizing that these are not odd little patches but truly vast areas.

As I like to remind undergraduate students, if you put the map

of Europe inside the drc, with London at thewest coast, Mos-

cow would liewithin the eastern border; in southern Sudan, the

GlobalizingAfrica? 27

area that was until recently out of the reach of even major relief

agencies spannedanareabigger thanFrance.Nor is thisaquestion

of brief or transitorypolitical circumstances.Theweakgripof the

central state in countries like theCongoandAngolagoesback for

manydecades,whilemuchof southernSudanhas beenout of the

controlof itsnationalgovernmentalmostcontinuouslysinceitbe-

cameindependent in1956.Evenwherenation-statesdoenjoysome measure of effective control of their hinterlands, formal similari-

ties inpolitical institutionsbetraystarkdifferences inactualmodes

of functioning, as recent work on African states (discussed later)

shows.Meanwhile, theproperty laws thatare sometimes taken for

granted as the bedrock of capitalism in itsmost familiar form are

only very precariously institutionalized in many African settings

(asmightbeattestedbya foreign investor inNigeriaoracommer-

cial farmer inZimbabwe). Finally, aswe know, in perhaps a score

ofAfrican countries, a host of standarddevelopment indicators—

fromgdp per capita to access to health care and schooling to life

expectancy—have in recent years been falling, not rising. This is

true not only of countries wracked by war but also of many that

haveseennothingbutpeace.InZambia, for instance—thecountry

Ihave studiedmost—poverty rates are today reckonedat some73

percent.Diseases likemalaria,cholera,andmeaslesareresurgentas

public-health countermeasures have collapsed. School attendance

has dropped below 50 percent in some areas, and the population

is said to be less educated than at any time since independence in

1964. Estimated life expectancy at birth, meanwhile, has fallen—

mostly, but not entirely, due toaids—fromaround 50 in 1980 to

just 32.4 years, the lowest in theworld.2

All of this poses a profound challenge for global convergence

narratives. It does not necessarilymean that such accounts are in

any simpleway ‘‘wrong.’’ Indeed, inmanydomains, convergence

arguments areoften stronger thananthropologists (perhapswish-

fully) allow.But the recenthistoryofAfricadoespose aprofound

challenge to ideas of global economic and political convergence.

If theworld’s societies are truly converging on a single, ‘‘global’’

model, how is it possible to account forAfrica’s different, difficult

trajectory? Is it simplya ‘‘development failure,’’ tobeplaced at the

28 GlobalizingAfrica?

door of morally culpable elites? A ‘‘lag’’ that we need only wait

to seeovercome?Ahorrible accident,predicatedoncontingencies

such as the aids pandemic?What is themeaning—theoretically— ofwhat presents itself as a vast continental anomaly?

WhererecentglobalizationtheoristshaveaddressedAfrica, ithas

typicallybeenasanegativecase:anexampleof thepriceof the fail-

ure toglobalize, as the imfwouldhave it; a ‘‘global ghetto’’ aban-

doned by capitalism, as the geographerNeil Smith (1997)would

insist;acontinentof ‘‘wastedlives’’ofnousetothecapitalistworld

economy, as ZygmuntBauman (2004) has recently suggested; or

‘‘the black hole of the information society,’’ as Manuel Castells

(2000) would have it. Such negative characterizations risk ignor-

ing the social, political, and institutional specificity of Africa and

reinventingAfrica as a twenty-first-century ‘‘dark continent.’’ For

contemporary Africa is clearly not a featureless void defined only by its exclusion from the benefits of global capitalism, nor is it an

informational ‘‘blackhole.’’

Instead,Isuggest thatareadingofrecent interdisciplinaryschol-

arshiponAfrica canhelp to reveal thequite specificways inwhich

Africa is, and is not, ‘‘global’’ and thereby shed surprising new

light on our understanding of what ‘‘globalization’’ may mean at

present.What we see (as anthropologists have long insisted) de-

pends onwherewe are looking from.Looking at ‘‘globalization’’

from the vantage point provided by recent research focused on

Africa brings into visibility things that might otherwise be over-

lookedandforcesus tothinkharderabout issues thatmightother-

wise bepassedoveror left unresolved.

Inahighly schematicway, then, this essay reviews insights from

recent Africanist scholarship concerning three elements usually

identified as central aspects of ‘‘globalization’’: first, the question

of culture (and the related question of alternative modernities);

second, ‘‘flows’’ of private capital (especially foreigndirect invest-

ment); andthird, transformations ingovernanceandthechanging

role of the nation-state. It argues that attention to the undoubt-

edly extreme situation in some parts of Africa can help to clarify

what is, and isnot, ‘‘global’’ about thecontemporary transnational

political economy.

GlobalizingAfrica? 29

CULTURE

Anthropologists first confrontednotionsof cultural globalization

in relation to thequestion (or, for anthropologists, the specter) of

cultural homogenization.Whatwas the fate of cultural difference

in aworldwhere fewer and fewer people lived in conditions that

could be understood as those of pristine isolation; aworldwhere

ever increasing proportions of people lived in cities, drove cars,

andwatchedtelevision;aworldwheresuchemblemsofanexpand-

ing U.S. culture as the English language, pop music, blue jeans,

and McDonald’s seemed to be expanding across the globe? Was

the cultural future of theworld a sort of Westernized or Ameri-

canized global monoculture—the ‘‘Coca-Cola-ization’’ of the en-

tireplanet?And if so,whatwas the fateof thedisciplineof anthro-

pology itself in such auniformculturalworld?

Fortunately—at least for the field of anthropology—it soon

emerged that culturalglobalizationwasnota simplematterof ho-

mogenization. As anthropologists like Ulf Hannerz (1987, 1992,

1996)begantoremindus,transnationalexchangesofculturalprod-

ucts, forms, and ideas were hardly a new phenomenon, and ex-

perience showed that such traffic in meaning was not incompat-

iblewithenduringformsofculturaldifference.Culturaldifferences

were produced, thrived, and took on their significancewithin so-

cial relations of interconnection, not in primordial isolation. For

people in Calcutta to drink Coca-Cola would no more spell the

end of Indian culture than the colonial adoption of the Indian

drink tea by Londoners abolished Englishness. And onewas en-

titled towonder, as Clifford Geertz (1994) pointed out, whether

thegreatcuisinesofAsiawerereally inmortaldangerof beingout-

competed by the likes of Kentucky FriedChicken. In fact, a host

of local studies began to show that transnational traffic in mean-

ing lednot to aglobalmonoculture, but to complex formsof cul-

tural creativity—what Hannerz called ‘‘creolization’’—whose re-

sult was not a numbing uniformity but a dynamic ‘‘cut-and-mix’’

world of surprisingborrowings, ironic reinventions, anddazzling

resignifications.

The idea that logically emerged fromthiswas that societies and

cultureswere not to be understood as located along a continuum

30 GlobalizingAfrica?

between a ‘‘premodern’’ tradition, on the one hand, and a Euro-

centrically conceivedmodernityon the other. Instead,ArjunAp-

padurai and others suggested that it was necessary to rethink our

understandings of modernity to take account of the many differ-

ent sorts of modern cultural trajectories that anthropologistswere documenting. If non-Western cultures were not necessarily non-

modern ones, then it would be necessary to develop a more plu-

ralizedunderstandingofmodernity:notmodernity inthesingular

(where thequestion is,Areyou thereyetornot?)butmodernities

in the plural, a variety of different ways of being modern: ‘‘alter- nativemodernities’’ (seeAppadurai 1996; Daedalus 2000;Gaonkar 2001;Holston 1999).

This is undoubtedly a very appealing idea, but it immediately

raises anumberofproblems,which critics havenot failed topoint

out.Oneproblemisthemeaningoftheterm‘‘modernity.’’Oncewe

giveupthebenchmarkofasingularmodernity, thenwhatdoesthe

termmean,analytically?IfCameroonianspracticingwitchcraftare

in factbeing ‘‘modern,’’ asPeterGeschiere (1997)has recently sug-

gested, thenonewonders:Whatwouldcountasnon-modern?Or

is everyaspectof thecontemporaryworldbydefinitionmodern—

inwhich case, the term risks losing allmeaning by encompassing

everything.Anothersetofcriticismshaspointedoutthatthefocus

on cultural flows and their creative reinterpretation can lead to an

insufficient appreciationof the force of global norms andof insti-

tutional and organizational domainswhere one does indeed find,

if not homogenization, at least a high degree of standardization.

Sociologistsof education, for instance,have shownsuchstandard-

izationinat least theformalaspectsofschooling(see,e.g.,Boliand

Ramirez1986;Meyeretal. 1992).HereIwanttopoint toaslightly

different problemwith the idea,which derives from theway that

regions matter for themodernitydiscussion. InEast andSoutheastAsia, the ideaofmultipleor ‘‘alternative’’

tracks throughmodernityhas for someyearshadconsiderablecur-

rency, even outside of academic discussions.There, the pluraliza-

tion of modernity has been linked to the possibility of a parallel

trackalongwhichAsiannationsmightdevelopinawaythatwould

be economically analogous to theWest but culturally distinctive.

SuchnewlyindustrializingAsiancountriesasMalaysia,Singapore,

GlobalizingAfrica? 31

andTaiwan, inthisview,canachieve ‘‘FirstWorld’’economies,and

the superhighways, skyscrapers, and consumer conveniences that

comewith them,without therebybecoming ‘‘Westernized.’’ They

can thus retainwhat are sometimes thought of as cultural or even

racial virtues that theWest lacks,while making their own, ‘‘alter-

native’’way throughmodernity and enjoying a standard of living

equal toor better than that of ‘‘theWest’’ (Ong 1999: 55–83).

In Africa, however, such an economic convergencewith ‘‘First

World’’ living standards hardly seems to be in the offing. For this

reason, a recent tendency for scholars of Africa to adopt the lan-

guage of ‘‘modernities’’ in the plural has very different implica-

tions andproceeds fromdifferentmotives.3 In the face of decades

of scholarship that insisted on seeingAfrican societies as in some

sense located in the ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘traditional’’ past, contempo-

raryAfricanistsareunderstandablydrawntoawayofthinkingthat

insists on placingAfrican societies in the same (‘‘coeval’’) time as

theWest (Fabian 1983) andonunderstandingAfricanways of life

not as anahistorical ‘‘tradition,’’ but aspart andparcelof themod-

ernworld. It is this that leadsGeschiere to insist on ‘‘themoder-

nity ofwitchcraft’’: the desire to show thatwhat is called ‘‘witch-

craft’’ is not simply a holdover from the past but, rather, a set of contemporary practices that respond to such ‘‘modern’’ contem-

porary forces as the cash economy, class formation, and the state.

Mamadou Diouf (2000) makes a related, and similarly convinc-

ing, argument for the ‘‘modernity’’ of the transnational networks

of SenegaleseMourid traders.

Yet in Africa, modernity has always been a matter not simply

of past and present, but also of up and down. The aspiration to

modernityhasbeen an aspiration to rise in theworld in economic

and political terms; to improve one’s way of life, one’s standing,

one’s place-in-the-world.Modernity has thus been away of talk-

ingaboutglobal inequalityandaboutmaterialneedsandhowthey

might be met. In particular, it has indexed specific aspirations to

such primary ‘‘modern’’ goods as improved housing, health care,

andeducation.Yetnow,anthropologists,havingdeclaredmodern-

ization theorydefunct and development discourse passé, proudly

announce that Africa, notwithstanding all its problems, is in fact

32 GlobalizingAfrica?

just as modern as anyplace else. It just has its own, ‘‘alternative’’

versionofmodernity.

As I point out in chapter 7, Africans are often puzzled by such

claims. Africa’s lack of modernity seems, to many people there, all too palpable in the conditions that surround them—in the

bad roads, poor health care, crumbling buildings, and precari-

ously improvised livelihoods that one cannot avoid encountering

in the continent’s ‘‘less developed’’ countries.Where anthropolo-

gists proclaim Africa always already modern, local discourses on

modernitymoreoften insistonseeingacontinuing lack (seechap-

ter5andchapter7)—alackthat isunderstoodintermsnotofacul-

tural inferioritybutofapolitical-economicinequality.Forthisrea-

son, thequestionofmodernity iswidelyapprehended inAfrica in

relationtotheconceptof ‘‘development’’andtheissueofsocialand

economicstandardsof living.Forall theirmanifoldfailings,thede-

velopmental narratives that have long dominated thinking about

Africa’s place-in-the-world—narratives that explicitly rank coun-

tries fromhigh to low, frommore to less ‘‘developed’’—doat least

acknowledge (andpromise to remedy) the grievances of political-

economic inequality and low global status in relation to other

places.Theanthropologist’s evenhandedassessmentof ‘‘moderni-

ties,’’ however, by pluralizing without ranking the different rela-

tions to ‘‘modernity’’ of different world regions, runs the risk of

deemphasizingoroverlooking the socioeconomic inequalities and

questionsofglobal rank that loomso large inAfricanunderstand-

ings of the modern. In this way, a well-meaning anthropological

urgetotreatmodernityasacultural formationwhosedifferentver-

sions may be understood as both coeval and of equal value ends

up looking like an evasion of the demands of those who instead

see modernity as a privileged and desired socioeconomic condi-

tionthatisactivelycontrastedwiththeirownradicallyunequalway

of life.

The point I want to make here (one that is elaborated more

fully in chapter 7) is not that anthropologists have been wrong

to historicize cultural practices or to call into question the as-

sumed linearities of Eurocentric progress narratives. It is, rather,

that there is an unappreciated danger—which becomes especially

GlobalizingAfrica? 33

visible in the African context—that a culturalized and relativized

notion of modernity tends to allow the material and social in-

equalities thathave longbeenat theheartofAfricanaspirations to

modernity to drop out of the picture. In their eagerness to treat

African people as (cultural) equals,Western anthropologists have

sometimes too easily sidestepped the harder discussion about the

economic inequalities and disillusionments that threaten to make any such equality amerely ideal or sentimental one.

Letusturntotheeconomicdomainandconsiderthequestionof

thecontinent’s relationtowhat isoftencalled ‘‘global capital.’’ It is

strikinghoweasyit is forAfricatofigureinaccountsofaglobalized

culturalworld, incontrast toitsnearabsencefrommostpicturesof

a global economy.No surveyofworldmusic, for instance,would

be conceivable without a major section on Africa, yet it is com-

mon for surveys of the global economy to contain only themost

cursory reference toSub-SaharanAfrica.Yetoneof thekeyclaims

ofdominant accountsof globalization is that deregulatedmarkets

andfootloosecapitaltodayroamtheentireglobe.HowdoesAfrica

figure in this?Consider thequestionof private capital flows.

CAPITAL FLOWS

Itwasoneof theorthodoxies of post–WorldWar II development

theorythat thepoorestcountrieswouldnaturallyserveasmagnets

forcapital,andthat investmentinthosecountrieswouldyieldsuch

highratesofeconomicgrowththattheywouldsoonconvergeeco-

nomicallywith the rich industrial countries. Both assumptions, it

is nowwidely agreed, proved to bewrong.The poorest countries

todayattractverylittleprivatecapitalofanykind.Accordingtothe

formerWorldBankeconomistWilliamEasterly, thecountries that

make up the richest 20 percent of theworld population received

88percentof private gross capital inflows in 1990; those countries

makingupthepoorest20percentreceived1percent(Easterly2001:

58–59).4 The increase in transnational capital flows, of which we

have heardmuch in recent years, has been ‘‘mostly a rich–rich af-

fair,’’ as theeconomistsMauriceObstfeldandAlanTaylorhaveput

it, amatter less of ‘‘development’’ than of diversification. Indeed,

34 GlobalizingAfrica?

theygoontoobservethat ‘‘today’s foreigninvestment inthepoor-

est developing countries lags far behind the levels attained at the

start of the last century’’ (Obstfeld andTaylor 2002: 59).

As for economic growth, recent studies show no tendency for

the poorest countries to converge toward the rich ones. On the

contrary, the data appear to show a strong tendency for the gap

towiden, as rich countries have grown rapidlywhilemost of the

poorest have, in terms of economic growth, stood still or even

lost ground. It is not a story about economic convergence, then,

but—as the economistLantPritchett put it in the title of an influ-

ential paper—‘‘Divergence, Big Time’’ (Pritchett 1997). In recent

years,manyofthepoorestAfricancountrieshaveput inplace imf-

sponsored reforms (chiefly,openingmarkets andprivatizing state

assets)thatwereintendedtoproduceafloodofcapital investment.

But theresult formosthasnotbeenaboominforeign investment.

More often, it has been a collapse of basic institutions (including

major industries aswell as social infrastructure suchas schools and

health care) and an explosionof official illegality.

Whencapital has cometoAfrica inrecentyears, ithasbeenover- whelminglyintheareaofmineral-resourceextraction.Inthemidst

of what generally have been very hard times onmost of the con-

tinent, mining and oil extraction have boomed in several coun-

tries.Again, this is amatter that isdiscussedat somelength later in

this volume (see chapter 8).What needs to be highlighted for the

present is only the extent towhich this economic investment has

been concentrated in secured enclaves, oftenwith little impact on

thewider society.The clearest case (andnodoubt themost attrac-

tivefortheforeigninvestor) isprovidedbyoff-shoreoilextraction,

as inAngola,whereneither theoilnormostof themoney itbrings

in ever touchesAngolan soil.But evennon-petroleummineral ex-

traction today very often takes place in capital-intensive enclaves

that are substantially insulated fromthe local economy,oreven in

guarded fiefdoms protected by private armies and security forces

(see chapter 8).

In an earlier period, mining investment often brought with it

a far-reaching social investment. In the ZambianCopperbelt, for

instance, investment in copper mining brought the construction

of vast ‘‘company towns’’ fornearly 100,000workers.These towns

GlobalizingAfrica? 35

eventually came to include not only company-provided housing,

schools,andhospitals,butevensocialworkers,recreationalameni-

ties,anddomestic-educationprograms(Ferguson1999).Here, the

businessofmininginvolvednotonlyextraction,butalsoabroader

long-term social project. Its presencewas, we might say, socially

‘‘thick.’’ Butnowadays,mining (and evenmore so,oil production) is socially thin; it has becomemuchmore capital intensive and re- lies onmuch smaller groups of highly skilledworkers (sometimes

foreignworkers on short-term contracts). It depends ever less on

wider societal investments.Today, enclaves of mineral-extracting

investment in Africa are usually tightly integrated with the head

officesofmultinational corporationsandmetropolitancentersbut

sharplywalledoff fromtheirownnational societies (often literally

walledoffwithbricks, razorwire, and security guards).

Consider the case of gold mining in Ghana. The privatization

of the gold mines in that country, combined with generous tax

incentives, has done just what it was supposed to do: bring in

large amounts of private investment.Thanks to such investment,

Ghana’s gold industry has undergone a massive transformation

since themid-1980s. Foreign direct investment (fdi) of about $5

billion has flowed in, probably exceeding the value of fdi in all

other sectors combined,while production has risen from 300,000

ounces in 1985 to 2,336,000 ounces in 2001 (WorldBank 2003: 2).

Goldhasnowreplaced cocoa asGhana’smain export.Yet a recent

World Bank report voices doubt about what the ‘‘true net bene-

fits’’ of this ‘‘development’’ might be. As the report points out,

capital-intensiveminingbyforeignfirmshasahighimportcontent

and produces ‘‘only modest amounts of net foreign exchange for

Ghanaafteraccountingforall itsoutflows’’ (WorldBank2003:23).

Tax revenues are also slight, due to the ‘‘various fiscal incentives’’

offered to attract foreign investors in the first place.Most impor-

tant (and in contrast to earlier, more labor-intensivemining ven-

tures), therehasbeen little creationof employment forGhanaians

because of the ‘‘highly capital intensive nature ofmodern surface

mining techniques’’ (WorldBank2003: 23).5

The report tellinglydescribes a ‘‘field visit’’ byWorldBank staff

to the centerof the gold-mining country inWassaDistrict,which

found ‘‘competition between mining and agriculture for arable

36 GlobalizingAfrica?

land, [a] poor state of local infrastructure, inadequate public ser-

vices, and high unemployment’’ (World Bank 2003: 21). It con-

cludes that ‘‘the local economy . . . does not appear to have bene-

fited from large-scalemining through sustainedeconomicgrowth

and improved public services,’’ and that ‘‘local people feel no per-

ceptible benefit from the resources extracted from ‘their’ land’’

(WorldBank2003: 21).Unemployedyouth, the report notes, had

recentlyattackedlocalchiefsanddestroyedtheirpalacesoutoffrus-

trationover ‘‘lackof jobsand insufficientaccess to land forcultiva-

tion’’ (WorldBank2003: 21).

Some other forms of mining on the continent—notably, for

alluvial diamonds—are both less capital intensive and less spa-

tially concentrated and thus harder to insulate from thewider so-

ciety throughenclavemethods.But thatdoesnot stopavarietyof

powerful and well-armed interests from attempting (with mixed

success) to carve out such exclusionary spatial enclaves. In the

richdiamond-producing regionofMbuji-Mayi in thedrc, for in-

stance, private companies routinelyusemilitary force in efforts to

monopolize the collection of alluvial diamonds.The partly state-

owned firmSociétéminière de Bakwanga (known as miba) uses

both private security firms andwhat are termeddrc ‘‘police offi-

cers’’ (who nonetheless report to miba’s head of security, not to

any police superiors) to shoot, arrest, and beat up ‘‘trespassers.’’

The partly Zimbabwean-owned firm Sengamines enjoys similar

protection from the Zimbabwean armed forces. It is unclear, as

a recent human-rights report notes, ‘‘what legal framework, if

any, they are operatingwithin’’ (Amnesty International 2002: 8).

Bothcompanieshabitually shootandkill localpeopleunfortunate

enough to attempt to dig diamonds on the companies’ claimed

‘‘concessions,’’ eventhoughboththeboundariesof theconcessions

andtheir legalbasis areoftenhighlyunclear (seeAmnestyInterna-

tional 2002; see alsoGlobalWitness2004,whichprovides auseful

overviewof the use of violence to secure natural resources in the

drc in recent years).

Muchmore couldbe said about all this (see chapter 8), but here

I emphasize only two points. First, themovement of capital that

suchenterprises entail does indeedcrisscross theglobe,but itdoes

notencompassorcover it.Themovementsofcapitalcrossnational

GlobalizingAfrica? 37

borders, but they jump frompoint topoint, andhuge regions are

simply bypassed.Capital does not ‘‘flow’’ fromNewYork toAn-

gola’s oil fields, or fromLondon toGhana’s goldmines; it hops,

neatly skippingovermost ofwhat lies in between. Second,where

capital has been coming to Africa at all, it has largely been con-

centratedinspatiallysegregated,socially ‘‘thin’’mineral-extraction

enclaves.Again, the ‘‘movementofcapital’’heredoesnotcoverthe

globe; it connectsdiscretepointsonit.Capital is globe-hopping,not globe-covering. The significance of this social fact for understand- ingpatternsofpolitical orderanddisorderon the continent is dis-

cussed in thenext section.

GOVERNANCE

The reformsdemandedby ‘‘structural adjustment’’were—accord-

ing to theirneoliberal proponents—supposed to roll backoppres-

sive and overbearing states and to liberate a newly vital ‘‘civil so-

ciety.’’The resultwas tobeanewsortof ‘‘governance’’ thatwould

bebothmoredemocratic andmoreeconomicallyefficient.Formal

democratization has indeed swept over much of the continent

(though far from all of it), and multiparty elections have invigo-

rated thepolitical life of a numberof countries.At the same time,

swarms of new ‘‘nongovernmental organizations’’ (ngos) have

arisen, taking advantage of the shift in donor policies thatmoved

funding forprojects away frommistrusted statebureaucracies and

intowhatwereunderstoodasmore ‘‘direct’’ or ‘‘grassroots’’ chan-

nels of implementation (see chapter 4).

But rather than setting inmotion a general liberation, the best

scholarship on recent African politics (as noted in the introduc-

tion) suggests that this ‘‘rolling back’’ of the state has provoked

or exacerbated a far-reaching political crisis. As more and more

of the functions of the state have been effectively ‘‘outsourced’’

to ngos, state capacity has deteriorated rapidly—unsurprisingly,

as Joseph Hanlon has pointed out, since the higher salaries and

better terms of employment offered by ngos quickly ‘‘decapaci-

tated’’ governments by luring all the best civil servants out of the

governmentministries (Hanlon2000).Thosewho remainedwere

38 GlobalizingAfrica?

often paid less than subsistence salaries, with the inevitable con-

sequences of corruption and an explosionof ‘‘parallel businesses.’’

Deprived both of capable staff and of economic resources, states

quicklybecame ‘‘hollowedout,’’ in thewordsofChristopherClap-

ham(1996),andstateofficials setaboutona ‘‘privatizationplan’’of

theirown—what Jean-FrançoisBayart,StephenEllis, andBéatrice

Hibou(1999)havecalled ‘‘thecriminalizationof thestate.’’Along-

side, and interpenetratedwith, the formal institutionsof the state,

informal networks of officials, local power brokers or warlords,

arms traders, and internationalfirms inmanycountries formwhat

Reno(1999)has termeda ‘‘shadowstate’’ that leaves the formal in-

stitutions of government littlemore than an empty shell. In such

environments, ithasbeeneasy tomobilize irregulararmies forpri-

vateeconomicgain, andavigorous transnational trade inarmshas

beenoneof the feweconomic areasof consistentgrowth. It is not

that states have disappeared, or even simply that they are, as it is

often put, ‘‘weak.’’ It is, rather, that they have increasingly gotten

outofthebusinessofgoverning,evenasthey(or, rather, thepoliti-

ciansandbureaucratswhooccupytheiroffices)retaina lively inter-

est inother sortsof business. In thisnewera, it isnot theorganiza-

tionsof ‘‘civil society’’ that are ‘‘nongovernmental’’—it is the state

itself.

For much of Africa, such a new political order has meant not

‘‘less state interference and inefficiency,’’ asWestern neoliberal re-

formers imagined, but simply less order, less peace, and less secu-

rity. In anumberof countries (now includingeven such tradition-

ally ‘‘stable’’ states as Côte d’Ivoire), it has meant civil war. At

the same time, the role of private security companies and profes-

sionalmercenaries in securing economically valuable enclaves has

mushroomed,as isnowincreasinglywelldocumented(Lock1998;

Musah and Fayemi 2000; Reno 2001a, 2001b, 2004; Singer 2003;

see also chapter 8).

In fact, the picture that seems to emerge from the recent schol-

arly literature isof twoquitedifferentkindsofgovernance,applied

to the two different Africas that French colonialism once distin-

guishedas ‘‘Afrique utile’’ and ‘‘Afrique inutile’’—or ‘‘usable/useful Africa’’and‘‘unusable/uselessAfrica,’’asReno(1999)hasreminded

us. Usable Africa gets secure enclaves—noncontiguous ‘‘useful’’

GlobalizingAfrica? 39

bits that are secured, policed, and, in a minimal sense, governed

throughprivate or semiprivatemeans.These enclaves are increas-

ingly linked up, not in a national grid, but in transnational net-

works that connect economically valued spaces dispersed around

theworld in apoint-to-point fashion.

The rest—the vast terrain of ‘‘unusable Africa’’—gets increas-

inglynongovernmental states, and an arrayof extra-state formsof

control and regulation that range from revitalized forms of local

politicalauthority(oftenstyled‘‘traditional’’)toopenbanditryand

warlordism. This state of affairs is often violent and disorderly,

but it should not be understood simply as an absence of govern-

ment. As Janet Roitman has recently pointed out for the Chad

Basin (2004), even banditry has its own intricate forms of social

andmoralorder, and its formsof ‘‘regulation’’ oftenfindpointsof

attachmentwith the interests of both state officials and variously

militarized illegal traffickers (forwhomthe ‘‘inutile’’ areas that are of little interesttoforeigninvestorsmayturnouttobequite ‘‘utile’’ indeed).At the same time, areas inwhich states no longer project

bureaucratic control are often effectively ‘‘governed’’ in a transna-

tional humanitarian or developmentalmode, as a hodgepodge of

transnationalprivatevoluntaryorganizationscarryouttheday-to-

daywork of providing rudimentary governmental and social ser-

vices, especially in regions of crisis and conflict. I have elsewhere

described such ‘‘government-by-ngo’’ as a formof ‘‘transnational

governmentality’’ (Ferguson andGupta 2002). Like the privately

secured mineral extraction enclave, the humanitarian emergency

zone is subject to a form of government that cannot be located

within anational grid, but is instead spread across a patchworkof

transnationally networked, noncontiguousbits. (See chapter 4.)

Perhaps themost surprisingfindingof the recent literature con-

cernstherelationbetweentheWorldBankandInternationalMon-

etaryFund(imf)projects forpolitical reformandthedesiredgoal

of attracting capital and achieving economic growth. For the fact

is that the countries that are (in the termsofWorldBankand imf

‘‘governance’’ reformers) the biggest ‘‘failures’’ have been among

the most successful at developing capital-attracting enclaves. Afri- can countries where peace, democracy, and some measure of the

40 GlobalizingAfrica?

rule of lawobtain have had verymixed records of drawing capital

investment in recent years. (Zambia is unfortunately a prime ex-

ample.)But countrieswith the ‘‘weakest’’ andmost corrupt states,

and even raging civil wars, have often attracted very significant

inflows. Reno’s book on ‘‘warlord politics,’’ for instance, picked

four countries for study based on their ‘‘widespread violence and

extremelyweak state institutions’’: Liberia, SierraLeone,Congo/

Zaire,andNigeria(Reno1999).Wascapitalfleeingfromthese law-

less spaces?On the contrary:The four soakedupover half of pri-

vatecapital inflowstoSub-SaharanAfrica(excludingSouthAfrica)

in his sample year of 1994–95. Indeed, countrieswith raging civil

wars and spectacularly illiberal governments have on a numberof

occasions done surprisingly well, according to growth measures.

ConsiderAngola,whichduring thewar-torn1980sboastedoneof

the better gdp growth rates on the continent, or Sudan, whose

8.1 percent annualgdpgrowthmade itAfrica’s economicgrowth

‘‘star’’ of the 1990s, in spite of its horrific civil war and oppressive

government.6

Such observations suggest that the picture of Africa as a place

that has been simply abandoned by global capital has to be quali-

fied. It is true that, ascapital ‘‘hops’’over ‘‘unusableAfrica,’’ alight-

ingonlyinmineral-richenclavesthatarestarklydisconnectedfrom

their national societies, much of Africa is indeed marginalized

fromtheglobal economy,as several theoristsofglobalizationhave

noted.But the situation that comes intoviewfromrecent scholar-

ship is not exactly the featureless void thatCastells (2000) evokes

in his characterization of Africa as a ‘‘black hole’’ of the informa-

tion society.On the contrary, specific forms of ‘‘global’’ integra-

tiononthecontinentcoexistwithspecific—andequally ‘‘global’’—

formsof exclusion,marginalization, anddisconnection. Indeed, it

isworth askingwhetherAfrica’s combinationof privately secured

mineral-extraction enclaves and weakly governed humanitarian

hinterlands might constitute not a lamentably immature form of

globalization, but a quite ‘‘advanced’’ and sophisticatedmutation

of it. If so, the formsof ‘‘global economy’’ that havedeveloped in

somemineral-richAfricancountries in recentyearsmight showus

not just a theoretically interesting anomaly, but also a frightening

GlobalizingAfrica? 41

sortofpolitical-economicmodelforsomeotherworldregionsthat

combine mineral wealth with political intractability. (This possi-

bility is brieflyexplored in chapter 8.)

RETHINKING THE GLOBAL: AN EXAMPLE

IhavesuggestedthatasurveyofrecentscholarshiponAfricamight

notonly illuminate the situationon the continentbut alsohelpus

tothinkmorecriticallyaboutthemeaningof theglobal. Iwillnow

illustratethiswithabriefexamplefromthedomainofenvironmen-

tal politics.

Discussions of the environment often rely on a language of the

‘‘global.’’ Global warming, the ozone layer, acid rain, ocean eco-

systems,Chernobyl, desertification—all seem to showwith over-

whelming clarity that today’s key environmental issues are global

onesthatdemandtobeaddressedatwhatwecall the ‘‘global level,’’

notmerely thenational or the regional level. Such common-sense

turnsof phrase invoke the ‘‘global’’ as an encompassing,overarch-

ing spatial level, a notion that has come to bewidespread both in popularand journalisticunderstandingsand inthescholarly litera-

ture on ‘‘globalization.’’

The implicationusuallydrawn fromsuch invocationsof the en-

vironmentasaglobal issue is that the ‘‘national level’’ is inadequate

for environmental regulation and protection, since environmen-

tal crises do not respect national borders. So environmentalism,

we are told, must ‘‘go global.’’ Now, it is undoubtedly true that

environmental crises reveal the limitations of the nation-state sys-

tem in a particularly vivid way. But if the global is not, as I have

argued, an enveloping level of coverage superior to the national but,rather,aformofpoint-to-pointconnectivitythatbypassesand

short-circuits all scales basedoncontiguity, then the ‘‘global’’may

be just as inadequate to environmental problems as the national

(indeed, possibly evenmore so).This is so because ecosystems do

notwork ‘‘point-to-point’’ anymore than theyworknationally.

A great deal of what passes for environmental regulation and

protection inAfricaworks according to thepoint-to-pointmodel

(and is thuswell andtruly ‘‘global’’ inmysense).Nationalparks,of

42 GlobalizingAfrica?

course, are themselves guarded enclaves, existing in often fiercely

combative relations with surrounding residents. Often fenced

and militarily patrolled, these patches of internationally valued

‘‘nature’’ may be protected with ‘‘shoot-to-kill’’ policies against

‘‘poachers’’ who are often simply the local people who lost their

land and their ancestral hunting rights when they were forcibly

evicted tomakeway for the game park (seeAdams andMcShane

1996;Duffy2000;Neumann2001a).

More recent efforts in environmental protection and wildlife

conservation inAfrica have responded to the failures of the tradi-

tional ‘‘fortress conservation’’ approach by promoting a new ap-

proachbasedon ‘‘communityparticipation.’’The idea is to involve

members of ‘‘local communities’’ in the management of wildlife

‘‘resources,’’ in the hope that they will be able to control poach-

ing while also benefiting in someway from the existence of pre-

served wildlife (Hulme and Murphree 2001). Yet Roderick Neu-

mann(2001b)hasconvincinglyarguedthatthenewmodeldepends

justasmuchastheoldoneonthecoercivepartitioningofspaceand

the desire to ‘‘secure’’ selected rural areas as ‘‘resources’’ for inter-

nationallyvaluedeco-tourism.Inhiscase studyof theSelousCon-

servation Programme in Tanzania, he shows that the creation of

‘‘buffer zones’’ for the use of villagerswas designed to recruit vil-

lagers into a kindof anti-poaching self-surveillance. ‘‘Community

participation’’ did not replace coercion; it supplemented it. Both

state violence and the threat of it, Neumann argues, were essen-

tial to the working of the project. Indeed, his conclusion is that

‘‘community participation’’ and state violenceworked together as

‘‘integrated formsof social controldesignedtomeet theneedsand

goals of international conservationorganizations and the tourism

industry’’ (Neumann 2001b: 324).There is thus no contradiction

in the fact thatwildlifemanagement inTanzania has seenboth in-

creasing ‘‘community participation’’ and increasingmilitarization

in recent years—as illustrated in a recent reported incident in the

famed Serengeti Park in which game rangers allegedly arrested,

linedup,andshottodeathsomefiftyfamine-strickenvillagerswho

hadenteredtheparkarmedwithbowsandarrowsinsearchofsmall

game (Neumann2001b: 305).

Such spatial enclaving in the service of ‘‘nature’’ is not only the

GlobalizingAfrica? 43

work of states. Environmental ngos, too, often carve out their

ownspatial enclavesor turfs,perhaps targeting ‘‘hot spots’’of bio-

diversityor seeking topreserve specific environmental ‘‘treasures’’

orendangeredspecies.Suchngos are indeedoften ‘‘globally’’ net-

worked (i.e., linkedwith similarorganizations around theworld),

but it is a network of points, with most of what lies in between

simply bypassed or ignored. Meanwhile, the generalized destitu-

tion,theunderminingofstateauthority,andthespreadofcivilwar

on the continent pose fundamental threats to ecosystems that no

systemofprotected enclaves canmitigate for long.

Consider theworkofanenvironmentalngocalledAfricaRain-

forest andRiver Conservation (arrc). According to the group’s

Web site, its aim is to help preserve life that ‘‘has flourished in

Africa’sdarkestregions’’ formillionsofyearsbutthattoday ‘‘iscol-

lapsingatthehandsofman.’’7Itsmainworktodatehasbeeninthe

ChinkoRiver basinof theCentralAfricanRepublic (car),where

President Ange-Felix Patasse reportedly authorized the group to

create a wildlife preserve while developing a ‘‘counter-poaching

program’’ to prevent the destructionof gamebygroups of armed

poachers fromacross theSudanese border.

Arevealingarticlebya journalistwriting for the Observer maga- zine, published by the British newspaper the Guardian, provides the details on how the conservation project in the car is be-

ing carried out (Clynes 2002). Apparently, the arrc, led by its

founder, the Wyoming physician Bruce Hayse, has hired merce-

naries to attack the Sudanese poachers and to try to form a 400-

stronglocalanti-poachingmilitiatopatroltheChinkoRiverbasin.

Thearrc’s ‘‘directorofoperations’’ is reportedlya formerRhode-

sian mercenary and a veteran of the South African private mili-

tary firmExecutiveOutcomeswhouses the aliasDaveBryant. In

previous jobs in SouthAfrica,Mozambique, andMalawi, Bryant

movedeasilyacross the ‘‘oftenblurry’’ line separatingparamilitary

and anti-poachingwork (Clynes 2002: 5).He sees no conflict be-

tween military work and the task of conservation: ‘‘People don’t

like the fact that I’mex-military, butwhobetter todo this job?’’8

Other activists in the field of African wildlife conservation ap-

pear uneasy with the idea of a foreign ngo using conservation

fundstocreateanongovernmentalmilitaryforce. ‘‘Wewouldn’tdo

44 GlobalizingAfrica?

it,’’ saidRichardCarroll of theWorldWildlifeFund (wwf). ‘‘Can

you imagine the headlines? ‘wwf supporting SouthAfricanmer-

cenaries tokillCentralAfricans’?’’ (Clynes2002:6).But inarecent

interview,Haysedefendedtheoperationbyclaiming, ‘‘Whatwe’re

doing is really not that extreme by African standards in terms of

gameparks,’’ andnoting(correctly) thatshoot-to-killpolicieshave

beenused innationallyadministeredparks in countries likeKenya

andZimbabwe.While peoplewill certainly be killed, he noted re-

assuringly, ‘‘We’re not proposing to go out and do any kind of

widespreadmassacre.’’9

Askedforcommentduringthisinterview,anofficialnamedPeter

Knights from WildAid, another conservation ngo, agreed that

‘‘extreme measures’’ had been used in wildlife conservation for

some time on the continent. ‘‘And it’s not just aboutwildlife,’’ he

continued:

It’saboutresourcesingeneral,andit’sunfortunatelythescenariowe

find inAfrica,where there’s somanyof these small civil wars.You

often don’t hear about it, especially not here in the United States,

but there’s a lot ofwars, a lot of conflicts goingon, and sometimes

it’s aboutwildlife. Sometimes it’s aboutother commodities.

Indeed,those ‘‘othercommodities’’appeartobeapartofthearrc

story, aswell. According to the Observer article, the arrchas re- sponded toa fundingcrunchbyseeking to raise itsownmoneyby

sellingdiamondsdug in ‘‘its’’ area.The journalistTomClynes ob-

servedBryantandothersnegotiatingtheacquisitionandsaleofthe

stones (thoughwithoutgreat success, at least initially), andHayse

openlydefendedthenewfundingdevice: ‘‘Diamonds lookedlikea

waytodeveloptheprojectwithsomekindofsecurefinancial foun-

dation, andtoprovideamoreequitablemeans for the localpeople

to sell thediamonds theypickup’’ (Clynes 2002: 7).With a ‘‘flexi-

bility’’ reminiscentofotheractors intheregion, thearrc is appar-

ently seeking toput its ‘‘conservation’’ enclave tomultiple uses.

The arrc is undoubtedly an extreme case in its explicit com-

mitment to privatized violence in support of conservation. It is

not unique, however.DeborahAvant (2004) has recently given a

fascinating account of the process throughwhich local officials of

thewwfandtheInternationalRhinoFund(irf)endedupdecid-

GlobalizingAfrica? 45

ing to hire mercenaries to protect the Garamba National Park in

thedrc.Thewwf’s national leadershipeventually repudiated the

effort,buttheirf(togetherwiththewwf’s localofficers)hascon-

tinuedtopursuehiredprotectionviaprivate securityfirms,aswell

as viaUgandan troopsoperatingnear thepark (Avant 2004: 376).

Mainstreamconservationorganizations like thewwfhavekept

theirdistance fromsuchpractices, at least inpublic—probablybe-

cause (asAvant rightlyobserves) theyderivemuchof their power

from a perception ofmoral authority that could easily be eroded

bysuchthingsas involvementwithmercenaries.Butmanyofficials

of these organizations are, by some accounts,more supportive of

suchmeasures inprivate. Indeed,accordingtothe Observer report, the president and founder of the well-known Rainforest Action

Network,RandyHayes,waspresenton thearrc’sChinkoRiver

expedition, and someofficials are apparently glad that someone is

willing to do this sort of ‘‘dirty work.’’ According to one main-

streamconservationist(asquotedinClynes2002:6), ‘‘It’sprobably

better that thewwf isn’t involved.This is the sideof conservation

thattheorganizationswiththepanda-bearlogosdon’twanttodeal

with. It’s dirty, filthywork.And if youwant to succeed,youdon’t

put a choirboy in charge.’’

Perhaps themore importantpoint, however, is that thepractice

of thearrc is only a particularly uncompromisingmanifestation

of a vision of nature and its relation to the ‘‘global’’ that is much

morewidespread. After all, it is not only environmental extrem-

istswho take as their object of interventionwhat they imagine to

be pristine pockets of asocial nature. (The ‘‘hot spots’’ approach

to biodiversity has been endorsed bymanymainstream conserva-

tion organizations, includingConservation International and the

wwf.) And it is not only wild-eyed ‘‘eco-mercenaries’’ who be-

lieve that a ‘‘we’’ group of well-funded First World activists can

and should claim themoral authorityof a planetary conscience in

support of their own very particular interventions. Indeed,more

‘‘mainstream’’ environmentalngos also appear very much a part

of the larger ‘‘global’’ landscape that I have sketched here, oper-

ating as they do in a world of fragmented spaces, deteriorating

stateauthority,enclavedenvironmental ‘‘resources,’’andprivatized

security.

46 GlobalizingAfrica?

This is assuredly not to say that transnational ngos seeking to

conservewildlife and ecosystems deserve onlyour scorn and con-

demnation for theirefforts.Theirwork isoftenextremelyvaluable

and sometimes very sensitive to the sorts of concerns that I have

highlighted.Mypoint isnot todismiss theprojectofwildlife con-

servation but to point out theway that even such important and

undoubtedlywell-intentioned transnational projects,oftendriven

by altruistic motives, have increasingly, through a logic of prag-

matic adaptation to circumstance, taken on some of the forms of

spatialorganizationthatwemorereadilyassociatewiththeexploi-

tation of enclaves for mineral extraction.The same could be said

about humanitarian and relief agencies on the continent, which

havealsobecomeincreasinglyreliantonextra-statemechanismsto

establish patchworks of political order where states have become

nongovernmental.As aworker for Save theChildrenobservedof

theprivatemilitary companies inSierraLeone, ‘‘Theybangheads

veryefficiently, thefightingstops—andthat’swhenbabiesget fed’’

(asquoted inReno2001a: 212). Saving rhinos, like feedingbabies,

is surely a noble cause. But a close look at the means by which

such causes arepursuedwould seemtohavemuch to tell us about

how Africa is linked upwith a variety of contemporary ‘‘global’’

projects.

We have grown accustomed to a language of global ‘‘flows’’ in

thinkingabout ‘‘globalization,’’ butflowis apeculiarlypoormeta-

phor for the point-to-point connectivity and networking of en-

claves that confront us when we examine Africa’s experience of

globalization (cf. Tsing 2001). Such language literally naturalizes globalizationbymakingitanalogoustothenaturalprocessofflow-

ingwater.Rivers reallydoflow.Like somanyecologically signifi-

cant processes, a river’s flowworks via spatial contiguity—a river

goesfrompointAtopointBonlybytraversing,watering,andcon-

necting the territory that lies between the two points. But as the

contemporaryAfricanmaterial showssovividly, the ‘‘global’’does

not ‘‘flow,’’ thereby connecting and watering contiguous spaces;

it hops instead, efficiently connecting the enclaved points in the

networkwhile excluding (with equal efficiency) the spaces that lie

between the points. Ecological processes that depend on spatial

contiguity are, to be sure, not exclusively ‘‘local’’—often they are

GlobalizingAfrica? 47

regionaland, indeed,sometimesevenplanetary.Butneitherthere-

gionalnortheplanetaryscale iseasilyaddressedvia today’s ‘‘globe-

hopping’’ political and economic forms.

If this is so, then so-called global forms of economy, politics,

and regulation have no inherent advantage in dealing with envi-

ronmental issues. Indeed, insofar as contemporary ‘‘global’’ inter-

ventions on behalf of ‘‘the environment’’ rely on the existence of

protectedenclavessubject toradicallydistinctandspatiallydiscon-

tinuousmodesofpolicingandgovernment, they revealwithgreat

clarity theway that apparently universal andplanetary projects in

factrelyonsharpspatialdivisionsandviolentlypolicedzonesofex-

clusion.Such interventionsare indeed ‘‘global’’ in that theyrelyon

the transnational organizationof funding, institutions, andmoral

concern, but their very mode of operation reveals the selectively

disordered and starkly divided landscape that, I have argued, is a

foundational featureofAfrica’scontemporarymodeof integration

into ‘‘global society.’’

CONCLUSION

Areviewof recent scholarship on the political economyofAfrica

suggests that a continent that is widely understood to be simply

backwardorexcludedvis-à-vis thenewlyemergent formsofglobal

societymay in fact reveal key features of how the ‘‘global’’ works

today, and how itmightwork in the future. As I observed at the

start:Whatwe see depends onwherewe are looking from.What

doweseeabout the ‘‘global’’ today fromthevantagepointof these

recent studies?

The global, as seen fromAfrica, is not a seamless, shiny, round,

andall-encompassing totality (as theword seems to imply).Nor is

it a higher level of planetary unity, interconnection, and commu-

nication.Rather, the ‘‘global’’wesee in recent studiesofAfricahas

sharp, jagged edges; rich anddangerous trafficamid zonesof gen-

eralizedabjection; razor-wiredenclavesnext toabandonedhinter-

lands.Itfeaturesentirecountrieswithestimatedlifeexpectanciesin

themid-thirtiesanddropping;warfareseeminglywithoutend;and

thesteepesteconomicinequalitiesseeninhumanhistorytodate.It

48 GlobalizingAfrica?

isaglobalwherecapitalflowsandmarketsareatoncelightningfast

andpatchyand incomplete;where thegloballynetworkedenclave

sits rightbeside theungovernablehumanitariandisaster zone. It is

a global not of planetary communion, but of disconnection, seg-

mentation, and segregation—not a seamless world without bor-

ders, but a patchwork of discontinuous and hierarchically ranked

spaces,whoseedgesarecarefullydelimited,guarded,andenforced.

SuchanAfrica-centeredviewdoesnotshowusthe ‘‘truenature’’

of globalization—as if previous totalizing accounts of a global-

izedworld couldnowbe simplydismissedor replacedwith anew

one. Rather, the view developed here represents an attempt—an

‘‘essay’’—to show the possibilityof taking another perspective on

the ‘‘global’’ and to insist that there is no viewof ‘‘globalization’’

that simply ‘‘covers it all,’’ that all views (even themost apparently

all-inclusive and authoritative ones) are in fact views ‘‘fromsome-

where’’ (cf.Tsing2000).The fact that anAfrica-focusedpicture of

globalization looks sounlikewhatmost global theories leadus to

expect does notmean that other accounts, ‘‘from’’ other ‘‘places,’’

can simplybedismissed.Butneither is it simplyamatter adding a

newpiece toanotherwise intactpicture (as in theold cliché about

the five blindmen and the elephant)—as if we could simply ‘‘add

Africa and stir’’ and thus arrive at a truly all-inclusive picture. In-

stead, the view from Africa challenges us to develop new, more

situatedunderstandings of emergingglobal patterns, understand-

ings that attend more adequately not only to exciting new inter-

connections, but also to the material inequalities and spatial and

scalardisjunctures thatsuchinterconnectionsbothdependonand,

in someways, help to produce.Above all,what the inconvenient

questions comingoutofAfrica showus is howmuchmore think-

ing, and howmuchmore empirical social research, remains to be

done beforewe can really understand a globalization that divides

theplanet asmuch as it unites it.

GlobalizingAfrica? 49