Archive for the 'Africa' Category

Memories of underdevelopment

Published
by
peter
on 2010-02-22
in Africa and History
. Closed

Further to my post speculating about Robert Mugabe’s personality, here is some news from The Times about his physiology.  Apparently, he nods off to sleep every few minutes, even when meeting foreign visitors.  (HT:  Normblog)

The Times article mentions the two main contenders for the leadership of ZANU (PF) following Bob’s always-imminently-predicted-but-never-quite-arriving retirement:  Emmerson Mnangagwa and Solomon Mujuru.  One would think that the Zimbabwean Vice-President, Joice Mujuru, who is likewise a ZANU (PF) nomenklatura, would perhaps also be a contender, but she is married to Solomon, so he takes precedence.   She is more famous in Zimbabwe under her chimurenga name, Teurai Ropa (or Spill-Blood) Nhongo, and for leading a team of guerrilla fighters into battle while pregnant.   Because she joined the struggle (for Independence) in her teens, she did not finish high-school; to her great personal credit, she completed her O-levels after Independence and while a Cabinet Minister.   In the year she did O-level English, a novel by George Orwell was on the syllabus, leading to her infamous stage whisper at the official opening by then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe Institute for Development Studies;  when the VIPs were led to a different (and much better) buffet than that provided for the other people present, she was heard by all to exclaim,  “But this is just like Animal Farm!”

Her husband also had a loud voice.  When I first met him, he was calling himself Rex Nhongo, and I did not then know what he looked like.  A mutual friend introduced us using only first names as we happened upon each other buying groceries one evening after work in a Greek delicatessen in the low-density (ie, formerly whites-only) suburbs of Salisbury (as it then was).  Making conversation while we stood in the queue, I asked,  “And what do you do for a living, Rex?”  In a booming voice which scared the daylights out of the white customers in the shop, he replied, “Oh, I’m Commander-in-Chief of the Army, son!”  Whether intended or not, this statement got the three of us to the front of the queue immediately.

FOOTNOTE:

Note that in maShona custom, a person may be given or may adopt different names over their life, and may prefer different names at different times or for different purposes.  In addition, for reasons of security during the liberation struggle many people adopted noms de guerre, so-called chimurenga names.

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The psychology of Robert Mugabe

Published
by
peter
on 2010-02-17
in Africa, History and Politics
. Closed

I wondered here whether Robert Mugabe had been an informant for CIA in the years prior to Zimbabwean Independence in 1980.   If so, many strange events in Zimbabwean politics, before and after Independence, would be explained.   The thought has now occurred to me that such a relationship, if it had existed, would also explain an odd trait of Mugabe’s personality in the period after his return from exile in December 1979.    I realize my thoughts here are pure speculation, and, moreover, speculation about another person’s personality.  

Because informants working for espionage agencies provide information on a regular basis to an employee of that agency, informants and their agents often develop quite close relationships.  Each has a secret which he or she usually cannot tell to other relatives or friends or colleagues – informants cannot usually divulge their information-passing actions to those around them, and agents usually do not divulge the names of their informants to their fellow employees.   Each also has to trust the other to some extent, and so the pair can develop quite a close relationship with one another; examples can be seen in Larry Devlin’s account of his close relationship with Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and Robert Baer’s account of his time working for CIA in the Middle East.

If our Robert had indeed been an informant (paid or unpaid) for CIA, then we would probably expect the agency to release him from that relationship when he was elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.  If he had developed a close relationship with his agency handler, then becoming PM would mean he would no longer have a close, neutral confidant.     Is this then why Mugabe became close to Lord Christopher Soames, the temporary Governor sent by Britain to oversee the election and the transfer of power at Independence?  Their relationship became so close that Mugabe asked Soames to stay on (as Governor? as President?) for a couple of years after Independence, a request Soames declined.   Is this also why Mugabe met weekly with his political enemy, Ian Smith, for about 18 months following Independence?    Until it fell apart in 1981, their relationship was sufficiently close that they were able to dance with each other’s wives at official functions, such as the ball held for the African Parliamentary Union meeting in Zimbabwe in 1981.

The closeness of both these relationships (Mugabe-Soames, Mugabe-Smith) has always struck me as odd.   But, if true, an ex-informant seeking another regular confidant could explain them both.

References:

Robert Baer [2002]: See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. Crown Publishing Group.

Larry Devlin [ 2007]:  Chief of Station, Congo.  New York, NY, USA:  Public Affairs.

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The second time as farce

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-29
in Africa, Anthropology, Globalization, History, Military strategy and Post-Industrial Nomads
. Closed

Rory Stewart, in his book about walking across Afghanistan, has this to say about the post-colonial cadres working for the UN and other international agencies in developing countries:

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neo-colonialism.   But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer.  Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing.  They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language.  They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies and royal botanical gardens.  They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t their home government would rarely bail them out.  If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism.  Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention.  Their policy fails but no one notices.  There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility.  Individual offices are never in any one place and rarely in one organization long enough to be adequately assessed.  The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neo-colonialists have no such performance criteria.  In fact their very uselessness benefits them.  By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation or oppression.

Reference:

Rory Stewart [2004]: The Places in Between. London, UK:  Picador, p.272, footnote #59.




Political activists of renown

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-20
in Africa, Heroes, History and Politics
. Closed

Recently, I have listed the teachers and writers who have influenced me, along with the managers whom I admire.  I now list the politicians and political activists whom I admire.  Some of these led conventional political careers, others were community organizers or single-issue advocates, and yet others were spies, or were accused of being such.  

Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Sol Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende Gossens, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Paul Keating, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.

Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (4) have produced more than their per capita share of political heroes, it would seem, but the distribution no doubt reflects my reading and interests.  Of course, it hardly needs to be said that I do not necessarily agree with any or all the views these people have expressed or hold, nor necessarily support all their actions.




Heroes: the underground railroad in Rhodesia

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-15
in Africa, Heroes, History and Politics
. Closed

Talking about Zimbabwean history reminded me that there are some unsung heroes of Zimbabwe’s struggle for majority rule whom I wish to salute.   These are the people who, rejecting the racist policies of the Rhodesian Front government, organized an illegal underground railroad to secretly transport black and white resisters across the border, usually to Botswana and Zambia.   The whites transported were usually resisting military conscription to fight in a war they disagreed with, a war in support of a cause they believed immoral.  I knew a couple of these railwaymen:  AP (”Knotty”) Knottenbelt, who had been headmaster of Fletcher High School, a state boarding school for black boys, from where he resigned in 1969 rather than raise a Rhodesian flag; he later tutored at the University of Zimbabwe, and the Mugabe Government appointed him to the board of the Posts and Telecommunications Corporation after Independence.     Another railwayman was his bridge partner, Nick Holman, father of the (now former) Financial Times Africa Editor, Michael Holman.   These men and their collaborators deserve praise and admiration for their great personal courage in support of a non-racial society.




Lancaster bombing

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-14
in Africa, History and Politics
. Closed

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement between the British Government and the major political forces in Zimbabwe, an agreement which led to Zimbabwe momentarily becoming – for the first time in its history – a British colony.  Before 1979, Rhodesia had initially been governed from the first European settlement in 1890 as a concession of the British South African Company (advised from 1898 to 1923 by a semi-elected council), and then from 1923 as a self-governing British territory with dominion-like status.  From 1898 onwards the franchise, as in other British-controlled territories in Southern Africa starting in 1836, was a conditional one – in order to vote one had to satisfy certain conditions: age, gender, literacy, education, income, and property-ownership.   These conditions were biased against non-whites, but did not exclude them completely, as I explained here.  Because the franchise was not race-based, white Rhodesians like Ian Smith could delude sympathetic foreigners, and themselves, that they were running a democratic and non-racial government.     

Continue reading ‘Lancaster bombing’

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Robert Mugabe and CIA

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-09
in Africa and Intelligence
. Closed

One has to wonder if Robert Mugabe was ever on the payroll of the US Central Intelligence Agency.   Consider these facts:

  • According to Larry Devlin’s account of his time as CIA Chief of Station in the newly-independent Zaire, CIA sought in the 1960s to recruit agents and paid informants inside the black nationalist political parties and liberation movements in African states.  Why would Southern Rhodesia be different?   Certainly, according to the memoir of Ken Flower, CIA had people stationed in Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s.
  • The New York Times reported in 1990 (1990-06-09) that the CIA had played a part in the arrest of Nelson Mandela by the apartheid regime of South Africa in 1962, using an agent the CIA had within the South African ANC.
  • According to Tom Lodge’s history of post-war black politics in South Africa, the South African Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which was aligned with ZANU (PF), received financial support from the USA.  Lodge gives no sources for this statement.
  • According to Heidi Holland’s biography of Mugabe, the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) facilitated his and Edgar Tekere’s escape across the border from Rhodesia into Mozambique in 1975 (Holland, pp. 175-6).  Was the CIO acting under advice from CIA?
  • Following Zimbabwean Independence in 1980, the newly-elected Government of Robert Mugabe took two years before permitting the USSR to open an embassy in Zimbabwe.  The USA, the UK and the PRC were each permitted to open embassies immediately.  Mugabe’s party, ZANU (PF), of course had been aligned with (and mainly received support and training from) the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA during the Second Chimurenga while its main rivals, Joshua Nkomo’s PF-ZAPU, had been aligned with (and mainly received support and training from) the CPSU and the Soviet military.    The first Zimbabwean (and before that, Rhodesian and Zimbabwe-Rhodesian) Director of Central Intelligence, Ken Flower, says in his memoir:  “the early advice I received from [Minister of State Security, Emerson] Mnangagwa:  to accept foreign missions as friendly or ‘non-aligned’ until proved otherwise, but in the first instance to make life as difficult as possible for the Russians.” (page 273).
  • For almost two years following Independence, Mugabe met weekly with Ian Smith, the racist and duplicitous Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia who had made the illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, and who resisted majority rule until forced to agree to it by the South African regime of John Vorster.
  • Following Independence, Mugabe retained Ken Flower as head of the CIO until his retirement 18 months later, and then kept him on as a consultant for a period after that.  Flower had been head of the CIO from its foundation in 1963 under Rhodesian Prime Ministers Winston Field and Ian Smith, and Zimbabwe-Rhodesian PM, Bishop Abel Muzorewa.
  • According to a report in Newsweek in February 1982, Joshua Nkomo told a press conference in the then Salisbury (renamed Harare later that year) following his dismissal from the Cabinet, that he had sought South African Government assistance to stage a coup against Mugabe and ZANU (PF), but this request had been refused.
  • For at least several years following Independence, the counter-espionage unit of the Zimbabwe CIO had only two divisions:  one seeking to identify and counter South African espionage activities, and the other seeking to identify and counter Soviet espionage activities.  No staff of the CIO were devoted to identifying or countering US espionage activities.  I was told by various CIO officers (including Flower himself) during the 1980s that this was because the USA was not perceived by the Mugabe Government to pose a threat to the country or to the ruling party.  Such a position was, on the surface at least, quite odd, given the (then) avowedly socialist nature of the ZANU (PF) administration, its communist and anti-colonialist rhetoric, and its ostensibly close links to the regimes of Angola, Cuba, the DDR, the DPRK, Libya and Mozambique.  It should also be recalled that during its first decade of Independence, Zimbabwe experienced regular bombings and other acts of terrorism by agents of the apartheid regime of South Africa; these acts included the destruction by terrorist bombs in 1982 of most of the nation’s airforce.   Moreover, some of the white staff of the Zimbabwe CIO, including some in counter-espionage, were themselves South African agents, as was demonstrated when some of these people subsequently defected to RSA.  Zimbabwe had considerable reason to fear foreign espionage at this time.
  • Western Governments, including the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were remarkably quiet about Mugabe’s genocidal campaign of violence against the people of Matabeleland in 1983-1987, the Gukurahundi.   Indeed, the UK and the USA expressed far more concern for the fate of the white commanders of the Zimbabwean Airforce, arrested, held illegally, and tortured following the bombings of 1982.  The Reagan administration had added Zimbabwe to its list of countries eligible to receive US military aid in December 1982. 
  • Members and supporters of PF-ZAPU, most recently the brave Judith Todd, have long suggested that some senior members of ZANU (PF) were paid CIA agents. 

Unless someone like Larry Devlin writes his memoirs, I doubt we will ever know the facts in this case.  

Latest revision of this post:  2010-01-04.

References:

Larry Devlin [ 2007]:  Chief of Station, Congo.  New York, NY, USA:  Public Affairs.

Ken Flower [1987]: Serving Secretly: Rhodesia’s CIO Chief on Record.  Johannesburg, RSA:  Galago.

Heidi Holland [2008]:  Dinner with Mugabe. Johannesburg, RSA:  Penguin.

Tom Lodge [1983] : Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945. Longman.

Judith Garfield Todd [2007]:  Through the Darkness:  A Life in Zimbabwe. Cape Town, RSA:  Zebra Press.




Public lectures

Published
by
peter
on 2009-10-08
in Africa, Politics and Rhetoric
. Closed

I expect that Bertrand Russell is the only person in history to have given public lectures to both TS Eliot (in lectures given at Harvard University) and Mao Tse-Tung (in a lecture series given in China).  With youtube and the web, we are in danger of forgetting how special an occasion a public speech can be.  And so I decided to list the people whose public lectures I have heard.  I’ve not included lecturers and teachers whose courses I attended, the most influential (upon me) I have previously listed here, nor talks given at conferences or in academic seminars.

Kenneth Arrow, Michael Atiyah, PK van der Byl, James Callaghan, Noam Chomsky, Don Dunstan, Steve Fuller, Bob Hawke, Xavier Herbert, Anahid Kassabian, Robert Mugabe, Ralph Nader, Joseph Rotblat, Rory Stewart, Oliver Tambo, Edgar Tekere, Rene Thom, John Tukey, Gough Whitlam, Elizabeth Windsor, and Andrew Young.

Continue reading ‘Public lectures’

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Bonuses yet again

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-09
in Africa, Corporate culture, Decision theory, Forecasting, Planning, Project Management and market planning
. Closed

Alex Goodall, over at A Swift Blow to the Head, has written another angry post about the bonuses paid to financial sector staff. I’ve been in several minds about responding, since my views seem to be decidedly minority ones in our present environment, and because there seems to be so much anger abroad on this topic.  But so much that is written and said, including by intelligent, reasonable people such as Alex, mis-understands the topic, that I feel a response is again needed.  It behooves none of us to make policy on the basis of anger and ignorance.

Continue reading ‘Bonuses yet again’




A good woman in Africa

Published
by
peter
on 2009-08-11
in Advertising, Africa, Anthropology, Culture and Politics
. Closed

Marbury reports on the reaction of US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to a question asked by a university student in Kinshasa about her husband’s opinion on some issue.  She appears to have taken umbrage at being asked for Bill’s opinion, as if she would have  no opinions of her own. 

If the questioner were an Australian journalist (Norman Gunston, say*), then she would have been correct to take offence. But the questioner was Congolese, and the question could have been asked sincerely.  Perhaps no aspect of African culture is more distinct from contemporary, post-Protestant, western culture than the relationship between individuals and families.  In traditional African society, individuals would not normally have their own opinions; rather, they would defer to the group opinion of the extended family to which they belong.  These family opinions are reached in different ways, in some cases by discussion among the adults until a consensus emerges, in other cases by diktak by the most powerful family member (who may not necessarily be the eldest male).   The means of reaching shared opinions differ from one society to another, from one family to another, and even, within a single family, from one occasion to another.  In short, the locus of decision-making is not an individual but a group.  Traditional Catholic culture has more in common with this idea than our post-Protestant western culture because in Catholic belief, it is the Church, as a whole, that mediates communications between Man and God, and which is the recipient of Christian grace.  Protestants allowed each person to speak to God him or herself directly, thus promoting (or perhaps examplifying or accompanying) the trend to individualism that has been a feature of western life these last two centuries or so.

This fact of African life has implications for anyone doing market research or opinion polling in Africa, since the standard method used for random variation of respondents within households in sample surveys (the so-called Kish Grid) does not work.  People speaking to sample surveyers, if they are willing to speak, want to give their family’s opinion not their own (if indeed, the concept of “their own opinion” makes any sense to them), and usually they want the designated household spokesperson to do the speaking. Depending on the specific culture, this designated person might be the eldest male, or it might be the youngest child, or the person with the most formal education.   I know this from my own experience doing market research surveys in Southern Africa, and I wrote about this experience for an anthropology journal.   Similarly, there are important implications for anyone designing and executing marketing campaigns or public health information campaigns in Africa, and perhaps elsewhere in the world (eg, Latin America).

On balance, I think Mrs Clinton should probably not have taken personal offence at the question.  But the fact that she did take umbrage points to the very profound cultural difference at play here.

Footnote:
* At a US press conference given to announce a movie about Watergate, Norman Gunston asked if the film would have any 18.5 minute gaps in it, as Nixon’s secret Oval Office tapes did, and whether former President Nixon would receive complimentary tickets to the film.

Reference:

P. J. McBurney [1988]: On transferring statistical techniques across cultures: the Kish Grid. Current Anthropology, 29 (2): 323-5.

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