African politics

The Guardian reports that LSE Director Howard Davies has resigned in the wake of the school’s connections to the Gaddafi family and its acceptance of large donations from them.

Over at his “other blog-digs”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/two-syllabuses/, Kieran is looking for suggestions for a course syllabus on Markets and Moral Order. By sheer coincidence, when browsing Daron Acemoglu’s “web page”:http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/paper today, out of curiosity to see how many new papers he had written this month, I noticed that Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson apparently had a piece that was directly on topic. It’s entitled a ‘Reply to the Revised (May 2006) version of David Albouy’s “The Colonial Origins of Comparitive Development: An Investigation of the Settler Morality Data.’ Sadly, the link seems to lead to a quite different (and rather duller) piece about death rates. Nor, despite some efforts, have I been able to establish precisely which instrumental variable Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson are using as a proxy for the morality of European settlers in Africa during the colonial period – presumably, this time it isn’t “mosquitoes”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/13/one-economics/, despite the tempting analogies. Suggestions for possible such variables gratefully received in comments.

Jesus Christ. Louis Michel, the former European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, is reported by the EU Observer as offering his opinions about Leopold II, King of the Belgians and one-time private owner of the Congo:

bq. “Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?” … “Leopold II does not deserve these accusations,” continued Mr Michel, himself a descendent of the Belgian king and a “Knight, Officer and Commander” in the Order of Leopold, Belgium’s highest honour. … “The Belgians built railways, schools and hospitals and boosted economic growth. Leopold turned the Congo into a vast labour camp? Really? In those days it was just the way things were done.” …. Admitting there were “irregularities,” he said: “We can easily be tempted to exaggerate when it comes to the Congo … I feel instinctively that he was a hero, a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium.” “To use the word ‘genocide’ in relation to the Congo is absolutely unacceptable and inappropriate.”

Let’s be clear about this: what Michel has said is comparable to Holocaust-denial. If you doubt this, or even if you haven’t read it yet, then Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost should set you right. Perhaps 10 million people, perhaps half the population of the area, died during the “Free State” period, victims of Leopold’s greed for the region’s natural resources, chiefly rubber.

The “Belgian Congo” became formally independent on 30 June 1960. I’d made a note of this and was intending to post something at CT on or around the anniversary. But this morning’s Guardian has “an amazing gallery”:http://bit.ly/dwU7Nf of portraits of Congolese people by the photographer Stephan Vanfleteren, together with (in most cases) a short autobiographical statement by the subject.

As foreshadowed a while back, I’ve taken myself off to Nairobi for the week to take part in the ICANN meeting here. The security is pretty heavy but I’m glad to report the opening morning was one of the best attended I’ve ever seen and had by far the best dancing. I’ll be blogging about it pretty much every day this week. So far, I’ve written about the CEO’s provocative speech on the first day, where he called out unnamed African government representatives for telling porkies about IPv6 availability. I also mused about how we should act with President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan probably attending an unrelated meeting in the building tomorrow.

Topics I’m planning to write about during the week will be what’s next for the proposed .XXX top level domain, local civil society organisations and social entrepreneurship, something about the new top level domain process in general, and a few other bits and pieces. If there are pressing topics of this meeting you’d like me to write about, let me know in comments here.

But as the blog posts are a bit specifically Internet policy wonk for CT and I’m also doing a bit of self-marketing at the mo, please come on over to www.mariafarrell.com if you’d like to read more. I’ll probably do a more general wrap up post on CT at the end of the week.

Update – just realised I forgot to add a link to the ICANN meeting itself, for anyone who’s interested. What with all the security concerns, remote participation has been beefed up. No better time to get informed & involved.

Although I no longer work for ICANN, I’d planned on attending its meeting in Nairobi next month to meet old friends and drum up some work for my new consulting business. The Nairobi meeting is scheduled to run from 7-12 March. The biggest issue on the table is a crucial stage in the addition of new top level domains; the vote by the Board on how to handle expressions of interest. But in the last 24 hours, ICANN’s COO, Doug Brent, has published a security warning that may result in the meeting being cancelled.

If this happens, it will be a real blow for the Kenyan Internet community. A previously planned meeting in Nairobi was cancelled because of security concerns prompted by election violence a couple of years ago. I thought this was the wrong call at the time, as election violence tends to die down and our meeting wasn’t till several months later. But I didn’t question and don’t envy the people who have to make that decision.
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When I read the _Financial Times_ review of Joris Luyendijk’s _People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East_ last year, I knew it was a book I wanted and needed to read (Australian title is _Fit to Print_). So I placed an order on amazon.uk that very morning. But it never came and I only just got my hands on a second-hand copy. Amazon (US and UK) are both listing it as out-of-print. Which is a pity, because you need to read it too. Some of it will be familiar to intelligent and well-informed people: of course we _know_ things work like that. But it is hard to keep the knowledge one has of the news process in view, when watching TV, reading the papers, listening to the radio over breakfast. Luyendijk will, at the very least, do the necessary job of keeping us sensitized.
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Via “Arthur Goldhammer”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-blog-of-interest.html, this is a “very interesting post”:http://withoutbanisters.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-was-algerian-warwhy-should-you.html.

The French military tortured systematically from the beginning to the end of the war, most spectacularly during the “Battle of Algiers” in 1957. They used all the classic methods: electricity, simulated drowning, beatings, sexual torture and rape. …The FLN’s use of terrorism — in particular their targeting of European civilians at popular clubs, bars, and so on in urban bombing campaigns — served as the rationale for this “exhaustive interrogation” of “suspects.” … The Algerian War was a war of independence, a war of decolonization. In that sense, it cannot and should not be understood as analogous to, or a direct precursor to, the United States’ “war on terror.”

As an American today, what I find really significant about the use of torture in the Algerian War is what it did to *France*, which underwent a profound crisis of democracy as it attempted to hold on to Algeria. … what torture did do was poison the public sphere: to conceal the fact that the military was torturing, French governments turned to censorship, seizure of publications deemed deleterious to the honor and reputation of the Army, paralyzing control over the movements of journalists, and prosecution of those who nevertheless continued to publish evidence that torture was going on. … The reason all the government censorship was necessary was that a small but incredibly passionate, intellectually high-powered anti-torture movement developed in France from late 1956. … historical comparison can function as illuminating intellectual practice. … cell phone cameras really changed the world. Because the main reason the French torture-defenders didn’t argue that stuff like simulated drowning was no big deal was because *they didn’t have to: they didn’t have to admit simulated drowning was happening AT ALL.* In the absence of certain forms of highly-circulated, red-handed visual evidence, like the Abu Ghraib photos in Bush-era America, “deny, deny, deny” (even if massive, overwhelming proof actually does exist) remains a plausible public-relations strategy. … Denial that these things happened at all, which will always be the first line of defense, is no longer possible. And that is encouraging, despite everything.

One could debate and dispute whether implementing a Basic Income Grant would be a good idea in affluent post-industrial societies, as we did (“here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/28/redesigning-distribution/ and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/10/should-feminists-support-basic-income/ and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/02/02/feminism-and-basic-income-revisited/) at CT before. Yet for developing societies with serious problems of persistent poverty, it seems to me like a very good idea indeed. One could add as a (desirable) condition that such a society should be able to internally generate the money to fund such a BIG (that is, there must be a big enough section of rich or middle class people whose consumption or income can be taxed). The idea may work wonderfully in countries like South Africa for example. If you give poor South Africans a relatively tiny BIG, they are not given welfare payouts that enable them to sit back and rest (as the critics may have it), but rather people are given some very basic means to take their lives in their own hands: money for food, for basic health care, for school fees, for a roof above their head, and perhaps to set up a small business. No more begging for food needed. The amounts can be tiny and may seem like pocketmoney to people in the global North, but as we know from the relative success of microcredits, poor people can change their lives (and those of their children) when they have small amounts of money.

There is now empirical evidence supporting this line of reasoning, coming from Namibia, where in 2004 “a coalition”:http://www.bignam.org/ of churches, trade unions, NGOs and AIDS organisations decided to run a pilot project to figure out what a small BIG would do to the lives of the extreme poor.

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I’m not going to pretend that I understand the details behind the crisis in English cricket. But it has prompted a South African friend of mine to email asking me what I knew/thought about Pietersen, and that in turn has prompted a bit of a mea culpa. I have found it impossible to enjoy Pietersen as a player since he qualified for England because, at some point around the time he qualified I heard him say something incredibly stupid and unpleasant about the racial quota system in South African cricket — something to the effect that he, himself, couldn’t thrive in a system which gave systematic preference to non-whites. Wikipedia bears out that he did indeed make such comments, and suggests that he believed he was dropped from the Natal team for quota reasons.

Why a mea culpa? Because I’m sure that numerous sport stars, some of whom I am sure I enjoy and perhaps even revere, have obnoxious political opinions, and wrongheaded views of the source of their own superior capabilities. Big money sport, and the attention lavished on the very successful, encourage vanity, and make it hard to see the role of luck in differentiating between one’s own, and others’ level of success. KP was just in a position in which it is natural for him to air these views because, unlike most sportsmen, he had to explain why he was changing his nationality.

There are brilliant exceptions both to the politics (Mike Brearley, David Sheppard, bizarrely enough Brian Clough) and to the vanity (the extraordinary Flintoff, as it often appeared most of the Australians under Waugh), and I’m not suggesting that all or even most stars are anything like the one of the great white hopes of English tennis (I had a schoolfriend who hated tennis, but used to watch Wimbledon just for the joy of watching a fascist lose), but KP is, I imagine, rather unexceptional. So my initial hint of pleasure in his downfall gave way to a sense of guilt that I had singled him out for dislike.

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Lovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, the President and General Secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) are facing trial on 30 July on charges trumped up by the Mugabe regime. You can help the struggle to free them by making a statement at We are ZCTU and joining a letter writing campaign.

Check out the photomosaic of these two brave men, made up of 2000 individual photos.

I have a post up at the Guardian blog on the general subject of it not being terribly practical to assume that if we all shout hard enough at the Chinese government, they will wave their Chinese magic wand and the Darfur crisis will go away. In the post, I unaccountably forgot to link to Alex Harrowell at Fistful of Euros, who inspired the post by reminding me that I held this view. I’m now correcting this (frankly the CT referral stream is probably a little less, shall we say, problematic[1] than the Comment is Free one). So let the circle-jerk be unbroken, etc. Sorry Alex.

In general, though, and I didn’t explore this enough because it would have looked like rambling, a lot of people seem to think that the Olympic Games is the most important thing in the world to China. How much do we think they really care about it going well? I mean, seriously, we are going to be hosting this thing in London soon, and if it really is true that major world governments regularly make massive shifts of geopolitical influence in order to avoid a few slightly embarrassing scenes at their opening ceremony, then I am rather worried about what the rest of the world might have planned for us.

[1] No, let’s say “insane”

I have a post up at “Aaronovitch Watch” (incorporating “World of Decency”) imagining the response of the South African government to some of the media commentators who are loudly shaming them for their failure to act (in what way?) on Zimbabwe. A few more thoughts for the slightly less polemic Crooked Timber venue …
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