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AFRICAN
DEVELOPMENT
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boulder
london
AFRICAN
DEVELOPMENT
MakingSenseof
theIssuesandActors
TODDJ. MOSS
S E C O N D E D I T I O N
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Published in the United States of America in 2011 by
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301
www.rienner.com
and in the United Kingdom by
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU
2011 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-58826-769-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book
is available from the Library of Congress.
British Cataloguing in Publication Data
A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book
is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements
of the American National Standard for Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.
5 4 3 2 1
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For Gabriel, Leo, Max,
and the next generation of Africaphiles
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List of Tables and Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
1The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development 1
Part 1 The Domestic Context
2History and the Legacy of Colonialism 21
3Big Men, Personal Rule, and Patronage Politics 39
4Violent Conflict and Civil War 57
5Political Change and Democratization 75
Part 2 Core Development Questions
6Africa’s Growth Puzzle 91
7Economic Reform and the Politics of Adjustment 105
8The International Aid System 121
9Debt Burdens and Debt Relief 157
10Poverty, Human Development, and HIV/AIDS 171
Part 3 Regionalism and Globalization
11The African Union and Regional Institutions 197
12Africa and World Trade 211
13Private Investment and the Business Environment 233
Part 4 Conclusion
14Some Concluding Themes 253
List of Acronyms 257
Bibliography 261
Index 275
About the Book 283
vii
Contents
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Tables
1.1 Snapshot of Sub-Saharan Africa 6
2.1 Africa’s Main Colonial-Linguistic Divisions 23
2.2 Africa’s Decolonization 28
4.1 Major Conflicts in Africa, Selected Periods 59
4.2 Active UN Peacekeeping in Africa, 2010 64
5.1 Freedom House Status, 2010 85
6.1 GDP per Capita 95
8.1 Bilateral ODA to Africa 125
8.2 Bilateral Donors, DAC Members 126
8.3 Multilateral Donors to Sub-Saharan Africa 128
8.4 Aid to Africa, by Recipient, 2008 139
8.5 Donors and the International Target 141
8.6 The Millennium Development Goals 142
8.7 World Bank Country Policy and Institutional
Assessment, 2009 146
8.8 African Countries Eligible for the MCC, FY2010 147
8.9 Tied Aid by Donor 151
9.1 Main Types of African Debt 160
9.2 Debt Indicators for Kenya and Mali, End 2008 160
10.1 Components of the Multidimensional Poverty Index 173
10.2 Poverty in Burkina Faso, 2003 175
10.3 Global Poverty by Region, 1990 vs. 2005 178
10.4 Global Education Indicators by Region 179
10.5 Global Health Indicators by Region 179
10.6 HIV/AIDS in Africa, 2008 Statistics 185
10.7 Prevalence Rates, Selected Countries, 2009 186
11.1 The African Franc Zones 204
13.1 Official Aid vs. Private Finance in Developing Regions,
2004–2008 235
13.2 Inward FDI: Sub-Saharan Africa, 2005–2008 237
13.3 Sub-Saharan Africa’s Stock Markets 243
13.4 Slow Business in Africa 245
ix
Tables and Figures
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Figures
1.1 Map of Africa 7
6.1 GDP per Capita in Ghana and South Korea, 1960–2008 96
6.2 GDP per Capita in Nigeria and Indonesia, 1960–2008 97
8.1 Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa as a Share of Total Aid,
1960–2008 137
8.2 Aid and Growth in Africa 143
9.1 Global HIPC Countries, 2010 163
12.1 Sub-Saharan Africa Exports, 1960–2008 213
12.2 Copper and Cocoa Prices, 1960–2008 221
13.1 Private Capital Flows vs. Official Aid to
Sub-Saharan Africa, 1970–2008 235
13.2 African Inward FDI, 1970–2008 236
x Tables and Figures
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I am grateful to my thoughtfulcolleagues at the Center for Global Develop-
ment—especially Nancy Birdsall—who every day create an environment of
rigor, critical thinking, and good fun. For their comments, advice, and friend-
ship, I thank Kaysie Brown, Michael Clemens, David Cowan, Kim Elliott,
Bill Fanjoy, Piers Haben, John Kelley, Charles Kenny, Ben Leo, Maureen
Lewis, Joshua Nadel, Stewart Patrick, Vijaya Ramachandran, Nuhu Ribadu,
Anneliese Simmons, Harsha Thirumurthy, Nicolas van de Walle, Jeremy
Weinstein, and several anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to my stu-
dents at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute for asking good questions and
motivating me to write this book. Thanks to those who helped to gather in-
formation in the book, including Julia Barmeier, Lauren Young, Stephanie
Majerowicz, and Scott Standley. All errors of fact or judgment are, of course,
solely my own.
I am especially appreciative to Jendayi Frazer, Bobby Pittman, and
David Gordon for creating opportunities for me that have deeply shaped
my views on and experiences in Africa. This book would be very different
without them.
Markus Goldstein, whose help began more than a dozen years ago when
he rescued me from the sweltering Ghanaian sun and welcomed me into the
sanctuary of his office in Legon, is today my great friend and collaborator
on Chapter 10.
Special thanks to Lynne Rienner for her continual support, good ad-
vice, and for asking me to do a second edition.
Thanks to Victor Ekpuk for his beautiful paintings and for, again, al-
lowing me to show his work on my cover.
My connection to Africa, and thus in many ways this book, owes much
to the warmth and hospitality of Ashari and the late Violet Mutongwizo and
their children.Ndatenda Baba naAmai.
Most important, my love and gratitude to Gabriel, Leo, Max, and es-
pecially Donna. Your patience with me and tolerance for my absences al-
lowed this book to be completed.
xi
Acknowledgments
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Africa’s half-century of independence isending on an exuberant high. As
I write this, the so-called Afro-optimists are again on the ascendancy. Eco-
nomic growth rates are up nearly everywhere, poverty is dropping, and
democracy seems to be stronger than ever before. Investors, who have usu-
ally ignored Africa as a marginal backwater, are now scouring for ways to
capitalize on new opportunities. Most African nations, once dependent on
Western governments for cash, now have a range of financing options from
the private markets, Asia, and the Middle East. Indeed, a resurgence and
growing confidence in Tanzania, Ghana, Mali, Kenya, Botswana, and many
other countries all seem to point to a bright future. Even the long and seem-
ingly hopeless quest for regional cooperation and unity, a dream repeatedly
crushed on the rocks of political self-interest, is looking more possible than
anyone could imagine a decade ago. Maybe talk of an “African century”
doesn’t sound so far-fetched?
The Afro-pessimists have a case, too. Unconvinced, they might point
out that Africa is mostly exporting the same old commodities, it is still vul-
nerable to the vagaries of a whirlwind global economy, and the illusory
comforts of formal economic growth figures are hardly better than a gen-
eration ago. Dictatorships are still common, and many darlings of the recent
past—Uganda, Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal—seem to be backslid-
ing. Coups d’état, thought by many to have been finally relegated to the
dustbin of history, have made a comeback—in Guinea, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire,
Mauritania, Madagascar, Togo. Maybe the optimists are deluding them-
selves again and the continent is still stuck in a developmental malaise?
So, who is right? Both, and neither. These divergent views of Africa’s
path are, on closer inspection, neither schizophrenic nor necessarily contra-
dictory. They merely reflect the complexity of a continent that defies simple
characterization as either Nirvana or Hades—and a development process that
1
1
The Complexities and Uncertainties
of Development
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is never linear, always messy, and usually unclear. Acceptance of uncertainty
is simply a requisite for studying and working on African development.
On one level, the optimists and pessimists can coexist because of the
continent’s tremendous diversity—another key theme of this book. Although
the portrayal of Africa as a monolith is slowly (and rightly) dying, there is
still a tendency to accept that whole swaths of Africa are more or less the
same. This book discusses big trends that span the region, but the real story
of Africa is one of accelerating variation among countries and even between
parts of different countries. Namibia and Angola are neighbors, but could
hardly be more dissimilar. Nigeria is the home to both the megacity of Lagos
and the sleepy state of Sokoto.
On another level, Africa is a place that seems at ease living simultane-
ously in different worlds. One of the first lessons I learned about Africa is
that bridging—the urban and the rural, the traditional and the modern, for-
eign customs and African ways—is not so much a strenuous tension as sim-
ply the norm. The middle-class family living in the suburbs of Nairobi also
keeps a home in the rural Rift Valley. The businessman who negotiates with
Chinese investors, has a cell phone, and goes to church every Sunday may
also speak with his ancestors through a traditional healer and pay homage
to illiterate village elders. These different lives are not contradictions, but
rather an acceptance of irreconcilability.
The wild swings in views of Africa’s direction and fate also reflect real
and dramatic changes. For most of the past five decades, the continent has
been on a roller coaster of outsized expectations and terrible disappoint-
ments. The early, heady years—starting with independence for Sudan in
1956, Ghana in 1957, and the collapse of the French African empire in
1960—were a time of great hopes. It was widely believed that the conti-
nent would use its newly found political freedom to take off as an economic
power. The ensuing experiments with forced industrialization were a disas-
ter, and the political gains were, almost everywhere, replaced with repres-
sion, this time not by outsiders but by Africa’s own political elites. The
euphoria of independence gave way to despair. Africa’s leaders appeared to
be stealing, eating, and wasting its future. At various points over the pro-
ceeding half-century, things started to look upbeat, often quickly followed
by a return of anguish. However, the bigger picture is of one country after
another slowly, erratically opening up, changing course, passing the baton
to the next generation. Progress has been uneven and halting. At the turn of
the twenty-first century, few countries looked back with much to celebrate.
Many had become even poorer.
All along Africa’s postcolonial journey, a key player has been the in-
ternational “development industry,” the army of outsiders coming to “help.”
By no coincidence, just as independence was dawning, new agencies started
2 The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development
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to form—a new wing of the World Bank for poor countries in 1960, USAID
in 1961, a British colonial department became an overseas aid agency in
1962. These agencies—abetted by growing legions of nongovernmental or-
ganizations (NGOs), think tanks, advocacy groups, and more—emerged to
support the continent on its quest to end the blight of poverty and depriva-
tion and assist African countries in taking their rightful place among the
community of nations.
Depending on your perspective, the international development com-
munity has enabled Africa’s disappointments, merely mitigated the worst ef-
fects of its crises, or really helped to put the continent back on the road to
recovery. Without a doubt, some international development efforts have
saved lives. Just as doubtlessly, other efforts have created more problems
than they have solved.
But one thing is beyond dispute: development is big business and a
growth industry. The current development community (of which I, usually
proudly, consider myself a part) has never had better times, with new re-
sources, tools, ideas, and energies. And attention is focused on Africa like
never before, both on its opportunities and its bewildering array of chal-
lenges. Nowhere on the planet is the concentration of poverty greater, or
the problems so complex. This is why so much of the development com-
munity is focused on Africa—and where its efforts are going to be judged
in the future. Yet the model for the development business—the world of
donor and recipient, of the Western rich bequeathing alms to the African
poor—is dying. Changes in the global economy, the rise of new economic
powers, and a diffusion of decisionmaking—all trends hastened by the fi-
nancial crisis of 2008–2009—mean that the traditional donors no longer
have a monopoly on resources and ideas. Africa too is transforming, a new
generation of business and political leaders are asserting themselves like
never before, seizing upon these new opportunities. It is undoubtedly an ex-
hilarating time to be entering the field of African development.
The Purpose of This Book
Responding to the growing interest in Africa, more and more students are
taking courses on the economics or politics of Africa, development studies,
public health, and the business of emerging markets. This book aims for a
simple, but hopefully not simplistic, introduction to the main themes, trends,
and players in contemporary African development. It is intended for readers
approaching these issues for the first time, budding activists, and new prac-
titioners getting started in their careers. By no means is this book intended
as a survey of the academic literature, a primer on economic development
theory, or a how-to guide. (Indeed, by the end, I hope you will be highly sus-
picious of anyone promising a magic formula.) Instead, it is supposed to
The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development 3
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give the reader some basic facts, information, and words of cautionbefore
they approach development for study or work.
Working in this field is wonderful (I highly recommend it!) but the Hip-
pocratic Oath applies: first, do no harm. When teaching at the undergradu-
ate and postgraduate levels, I have found that a constructive way to start a
course is to hold a no-question-is-too-dumb session where students could
ask fundamental background questions, such as “What is really the differ-
ence between the World Bank and the IMF?”; “Why are Africans still so
poor if they get so much aid?”; or “What does the WTO actually do?” Given
the cross-cutting, multidisciplinary nature of development, there are also
usually great differences in baseline knowledge: some students might know
about HIV/AIDS, but not about trade, or they might know a lot about debt
relief, but not much on new ways that countries borrow money. This book
brings that introductory session to a wider audience, to discuss broad trends
in a frank and accessible way, to encourage the reader to think critically
about the complicated issues at hand, and to help students ask informed
questions about Africa’s development challenges. It offers no answers.
What Is Development?
It may seem silly, but there is no real agreement on what exactly “develop-
ment” means. The narrowest economic definition is to make poor people
less poor by raising their incomes. For individuals, this entails helping them
to find greater opportunities to be more productive so that they can live bet-
ter and longer lives. For an economy as a whole, this involves generating
economic growth to raise incomes and reduce the number of people living
below a defined poverty line.
A focus on income measures and on economic growth rates has been
criticized as too confined, so some have preferred to define “development”
more broadly using welfare or quality-of-life measures, such as indicators
of health (infant mortality, access to doctors, clean water) or education (av-
erage years of schooling, literacy rates). The United Nations, for example,
combines these into its annual Human Development Index, which includes
income, school enrollment, literacy, and life expectancy to rank all the
world’s countries. The UN also has a new “multidimensional poverty index”
that uses ten indicators (see Chapter 10). An even more expansive view that
largely originates in the work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen considers the
mark of economic development and social progress to be the freedom of
people to participate in and make choices about their own future.
Different definitions of development are far from mutually exclusive,
however. Although this book uses a mostly orthodox economic perspec-
tive—promoting development on the African continent is about increasing
economic growth rates—it treats income as a means to a better life rather
4 The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development
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than an end in itself. This approach assumes some universal goals: more in-
come is better than less, living longer is preferable to early death, and edu-
cation is superior to ignorance. At its broadest, the development question
asked here is “How can the standards of living be improved in Africa?” At
the same time, it must also be recognized that such questions are not merely
technical. Development is ultimately not about bricks and budgets but about
social change.
Digging Holes vs. Capital Flows
One divide worth mentioning up front is, as was once caricatured by a col-
league, the “digging holes vs. capital flows” notions of development. The
former perspective thinks about development as organizing a series of ac-
tivities such as digging wells, building schools, or teaching children how to
read and grow new crops. For a “hole digger,” development is about deliv-
ering more services, executing projects, managing logistics, and imparting
knowledge. The “capital flows” viewpoint is that promoting development
is about getting the environment right so that people do such things natu-
rally. This view of the world thus scrutinizes policies, incentives, available
resources, and institutions and how they interact with the global economy.
By this perspective, promoting development is not so much what you do
for other people as it is what you help to leave behind. The right metric for
this view of development might not be “How many kids did you vaccinate
yesterday?” but rather “What kind of vaccination system would be there if
you left tomorrow?”
Whichever outlook one chooses—and there are pros and cons to each—
the international community’s role in promoting development is always going
to be secondary to efforts by Africans themselves. And where external play-
ers are active, their role encompasses much more than simply aid. This book
treats the international aid system as central, but only in the context of the
evolving ideas about policy, political organization at the national and inter-
national levels, and global economic issues such as trade and investment.
What Is Africa?
This book is about contemporary Africa. It focuses primarily on the post-
colonial period of roughly the past five decades with an emphasis on issues
and debates most prominent in the early years of the twenty-first century.
“Africa” is sometimes used to refer to all the countries on the mainland con-
tinent plus the six island nations of Cape Verde, Comoros, Madagascar,
Mauritius, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Seychelles. In much of the literature,
however—including this book—the term “Africa” and even “the continent”
is instead used synonymously with what more accurately is called sub-
SaharanAfrica to mean the forty-eightAfrican countries, excluding Morocco,
The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development 5
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Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Such a distinction is surely arguable,
but in the development world the countries of North Africa are typically
placed in the Middle East (for example, by the World Bank) because they
are in many ways more a part of the cultural and political life of that region.
(Confusingly, Sudan and even Djibouti are sometimes also considered
North African.)
African Diversity
Every book on Africa opens with a caveat about its great diversity (see Table
1.1). This stance is predictable but also exists for good reason: the conti-
nent is a varied amalgamation of countries, societies, and people that makes
generalization difficult. Hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects
are spoken on the continent. Many of Africa’s cities are crowded, bustling
hives of activity with high-rise buildings, the latest technology, and many
of the same stresses and strains of modern life elsewhere on the planet. At
the same time, vast stretches of the continent are sleepy, underdeveloped
places that seem not to have changed for millennia.
Africa’s political diversity is just as stark. Botswana and Senegal have
been mostly stable democracies since independence, but Equatorial Guinea
and Angola have been perpetual dictatorships. Ghana and Mali have gone
from military rule to open and fairly free societies, while Zimbabwe has
plunged in the opposite direction. Malawi and Zambia have no modern ex-
perience with war, but Angola and Sudan have seen almost no peace over
the past three decades. Uganda, Mozambique, and Burkina Faso have all
managed to recently increase growth and reduce poverty rates, but Guinea,
Niger, and Burundi have seen disappointing growth and rising poverty (see
Figure 1.1).
Indeed, the most glaring trend is the rapid divergence among African
countries facing opposing economic and political trajectories. A number of
countries—Tanzania, Ghana, Mozambique, Botswana, Mali, Burkina Faso,
Benin, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa, to name a few—seem
to be gaining strength and national confidence and appear poised to join the
6 The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development
Table 1.1 Snapshot of Sub-Saharan Africa
Number of countries 48
Total population 840 million
Life expectancy 52 years
Infant mortality rate 81 deaths per 1,000
Literacy 54% of adult women, 73% of adult men
GDP US$926 billion
Average GNI per capita US$1,096
Source:World Bank; all data are for 2009, except literacy data are for 2008.
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global economy as full participants. But others—Eritrea, Chad, Malawi,
Côte d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Niger, Mauritania, The Gambia,
and Congo-Brazzaville all come to mind—may find themselves falling fur-
ther behind unless something drastic changes.
While Africa’s diversity is indisputable, much of the continent never-
theless shares related problems and has faced similar misfortunes. (The chal-
lenge of a book on all of Africa is to try to get this balance right.) Nearly all
of Africa’s nations are fairly young, just a few generations since indepen-
dence, and are still going through what might be called the early growing
pains of nation building. Several have their very first president still in power.
The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development 7
REP. OF
Figure 1.1 Map of Africa
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After widespread establishment of one-party states, a wave of political open-
ness swept across the continent in the 1990s, leaving few countries un-
touched (if many far from fundamentally changed). The attempt—and
failure—of state control of the economy has also been a nearly universal
postindependence experience. Almost all African countries have since un-
dergone some attempts to free up the economy and reorient the govern-
ment’s activities over the last two decades. Yes, the details and results of
these political and economic trends have varied tremendously, but the paths
taken have mostly been roughly in the same direction. Africa may indeed be
extremely diverse, but some essential and discernible trends dominate the
story of contemporary Africa.
How Little We Know
Despite the vast changes that Africa has undergone, often with the involve-
ment of outsiders, a striking conclusion is actually how little is really un-
derstood about the development process. Although the current consensus
about the right way to proceed may seem fairly reasonable, so too did all the
other previous strategies at the time of their popularity. Forcing poor peo-
ple at gunpoint to live in collective villages (as happened duringujamaain
Tanzania) is unthinkable today, but was once thought a practical way to pro-
mote development. The international donors in particular are prone to a con-
tinuously evolving mea culpa with hubris, what might be called the “yes, but
nowwe have it right” syndrome.
A recurring theme in the progression of development thinking is that
past strategies had mistakenly overlooked some crucial aspect, but the miss-
ing link has now been identified and everything can be fixed this time
around. Africa was initially thought to just lack infrastructure and capital.
When providing those things did not work, investing in basic education and
health was added. When that strategy also failed to generate growth, it was
thought that bad policies must be the problem. After some policies were
corrected (but many were not) and the results were still disappointing, the
next answer was governance and institutions—essentially where we are
today. Yet in at least three decisive areas the development “experts” admit-
tedly still have little clue:
•The growth process.Economists simply cannot say what exactly
causes growth and thus are unable to come up with clear remedies to
generate faster growth. There are lots of ideas and many hints, but
no unambiguous answers that apply universally.
•Institutional change.A lot of talk takes place about “institutions” and
“capacity,” but actually very little agreement exists on what these
terms exactly mean, much less on how to change or build such things.
8 The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development
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•The politics of development.Development economists have belatedly
recognized that local politics are the reason that the paths chosen so
frequently appear illogical and self-destructive. Yet much of the real
politics in any country happen beneath the surface, out of view and
poorly grasped by external donors or analysts. But acknowledging
that politics matter is not the same as understanding the incentives to
promote development.
Given these sizable holes in confidence, humility seems appropriate.
The continent has in many ways been a laboratory of both good and bad
ideas, perhaps the unavoidable outcome of its political and economic weak-
ness. But the generally sorry record of African development so far suggests
that any ideas and fads pronouncing to have found the magic bullet to re-
solve an inherently complex problem, such as quickly eradicating poverty
in a scantily understood foreign land, should be viewed with extreme
skepticism.
What We Do Know
The case for modesty does not mean that we have learned nothing about
development. In fact, a massive endeavor to extract lessons from different
development experiences continues, with thousands of economists, sociol-
ogists, anthropologists, public health specialists, and other assorted experts
dedicated full-time to flying around the world, collecting data, interviewing
people, monitoring, evaluating, consulting, and in every possible way think-
ing about how to make Africa less poor. The World Bank alone has more
than ten thousand staff (a large portion of whom work on Africa), while the
major donor agencies each employ thousands more, plus there are hordes of
contractors, university researchers, and NGO workers. Even if no clear so-
lution is available for poverty and the puzzle of slow economic growth,
some unmistakable lessons are evident, especially about necessary prereq-
uisites and thingsnotto do. A few of the least controversial examples of
these lessons include:
• Peace and security are preconditions for development.
• High inflation is bad for the poor and for economic growth.
• Vaccinations are an effective way to save lives.
• Governments are very inefficient at doing some things, such as run-
ning factories and farms.
• States must do some things, such as protect property and deliver basic
services.
• Transparency is preferable to secrecy, especially for public budgets
and government contracting.
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Misconceptions and Misinformation
While there is still much uncertainty and debate about development ideas,
there is perhaps just as much misinformation about what international agen-
cies actually do in the development arena. Street protestors have found the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade
Organization (WTO) easy targets, painting them as puppets of a global con-
spiracy to keep developing countries poor and in their place. These institu-
tions do have major faults, and numerous reasons exist to critique them and
what they do. But much of the criticism heard on the streets and on the In-
ternet (and, sadly, in many classrooms) is simply wrong. The World Bank
may be a behemoth and is occasionally bumbling, but it rarely “imposes”
anything on any unwilling government. (In fact, Chapter 7 argues that the
governments usually have power over the Bank.) Similarly, the IMF can be
inexplicably narrow-minded in its mission and often heavy-handed, but it
does not, as is frequently claimed, set limits on health spending in poor
countries. On the flip side, the saintly reputation in some circles of non-
governmental organizations is often undeserved. Some NGOs loudly de-
mand to be heard and claim to speak for “the people” but are themselves
accountable to no one.
10 The Complexities and Uncertainties of Development
Political Elites: Champions or Charlatans?
Based on the caricatures common in much of the debate about development,
African governments and leaders seem to have split personalities. In many
parts of the literature, the role of the state is thought to be fairly benign, with
poverty reduction and promoting the public good assumed to be the goals of
government leaders. By this view, taken by some antipoverty activists, the
main barriers to development are technical problems or the outside world,
which is placing impossible demands upon well-meaning but beleaguered
African officials. The other caricature, more common in the political science
literature and among salty development skeptics, is that the problems are
mostly political and that African elites are mainly out to help themselves and
keep their grip on power. By this view, the state is little more than a tool for
theft while the development agenda is mostly a facade masking a series of
rackets being perpetrated upon the donors and the African people. To take
one example, is the Republic of Congo’s president a respected statesman, the
leader of a poverty-stricken country coming back from years of debilitating
war, and deserving of debt relief so he can use the savings to better help his
people? Or is he a mere thug who came to power at the head of a vicious
gang called the Cobras, who could care less about his own people and blows
$300,000 of his country’s money living it up for a week at a swanky New
York hotel when attending UN poverty meetings?
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Behind much of the debate about development and the appropriate role
of the state, international organizations, NGOs, corporations, and other play-
ers are often deep ideological convictions, especially over whether market
capitalism is a force for good or evil. Despite what is commonly asserted,
there is no secret nefarious plot against the poor being hatched in a smoke-
filled room in the basement of the World Bank. The methods and results of
the international agencies may not always be pretty or successful, but their
intentions are indeed to build a better world.
The Various “Languages” of Development
The discourse on development also operates in different circles using dif-
ferent—and often unintelligible—languages. The advocacy community is
typically looking for simple emotional messages and short-term answers as
part of its efforts to boost public awareness, lobby politicians, and (of course)
to raise money. An example is the frequent calls to “double aid to halve
poverty,” a catchy phrase that helped to boost aid budgets but inconveniently
turns out to be incorrect. Academics think largely about long-term theoret-
ical relationships and statistical models that can find associations, for in-
stance, between the prevalence of conflict and an economy’s growth rate.
Aid workers, researchers, and policymakers working in the development
business are a third set. This crowd is often process-obsessed and driven by
internal bureaucratic dynamics, such as trying to figure out which kind of
loans are best used under which kind of circumstances. But the develop-
ment business is also infused with cynics who have been working in the
field for a long time and have been chastened by past experiences. (Before
embarking on a career in development, you must get to know lots of these!)
All three groups talk about similar things (like the efficiency of aid, the im-
portance of politics, and the need to do better in the future), but they all use
completely different words and often have their own indecipherable lingo.
Here is one hypothetical example, all talking about basically the same thing:
Advocate:“The donors must cooperate better if we are going to lift
more people out of poverty.”
Academic:“The real per capita GNI growth rate and the log of ODA/GDP
(lagged t-2) are robustly and positively correlated once the indices of
donor proliferation and aid fragmentation developed by Acharya, de
Lima, and Moore (2006) are added as independent variables.”
Practitioner:“Donor coordination is being implemented in the context
of the international consensus reached at Monterrey on the actions
needed to promote a global partnership for development and accel-
erate progress toward the MDGs through the OECD’s High Level
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Forum on Joint Progress Toward Enhanced Aid Effectiveness (Har-
monization, Alignment, and Results) with monitoring by the Joint
Venture on Monitoring the Paris Declaration.” (I am embarrassed
that I understand this one!)
Ten Tips for Sensibly Studying African Development
With all these caveats in mind, here are some tips to avoid disillusionment
and despair as you plunge into the dilemmas of African development.
1.No silver bullets.Development is about the complex and usually
messy evolution of societies and economies. Single solutions are tempting—
more aid, more democracy, eradicate corruption, get prices right, deliver
more bednets—but inevitably leave the true believers disheartened. Africa
is the graveyard of panaceas; be wary of those peddling the latest one.
2.Don’t believe the (good and bad) hype.Africa is the object of wild
swings of extreme optimism and pessimism. Those seeking attention or rais-
ing money invariably invoke emotional appeals to crisis, usually with pic-
tures of adorable yet sad children (“flies on the eyes” is an immediate red
flag). While the continent has its share of real crises and people in need, the
imperative of fund-raising by some groups encourages continual publicity
of “emergencies.” At the same time, beware the salesmen for Africa who are
blindly optimistic, claiming all is now well and dismissing any problems as
mere media misrepresentation.
3.Resist the temptation to exoticize.Perhaps it is the accumulation of
wildlife documentaries or news reports of famine and war, but many West-
erners seem to think of Africa as if it were another planet. My first visit to
Africa (to Zimbabwe’s capital Harare in 1990) was a shock not because it
was so strange but rather because it seemed so normal. Sure, the people
were poorer than in the United States, but the lives of Zimbabweans mostly
revolved around issues similar to mine back home: family, jobs, schools,
going to the doctor, traffic, the cost of gasoline, and the local sports teams.
For many Africans, daily life is indeed a tenuous struggle. But Africa is just
a place on earth like any other.
4.It’s always political.As much as outside donors and activists some-
times like to think of development as a technical exercise about delivering
better seeds or fixing a mechanical problem, it is always a deeply intrusive
and political act to get involved in another country’s development trajec-
tory. The World Bank, for instance, likes to dress up its governance agenda
in apolitical terms such as “transparency” and “accountability,” but chang-
ing the way government works intimately affects the distribution of power
within a country. Indeed, all interventions—even the most seemingly benign
act such as child nutrition programs—have implications for the allocation
of influence and resources within a village or a family.
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5.Development is more than money.Excessive attention is paid to how
much money is spent, as if that were a good measure of development effort.
(Economist Bill Easterly once said that judging success by the size of aid
flows is like reviewing films based on their budgets.) It is of course true
that money is required to build schools or pay civil servants. But develop-
ment is often not at all about money. There is little relationship, for exam-
ple, between spending on healthcare and actual health. In fact, money may
frequently be secondary to bigger issues such as markets, opportunities, and
incentives. If there is little reason for children to attend school (maybe be-
cause they are needed on the family farm or there are no jobs after gradua-
tion) and teacher expectations are low (perhaps their wages are paid six
months late and there is no oversight, so they never bother to show up), then
all the money in the world will not create a functional education system.
6.Beware the “facts.”Development is absolutely rife with myths that
get repeated often enough that they eventually are accepted as facts. One ex-
ample is the urban legend that Tanzania writes twenty-four hundred reports
for donors every year. This has been cited regularly and even by the presi-
dent of the World Bank once in a speech calling for less red tape. But the
source of this fact is a hypothetical story from a 1996 book on aid that sug-
gestedifa country had to write quarterly reports for every project and had
six hundred different donor projects (a not unusual figure), then it would
result in twenty-four hundred reports. Although Tanzania undoubtedly pre-
pares many reports for its many donors, there is no evidence whatsoever
that twenty-four hundred is the right figure. There are similar stories, such
as a “fact” peddled by some campaigners that debt “kills nineteen thousand
children per day,” a figure arrived at through a convoluted series of errors
and dubious assumptions.
7.Beware the numbers.Much of the development agenda is driven by
quantitative analysis as part of the push to make the process more rigorous
and “scientific.” While this may be well intentioned, the problem for Africa
is that the data are almost always unreliable. Even basic information such
as gross domestic product (GDP), exports, the number of children in school,
or how much a country spends on hospitals is often little more than an ed-
ucated guess. Sometimes formal surveys are done through a census or by an
external agency, but these are fairly infrequent, and people have lots of rea-
sons for not telling a surveyor the truth when one shows up at the door de-
manding all kinds of personal information. Most of the time models are
used to make estimations, but usually with very large margins of error, mak-
ing comparison, especially across countries or where differences are small,
extremely difficult to do with much confidence. In Ghana, a recent exer-
cise found that GDP was actually 63 percent larger than everyone thought.
(Whoops!) Given the data problems, should we interpret that one country is
really twice as well-off as another because its GDP figures are slightly
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larger? If a country’s reported primary school enrollment rate jumps from
40 percent to 43 percent the next year, should we really believe that more
children are in school? (Keep in mind that many budgets are based on show-
ing “results,” so there are plenty of incentives to fiddle.) Next time you read
about changes in access to clean water in Niger, you should consider how
that number was determined.
8.Keep perspective on Africa’s size.Africa may loom large in certain
development circles, but it is still a tiny player on the global stage. Twenty
African countries each have a total population of less than 5 million people,
about the size of metropolitan Washington, DC. Botswana features promi-
nently in the development literature (including in this book), but it is a small
country of mostly desert and swamps with fewer than 2 million people. Afri-
can economies are even more minuscule relative to the global marketplace.
South Africa may be a regional giant, but its economy is about the same as
the state of Indiana. The other forty-seven economies’ total are about the
same size as metropolitan Chicago. The county in which I live (Montgomery
County, Maryland, next to Washington, DC) has a larger GDP than forty-six
different African countries (only South Africa and Nigeria are bigger). These
comparisons are worth recalling the next time you hear that a multinational
corporation just cannot wait to pry open some untapped African market.
9.Go deep.Cross-country comparisons and understanding regional
trends can be useful, but one must complement this approach with some in-
depth country cases. Learning about the history and cultures of a country can
help give context to current development efforts and make sense of what can
seem at first glance irrational. Consider picking some lesser-known coun-
tries, too. There are more than twelve thousand books in print about South
Africa and nearly one thousand on Ghana, but very few on Burundi, Sierra
Leone, Zambia. Why not try Burkina Faso or Mali?
10.Go!Reading and learning about Africa are fine, but nothing beats
going there in person. If you have the opportunity, travel around as much as
possible, talk to people, see how they live, and you will probably find that
much of what you expect is dead wrong. And you can trust your own eyes.
On a recent trip to Tanzania, I had been reading reports on the plane about
robust economic growth, but when I visited the main port in the capital, Dar
es Salaam, I noticed almost no activity. Nothing was being loaded or un-
loaded, even though it was a Tuesday afternoon at the only port for a huge
swath of the hinterland. To me, this was a hint that Tanzania’s economic
success story was probably less widespread than advertised. But more im-
portant than checking out the facts, going to Africa is an enriching and often
inspirational experience. You may even catch the “Africa bug,” a compulsive
attraction to the continent that infects many of its visitors and keeps them
coming back. Zimbabwe certainly did that to me.
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Structure of the Book
The book is organized into three sections—looking at the domestic context,
a set of core development questions, and finally at regional and interna-
tional linkages. In each chapter, the intention is to provide some basic back-
ground information, analysis of the trends, and an explanation of the
contemporary issues, actors, and institutions that students may encounter
as they delve deeper into the subject. I have intentionally avoided using
footnotes to keep the text as readable as possible. At the end of each chap-
ter are some suggested readings to learn more about the topics covered, but
the recommendations are far from exhaustive. Full citations are listed in the
bibliography.
The next section provides context for Africa’s development, starting
with its history and the effects of colonialism in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 ex-
amines the nature of political authority and gives background on some of the
most influential leaders, including ten “Big Men” that readers probably
know of and another ten that they probably do not but should. Violent con-
flict is dealt with in Chapter 4, including a brief description of some of
Africa’s recent conflicts, plus some ideas on the causes and effects of civil
wars, as well as efforts to prevent and end conflict. Political trends, includ-
ing the unsteady rise of democracy in recent years, are the focus of Chap-
ter 5.
Chapters 6 through 10 cover some of the most central development is-
sues, beginning with the puzzle of Africa’s economic growth. Chapter 7 fol-
lows with a look at the politics behind economic reform, including why
some of the problems identified in Chapter 6 appear so resilient. Chapter 8
outlines the major ideas, institutions, and current controversies in the aid
industry. Debt relief, a leading issue for antipoverty activists for much of the
past three decades, is the subject of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 explains the var-
ious definitions of poverty, including income and other measures. The sec-
ond half of Chapter 10 also briefly addresses the role of public services in
reducing poverty and the special case of HIV/AIDS in development.
The final section looks at Africa’s regional connections and its rela-
tionship with the rest of the world. The African Union and the plethora of
regional institutions are laid out in Chapter 11. Chapters 12 and 13 explore
the main issues and debates around the movement of goods and capital, re-
spectively, across borders. Chapter 14 concludes with a very brief summary
of some of the broad themes of the book.
Emergency relief, gender, the environment, technology, migration, de-
mographics, and culture are all important development-related topics that
might deserve their own chapters but don’t have one here. This book also
only briefly touches on public health and education issues, which are often
the primary focus of many students approaching Africa for the first time.
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This approach is deliberate; public health and schooling are admirable fields
and are of course central to the development story, but the purpose of this
book is partly to help students with that perspective also understand some
of the political, economic, and financial issues that unavoidably intrude on
a more technical approach to development.
For Further Reading
Some of the best books for understanding African development include
Nicolas van de Walle’sAfrican Economies and the Politics of Permanent
Crisis, 1979–1999(2001) andAfrica’s Stalled Development: International
Causes and Curesby David Leonard and Scott Straus (2003). Two must-
reads on development that are not Africa-specific but highly relevant are
William Easterly’sThe Elusive Quest for Growth(2001), and Paul Collier’s
The Bottom Billion(2007). Two highly recommended classics are Goran
Hyden’sNo Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in
Perspective(1983) and Robert Bates’sMarkets and States in Tropical Africa
(1981). A recent book making the case that seventeen African countries are
pulling away from the pack is Steve Radelet’sEmerging Africa(2010). A
terrific new book, which argues that global development is making headway
even in places without economic growth, is Charles Kenny’sGetting Bet-
ter: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—And How We Can Improve
the World Even More(2011).
For an overview of the history of dominant ideas about development,
see Colin Leys’sThe Rise and Fall of Development Economics(1996) and
Deepak Lal’sThe Poverty of Development Economics(2000). To read
Amartya Sen’s ideas about development, see, among many, hisDevelop-
ment as Freedom(1999). For another take on the divide between develop-
ment approaches, in this case between the “finance ministry” and “civil
society” tendencies, see Ravi Kanbur’s “Economic Policy, Distribution, and
Poverty: The Nature of Disagreements” (2001). For a highly readable his-
tory of economic thought, look no further than Robert Heilbroner’sThe
Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic
Thinkers(1953).
The best Africanist journals areJournal of Modern African Studiesand
African Affairs.The leading journals for development economics that are ac-
cessible to nonspecialists includeWorld Development, Economic Develop-
ment and Cultural Change, Development Policy Review,and theJournal of
Development Studies.TheJournal of Economic Perspectivesalso often cov-
ers development economics in a nontechnical format, as does theWorld Bank
Research Observer. Finance & Developmentis a free quarterly magazine
from the IMF that summarizes some of the best research coming out of the
international institutions.
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The Economist Intelligence Unit provides regularCountry Reportson
every country in Africa, plus annualCountry Profiles. Africa Confidential
is a wonderful, and usually reliable, source for the inside buzz on African
politicians. There are now multiple websites for gathering African news, in-
cluding many in Africa itself.AllAfrica.comaggregates news articles from
more than one hundred news organizations in Africa.
The most authoritative source for economic data is the World Bank, es-
pecially itsWorld Development Indicators.Also useful are IMF country re-
ports, especially the statistical annexes that are produced regularly on each
country. A growing number of central banks in Africa are also producing
regular information and posting it on the Web.
When looking for information about African development, a lot can also
be learned from novels, and there are a huge number from which to choose.
Some classics are Chinua Achebe’sThings Fall Apart(1958) andAnthills of
the Savannah(1988), Graham Greene’sThe Heart of the Matter(1948), V. S.
Naipaul’sA Bend in the River(1979), and the writings of Wole Soyinka (who
won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986). A few more recent novels worth
considering are Tsitsi Dangarembga’sNervous Conditions(1988),The House
of Hunger(1993) by Dambudzo Marechera, and Norman Rush’sMating
(1991). One of the most amusing books on the World Bank’s relations with
Africa is Michael Holman’s witty satireLast Orders at Harrods(2005). There
are many novels about South Africa and the apartheid era, including Alan
Paton’s classicCry the Beloved Country(1948) and the huge bodies of work
by Nobel literature prize winners J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. For
a sarcastic essay on stereotypes used in writing on Africa, see “How to Write
About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina (2006).
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PART1
TheDomesticContext
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Sub-Saharan Africa is now believedto be the origin of all mankind. New
DNA research suggests that not only do all modern humans descend from
Africa, but that all those outside of Africa probably originate from a single
large exodus less than one hundred thousand years ago. Despite being the
original cradle of mankind, Africa has undoubtedly had an unlucky history
that severely affects its development progress today. Most obviously, in re-
cent modern times the boundaries of African states were set by European
powers over a century ago, and nearly all of these national borders, no mat-
ter how illogical, remain in place today. European colonization of most of
Africa also had a major impact on the local authorities, altering the evolu-
tion of political institutions and putting Africa on a trajectory that almost cer-
tainly contributed to the disappointing development outcomes seen since
independence. At the same time, however, colonialism is often used as a
scapegoat for the failings of current leaders. This chapter presents a brief re-
view of African political and economic history and some of the issues from
the colonial period that may be affecting the contemporary development
context. It is by no means intended as a comprehensive account of Africa’s
long precolonial and complex colonial history, but merely to highlight some
of the key facts and trends that are still deeply relevant today.
Precolonial Political Organization
Much of Africa’s precolonial history remains unknown because few African
societies were literate or formally recorded their history. What is known is
that Africa’s early history was far from static. Indeed, it was marked by large
waves of migration and long-distance trading. Politically, many Africans
lived in smaller clan- or family-based units, which were sometimes loosely
organized into larger groups with various degrees of central authority. At
the same time, Africa also had a number of significant kingdoms or empires
21
2
History and the Legacy
of Colonialism
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that were highly complex, centralized, and in some cases spanned more than
a thousand miles. A few examples are as follows:
• The Monomotapa Empire, which is thought to have reached its peak
around the middle of the fifteenth century, stretched across southern
Africa and had its capital at Great Zimbabwe.
• The Buganda Kingdom, which rose in the eighteenth century, ruled
over present-day central Uganda.
• The West African Ashanti Kingdom, which centered in what is today
central Ghana, rose in the late sixteenth century and had a vast trad-
ing empire of gold, ivory, and slaves. The Ashanti became relatively
urbanized and developed commercial agriculture. Politically, it was
centralized, had a standing military force, and included some aspects
of early consultative democracy.
• The Songhai Kingdom spread across the Sahel, peaking in power in
the sixteenth century, and at one point stretched from modern-day
Nigeria all the way across Mali to the Atlantic coast. Its political cap-
ital was at Gao in Mali, but one of its major cities was Timbuktu, a
center of early Islamic scholarship and an important trans-Saharan
trading hub that goes back perhaps as early as the tenth century.
• The Axum Kingdom in modern Ethiopia rose in the first century A.D.
and stretched, with several breaks, into modern times.
• Shaka Zulu used new military techniques and weapons to build a
powerful Zulu Kingdom around modern-day KwaZulu-Natal in South
Africa in the early nineteenth century.
Early European Arrivals
The Portuguese were likely the first Europeans to arrive in sub-Saharan
Africa in their quest for an eastward sea route to India. It is thought that
Bartholomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope around 1487. The Por-
tuguese subsequently set up small military posts along the coasts for re-
stocking their ships. Although some former Portuguese colonies claim “five
hundred years of colonial rule,” the Portuguese rarely ventured inland from
these early posts in Angola and Mozambique. The French also began ex-
panding along the West African coast, establishing a post in 1624 in Sene-
gal. In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck, working for the Dutch East India Company,
landed in Cape Town and started the Cape Colony, the first real European
attempt to settle in Africa.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Europeans began to system-
atically explore and map Africa, setting the stage for greater political in-
volvement and commercial activity. Explorer penetration can be easily viewed
through the evolution of maps. Until the mid-nineteenth century, maps of
22 The Domestic Context
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Africa are largely blank in the middle of the continent. (One from 1839 on
the wall of my office even has several wrong guesses about the location and
sources of major rivers.) Among the most famous explorers was Mungo
Park from Scotland, who is thought to have reached Segou (in modern-day
Mali) in 1796, to become the first European to see the Niger River—and
was shocked to report back that it flowed east-to-west. Even more famous
is the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who explored central Africa
in the 1850s and was the first European to reach Victoria Falls. Alexandre
Serpa Pinto also crossed southern and central Africa and went even farther
up the Zambezi River in 1869. That same year, theNew York Heraldnews-
paper sent Welsh journalist Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone. Stan-
ley returned to Africa several times, including as an agent for the Belgian
king, Leopold II. Stanley helped Leopold establish the Congo Free State
around 1882, a vast area of central Africa that Belgium exploited for rub-
ber and other commodities. Savorgnan de Brazza traveled into the western
Congo basin and raised the French flag over the newly founded Brazzaville
in 1881.
By the end of the nineteenth century, European explorers had found the
sources of the great rivers—the Nile, the Niger, the Congo, and the Zambezi.
The adventures of Stanley and his contemporaries captured the European
imagination and sped recognition of the continent’s economic potential.
Growing economic and military competition among European powers, com-
bined with technological advancements in transportation, communication,
and weaponry, helped to spark the subsequent “scramble for Africa.”
The Scramble for Africa
Up until the 1880s, little of the continent was actually under European con-
trol—but that was to change quickly (see Table 2.1). In 1884 German chan-
cellor Otto von Bismarck convened a conference in Berlin for the major
powers to divide up the continent. Although the conference was couched in
History and the Legacy of Colonialism23
Table 2.1 Africa’s Main Colonial-Linguistic Divisions
Linguistic Group Official Language Examples
Francophone French Côte d’Ivoire
Senegal
Cameroon
Anglophone English Nigeria
Kenya
Zambia
Lusophone Portuguese Guinea-Bissau
Angola
Mozambique
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humanitarian terms, the purpose was to establish rules for conquest and to
avoid intra-European conflict over territory in Africa. The final agreement
was that any territory could be claimed as long as it was nominally occupied
and the other countries were notified. Another major decision at Berlin was
the agreement that the Congo Free State belonged to the Congo Society, an
organization controlled by King Leopold II. In effect, this made 2 million
square kilometers in the heart of Africa the private property of a European
monarch who would never set foot in Africa. Conquest of Africa accelerated
after the Berlin conference, and by the end of the century, every part of sub-
Saharan Africa was part of a European claim, except for Liberia and Ethiopia.
Britain pushed into Africa from two points, the Cape Colony in the far
south and Egypt in the north. Cecil Rhodes’s dream was to link British
colonies right across the continent “from the Cape to Cairo.” At the same
time, France was seeking to build an east-west empire to connect its hold-
ings in Senegal across the Sahara to the Niger River and on to the Nile and
as far as Djibouti on the Red Sea. Indeed, these two imperial axes cross at
Fashoda in southern Sudan, where the French and British came to the verge
of war in 1898. But, as at Berlin, in the end they backed down and agreed
to separate spheres of influence.
The British Empire
The British Empire, which at its height covered nearly a quarter of the earth,
included large swaths of Africa. The main areas under its control included
Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ghana in the west; Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda
in the east; and large parts of southern Africa. In general, the British Empire
in Africa used two models of colonization. In most places it implemented
indirect rule, placing a British administrator on top of local chiefs or other
existing political structures. In these colonies, Britain sought to extract re-
sources where possible and to assert its imperial power, but not to create
wholly new societies or to establish large European populations. Kenya and
Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) were fundamentally different. In these settler
states, British citizens were encouraged to immigrate and settle, especially
after World War II when African land was sometimes given to veterans. In
these places, where the British presence was thought, at least initially, to be
more permanent, British policy was more guided as serving the minority
settler population. In practical terms, this meant that Kenya and Zimbabwe
each saw much greater investment in infrastructure, better-quality school-
ing, and at independence each had much more advanced and diversified
economies. Two important legacies from British colonial rule are the English
language and the prevalence of English law. Lastly, Britain (if not neces-
sarily its settlers) appeared among the earliest in recognizing that colonial-
ism in Africa was a doomed venture and that Africans would soon take over
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the reins. In general, the British handover of power to local nationalists was
orderly and the disengagement was more complete, at least relative to that
of the French.
French Colonialism
In French Africa, a much closer relationship existed between the colonies
and Paris. The French used a more direct style of colonial rule than the
British and were more aggressive in trying to remake African societies in
their image, including a policy of encouraging and accepting small num-
bers ofevolues,or educated black African elites who were considered (al-
most) French. Despite this closeness, France also realized that independence
was coming and quickly arranged independence for its colonies. In a single
year, 1960, no fewer than fourteen former French colonies gained inde-
pendence. Unlike the British, however, the French have maintained much
closer ties. Most former French colonies, for example, use a common re-
gional currency pegged to the French franc (since 1999 it has, of course,
been pegged to the euro, but the French retain control over the exchange
rate). The French also in general remain intimately involved in national pol-
icymaking and security matters in West Africa.
Portugal in Africa
The Portuguese colonies fared the worst, at least partly because Portugal it-
self was poor and run by fascist dictators António de Oliveira Salazar (1932–
1968) and Marcelo Caetano (1968–1974). The Portuguese rulers were the
least interested in developing the countryside and made the fewest invest-
ments in schools or health for the African population. Importantly, because
Portugal never expected to cede control and then left in a hurry after a coup
in Lisbon, the Portuguese never made preparations for the transfer of power.
Thus, at independence, each of Portugal’s former colonies had only a hand-
ful of college graduates and inherited few skilled workers to manage the
transition to a new country.
Other European Colonists
Britain, France, and Portugal were the main colonial powers in Africa, yet
other countries were also involved. Germany had hosted the Berlin confer-
ence and was an enthusiastic colonizer, taking control in the late nineteenth
century of Southwest Africa (later Namibia), Tanganyika (later mainland
Tanzania), Togo, Cameroon, Rwanda, and Burundi. Its colonization was
considered among the harshest, including revelations of attempted geno-
cide against the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia. But after World War
I, Germany lost its overseas colonies, and the League of Nations gave con-
trol to other nations. Belgium (which had assumed sovereign control of the
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Congo from the king in 1908 after revelations of atrocities) was granted
Rwanda and Burundi. Southwest Africa was ceded to South Africa, while
the French took Togo and Cameroon, and Britain controlled Tanganyika.
Spain had a single colony in Africa, Equatorial Guinea, which gained inde-
pendence in 1968. Italy had its own grand imperial hopes, but its foray into
Africa was relatively minor. Italy controlled Eritrea and a small part of what
is now Somalia from 1885 to 1941. It also briefly occupied Ethiopia during
World War II, but was never a colonizer in the same way as its European
counterparts. (But you can still see the inscription “Mussolini” with a red
star over a tunnel on the road north of Addis Ababa.)
Africa’s Noncolonies: Ethiopia and Liberia
Ethiopia, once called Abyssinia, has a long history of centralized political
empire going back to the first-century rulers based in Axum. During the Eu-
ropean scramble for Africa, Italy attempted to take the country, but lost mil-
itarily to the Ethiopians in the Battle of Adowa in 1896. The Amhara elite
sought to consolidate their rule and modernize the country to resist further
European aggression. Haile Selassie became emperor in 1930 and acceler-
ated this process. The Italians tried again during World War II to rule
Ethiopia and did occupy the country from 1936 to 1941. British-led African
forces retook the country, and in early 1942 Britain and the United States ne-
gotiated a treaty recognizing Ethiopian sovereignty. Selassie was returned
to power and ruled the country until a coup in 1974.
Liberia was a colony of freed American slaves beginning in 1822 and
was supported largely by private religious and philanthropic groups. In 1847
the “Americo-Liberians” declared independence, and the Republic of
Liberia was born. But rather than reintegrate into local African societies,
the settlers regarded themselves as “Americans” and sought to model their
new government on the United States. Like some of the European settler
states in Africa, Americo-Liberians mostly sought to keep themselves sep-
arate from the indigenous African populations. Liberians with roots among
the settlers maintained control over the country until 1980, when President
William Tolbert was deposed and killed by Samuel Doe, setting off a series
of internal conflicts (see Chapter 4).
South Africa’s “Independence”
European entry into South Africa began in 1652 with the arrival of Jan van
Riebeeck, who set up the Cape Colony on behalf of the Dutch East India
Company. Dutch settlers slowly expanded their territory throughout the
eighteenth century, occasionally clashing with the indigenous Xhosa. Britain
seized the Cape of Good Hope area in 1797 during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch
War and formally annexed the Cape Colony in 1805. The descendants of the
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Dutch and other early European settlers known as Afrikaners (or Boers,
which means “farmers” in Dutch) grew increasingly resentful of new British
rule, including attempts to expand rights for Africans in the Cape. In the
1830s, thousands of Afrikaners embarked on the “Great Trek,” migrating
deeper into the hinterland. The Afrikaners set up their own states, the “Boer
Republics” of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. But the discovery
of diamonds and gold encouraged the British to take a new interest in the
Boer Republics. The Afrikaners held the British off during the First Boer
War of 1880–1881 using guerrilla tactics. But they could not do it again in
the Second Boer War of 1899–1902, when the British sent much larger
forces and employed brutal tactics against civilians, including what is rec-
ognized as the world’s first concentration camps. The Union of South Africa,
incorporating the Cape and Natal Colonies and the two Boer Republics, was
established in 1910. The agreement explicitly left out the Bechuanaland
Protectorate (now Botswana), Basutoland (Lesotho), and Swaziland, al-
lowing those three countries to remain independent and eventually become
sovereign states.
The right-wing National Party won power in 1948 and quickly began
to implement a policy of segregating the races, known as “apartheid.” Ag-
itation for greater rights by Africans grew throughout the second half of the
twentieth century, most notably by the African National Congress (ANC).
Two key events were when sixty-nine people were killed in Sharpeville by
police in 1960, during a protest against requirements that all Africans carry
passes, and riots in Soweto in 1976, sparked by rules forcing Africans to learn
Afrikaans instead of English. Antiapartheid protests grew in the mid-1980s,
as did international isolation through sanctions. In 1990 a ban on the ANC
was lifted and its leader, Nelson Mandela, was released from prison after
twenty-seven years. In South Africa’s first free elections in April 1994, the
ANC won by an overwhelming majority, and Mandela was elected president.
Independence Arrives
A confluence of events and trends triggered the end of Europe’s domination
of sub-Saharan Africa. Although the pressures for independence were a long
time coming, independence came in a relatively quick wave. Sudan was
first in 1956. Ghana was next in 1957, an event typically considered the be-
ginning of Africa’s independence movement. The French followed by shed-
ding Guinea in 1958, and fourteen more colonies followed suit in 1960. In
rapid succession over the next few years, almost all the remaining African
colonies gained freedom from their colonial powers (see Table 2.2). Portu-
gal was the main holdout and tried to maintain its African territories. But
after a revolution at home in 1974, it abandoned its colonies the following
year. White settlers in Rhodesia had declared their own independence in
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1965, but after a long and bloody civil war with nationalist guerrillas, it
too was transformed into an independent Zimbabwe in 1980. Africa’s last
colony was Namibia (formerly Southwest Africa), which had been ad-
28 The Domestic Context
Table 2.2 Africa’s Decolonization
Year Country Colonial Power (formerly)
1956 Sudan UK/Egypt
1957 Ghana UK
1958 Guinea France
1960 Nigeria UK
Somalia UK
Cameroon France (Germany)
Benin (Dahomey) France
Burkina Faso (Upper Volta) France
Chad France
Congo-Brazzaville France
Côte d’Ivoire France
Gabon France
Mali France
Senegal France
Mauritania France
Niger France
Togo France
Central African Republic France
Madagascar France
Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire, Congo) Belgium
1961 Tanganyika (merged with Zanzibar to form UK (Germany)
Tanzania in 1964)
Sierra Leone UK
British Cameroon (split to Cameroon and
Nigeria) UK
1962 Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) UK
Malawi (Nyasaland) UK
Uganda UK
Rwanda Belgium (Germany)
Burundi Belgium (Germany)
1963 Kenya UK
1965 The Gambia UK
1966 Botswana (Bechuanaland) UK
Lesotho UK
1968 Swaziland UK
Mauritius UK (France)
Equatorial Guinea Spain
1974 Guinea-Bissau Portugal
1975 Comoros France
Angola Portugal
Mozambique Portugal
São Tomé and Príncipe Portugal
Cape Verde Portugal
1976 Seychelles UK
1977 Djibouti (French Somaliland) France
1980 Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) UK (declared by
settlers in 1965)
1990 Namibia (Southwest Africa) South Africa (Germany)
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ministered by South Africa since World War I. In 1990, it finally became
independent, closing the door on five centuries of European colonization
on the continent. For many, however, the decolonization process was not
truly complete until 1994, when South Africa held its first free elections
and white minority rule ended.
Social Legacy of Colonialism
Colonialism and the arrival of European ideas, technology, and systems had
colossal effects on Africa—the influences of which are still deeply felt
today. As real and in many ways as catastrophic as colonialism was, many
people today also have reasons to either exaggerate the legacy or to use it
as a convenient scapegoat for other failings or mistakes. This point is men-
tioned not to minimize the devastating effects of colonialism and the eco-
nomic exploitation that accompanied political domination but rather to keep
in mind that interpreting the colonial legacy remains deeply political and
vulnerable to cynical manipulation.
A few aspects of the social impact of colonialism are still felt today.
•Culture.Much of Africa today retains outward aspects of European
culture, including language, dress, and cuisine. In many cases, the continu-
ation of some cultural imports is clearly pragmatic, such as countries with
multiple local languages keeping the colonial language as a neutral option.
But there are also concerns that the colonial experience undermined Afri-
cans’ confidence in their own culture and that many have come to accept the
European racist notion that African cultures are inferior. Even if this outlook
is not explicit today, it may underlie the tendency of many in Africa and
around the world to underappreciate African ingenuity or to seek foreign
solutions to African problems.
•Ethnicity.Identities based on blood linkages—ethnic, familial, or
clan—are very real in most of Africa because, as in Europe, traditional po-
litical organization was based on such relationships. Although a fluid and
often arbitrary concept, ethnic identity seems nevertheless to have extra-
ordinary power to influence how people treat each other. Colonial ideas of
race and ethnicity may have delineated, and in some cases evidently exac-
erbated, ethnic differences. In Rwanda, for example, it is not at all clear that
Hutus and Tutsis saw themselves as distinctly different until the Belgian au-
thorities classified people as one or the other and then implemented policies
of deliberate discrimination. (Pointing this out does not mean that the Hutu-
Tutsi clashes or the 1994 genocide is the fault of the Belgians, but colonial
influences may have contributed to ethnic division.)
•Racism.One version of ethnic discrimination that is explicitly tied to Eu-
ropean colonial rule is racism. Beliefs in African racial inferiority were clearly
part of the justification for colonialism in the first place, and such sentiments
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continue in many ways, if less obviously. In the countries that experienced
race-based violence, such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, or even Kenya, the
black-white tensions can still be felt. Racism is also a lingering issue for many
of the Asian minorities and the growing numbers of mixed-race people—
most obviously for “Cape coloreds,” the term still used in SouthAfrica today
to describe the large population of people concentrated in the western Cape
who have some combination of African, European, and Asian ancestry.
•Religion.Colonialism and geography are major determinants of Afri-
can religious patterns. Islam came to Africa along trading routes, reflected
in the dominance of that religion across the Sahel and along the coast of
East Africa. The first Christians in sub-Saharan Africa were probably in
Ethiopia, which has had orthodox Christian churches perhaps as far back as
the fourth century. However, for most of the rest of the continent, Christi-
anity arrived through missionaries, especially during the nineteenth century.
Because many of the European powers actively encouraged missionaries,
they were often the vanguard of eventual colonial domination. At the same
time, mission schools were often the only formal educational opportunities
for African children, and many of the continent’s most prominent national-
ist leaders were first taught at mission schools.
Slavery
The most devastating historical impact on Africa is probably the export of
an estimated 11 million of its inhabitants. Prior to the nineteenth century,
slavery was commonplace in much of the world, and many African societies
accepted it as a feudal-style labor arrangement or the rightful winnings from
military conquest. African slaves were not only common within the conti-
nent, but exports to the Middle East and parts of North Africa appear to
have occurred centuries before Europeans began exploring the African
heartland. But the growth of the transatlantic slave trade, which began in the
sixteenth century and was mainly between West Africa and the Americas,
turned slavery into a major business for European and African slave traders.
Ghana’s Ashanti Kingdom, for example, actively traded gold, ivory, and
slaves, first to Portuguese merchants and later to the Dutch and British. The
slave trade peaked in the late eighteenth century as demand for labor in the
Americas grew, especially from sugar plantations where an estimated 90
percent of all slaves in the Americas worked.
The abolition of slavery is sometimes described as the first human rights
campaign, growing primarily out of religious societies in Great Britain.
Faced with growing pressure from the public and the clergy, the British Par-
liament abolished its slave trade in 1808, outlawed slavery in 1833, and then
later used the Royal Navy to try to stop the trade. Despite British steps, other
European nations, such as Spain, Portugal, and France, continued to traffic
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in human cargo. In the interim period between Britain’s criminalization of
slavery and the final suppression of the transatlantic trade in 1867, more
than 3 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas.
Ironically, the antislavery movement in Europe was one of the critical
motivations and justifications for European conquest of the African conti-
nent. As the Europeans divided up the continent politically, one of the early
tasks for the colonial regimes was to curb slavery and the slave trade. British
General Charles Gordon, for example, was sent up the Nile to expand British
influence, and one of his orders was to try to suppress the slave trade in
Sudan. Belgium’s King Leopold justified his expanding control over Congo
in part on the supposed humanitarian mission to root out slavery (even as he
directly profited from the trade). The eventual abolition of the slave trade in
the Americas led to the decline of the practice of slavery, a step not formal-
ized in North America until the 1860s. Unfortunately, some forms of slav-
ery continue today, especially in places such as Sudan and Mauritania,
although more in the form of a contemporary version of feudalism than the
explicit business trade of the past.
African Nationalism
The experience of colonialism and the process of decolonization also had a
major impact on the political and ideological landscape in Africa. Since
African “nations” for the most part did not exist prior to colonialism, one of
the major challenges for the emerging leadership was to build a sense of
national identity. The fight against colonial authorities provided the initial
impetus for such a movement, which developed primarily from the grow-
ing number of educated Africans that agitated for greater indigenous polit-
ical autonomy. African nationalism was not only a political movement, but
also a cultural reassertion of Africans’ rights not to be dominated or con-
trolled by outsiders and a rejection of the colonial ideology that suppressed
African freedoms and self-worth.
A key turning point was the important role played by Africans in the
battle against fascism during World War II. Many Africans who served with
the Allies were distraught that many of the values they supposedly defended
during the war—such as democracy, freedom, and self-determination—did
not apply to them. The independence of India from the British Empire in
1948, largely based on the emergence of Indian nationalism, encouraged
African leaders to pursue similar goals. The victory of Vietnamese nation-
alists against the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the first major defeat of
a colonial army by local nationalists, was also a spark that catalyzed na-
tionalist guerrilla movements to seek independence through military means
in Africa. After the eventual end of colonialism and the disappearance of an
obvious imperial enemy to unite opposition, African nationalism—the
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process of redefining political units and loyalties—has been much more dif-
ficult and continues today (see Chapter 5).
Socialism
Another important ideological hangover from the colonial period is social-
ism. Leftist ideas—such as collective ownership and heavy state control of
the economy—took root in many African countries for three main reasons.
First, the Soviet Union and China were critical supporters in terms of money,
weapons, and training for many African guerrilla movements. Along with
this support came communist-inspired ideas of planning and economic man-
agement that led, in some countries such as Mozambique and Angola, to
explicit Marxist-Leninist parties after independence pursuing Soviet-like
economic models. Second, some aspects of many African cultures, such as
the communal treatment of land ownership and collective decisionmaking,
appeared more similar to socialism than a liberal capitalist model based on
individualism and private ownership. Third, state control of the important
parts of the economy (what Marx called the “means of production” and
Lenin called “the commanding heights”) seemed to many leaders a natural
economic complement to their newly won political independence. If polit-
ical independence was throwing off the yoke of colonial political domina-
tion, then why not also seize the economy to end exploitation and mobilize
local resources for national purposes? Although many of the socialist poli-
cies (and much of its language) have since been jettisoned (see Chapter 7),
state economic intervention lives on in many forms to support patronage
(see Chapter 3).
Pan-Africanism
In the early twentieth century, led by African American activist W. E. B. Du
Bois among others, the rise of ideas of solidarity and unity among all Afri-
can peoples occurred around the globe. Pan-Africanism, as it came to be
known, was influential among African nationalists who saw common cause
in fighting the colonial powers and seeking independence. At the same time,
several of the African nationalists and early political leaders—especially
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, and Julius Ny-
erere of Tanzania—became proponents of a Pan-African vision for Africa’s
political future (see Chapter 3). Nkrumah in particular envisioned a formal,
continent-wide political union. Pan-Africanism was the intellectual ration-
ale for the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963
(which became the African Union [AU] in 2002). Although Pan-Africanism
as an amorphous idea continues today, it has never coalesced into a mean-
ingful political structure (see Chapter 11).
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Traditional African Authorities
The arrival of European colonists had a major impact on the existing polit-
ical leadership in Africa. Given the huge diversity of precolonial political in-
stitutions and the broad range of colonial experiences, generalizing about the
impact of colonialism on traditional African authorities is impossible. In
some places where European military might was overwhelming, the tradi-
tional political structures were broken. But many others found ways for
some form of the old system to survive through adaptation or cooperation.
What does appear clear, nearly universally across Africa, is that while colo-
nialism introduced the structures of the modern state to Africa, vestiges of
traditional authority and organization remain today. In places such as Zim-
babwe, where most of the ruling chiefs were co-opted by the Rhodesian
regime and thus discredited after independence, minor local roles for chiefs
still remain. In several countries that had traditions of royalty that were
forced out by either the colonial masters or by independent governments,
royalty has recently come back, although largely in ceremonial roles. The
throne of the Asantehene, king of the Ashanti in Ghana, has been revived,
but mainly in a cultural capacity. The Buganda Kingdom in Uganda plays
a similar social rather than overtly political role. However, in some cases tra-
ditional authorities still wield considerable authority. In Botswana, for in-
stance, thekgotla,or village council, retains important authority over many
matters. The sultan of Sokoto, the traditional ruler of the Hausa in northern
Nigeria, retains a huge amount of influence in that part of the country. Most
starkly, Swaziland is still a formal monarchy and perhaps the most obvious
example of the endurance of traditional authority (see box).
Weak and Conflict-Prone States
One important legacy of colonial rule is the prevalence of weak political
states that are highly vulnerable to conflict. The inherited colonial borders
are a large part of this problem. Lines between states were drawn based on
European economic and strategic concerns rather than related to the social
and political realities that existed on the ground. These borders resulted in
many political, linguistic, and ethnic groups being both bunched together
and split apart. Current African states tend to have multiple ethnic and lin-
guistic groups that may provide little basis for a cohesive political unit. The
Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), for instance, includes more
than two hundred distinct linguistic groups. At the same time, because colo-
nial powers often used rivers as natural borders, yet groups of people tend
to live along both banks of a river, many ethnic groups have found themselves
divided among different states. For example, the Limpopo River that separates
South Africa and Zimbabwe also divides the Ndebele people. Many borders
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continue to be the source of tension, with ongoing demarcation disputes today,
including hostilities along the Nigeria-Cameroon, Ethiopia-Somalia, Chad-
Libya, and Ethiopia-Eritrea borders.
Another legacy is the system of weak political institutions left behind
after the colonial withdrawal. In the British colonies, where the move to in-
dependence was typically deliberate and took place over a long transition
period while formal education systems were in place, the newly independent
states had fairly well-developed civil services. In the Portuguese colonies,
where withdrawal was hasty and formal education extremely limited, the in-
coming African governments had only a handful of skilled bureaucrats and
very few established institutions of the modern state (see Chapter 6).
Pawns of Larger Global Forces
Just as Africa’s colonial destiny was mainly determined by foreigners sitting
in a conference room in Berlin, Western engagement in much of postinde-
pendence Africa has seen the continent mainly in terms of larger global
forces. Most obviously, African decolonization occurred during the height
of the Cold War, the geostrategic and ideological competition between the
United States and the Soviet Union. Although the struggle was considered
“cold” because the United States and USSR never directly fought, it was in
34 The Domestic Context
Swaziland: Africa’s Last Kingdom?
The people of the current Swazi nation migrated down from East Africa,
probably about five hundred years ago, settling in their current location in
the early 1800s. King Mswati II consolidated their territory and, to help fend
off the expansionist Zulus, formed strategic alliances with Boer farmers in the
area and the British. Ties grew to the South African and British authorities,
and Swaziland came under British control as a protectorate after the Boer
War ended in 1902. But even as European influence increased, the king main-
tained authority over the local population. Swazi law and custom, including
the authority of the king, continued to play a dominant force in the lives of
the local population, even while the British established a European-style legal
system to administer the country. The British deliberately kept Swaziland out
of the Union of South Africa in 1910, and following the introduction of
apartheid, the British began planning for eventual Swazi independence. The
transition was slow, however, and Swaziland became an independent state as
a constitutional monarchy only in 1968. Although the new state initially had
an elected parliament, it was later dissolved by King Sobhuza II in 1973.
Today, Swaziland has a parliament and prime minister, but they mainly play
advisory roles, and ultimate authority remains in the hands of the monarch,
currently Mswati III.
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fact “hot” in many parts of the world, including in Africa, through proxy
wars. Angola is the most obvious example, where the Soviets supported the
ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) government
and the Cubans sent thousands of troops and medical personnel in the 1980s.
The United States directly backed the União Nacional pela Independência
Total de Angola (UNITA) rebels and indirectly supported the South African
military invasion of Angola.
More broadly, the major global powers viewed Africa mostly though a
Cold War lens. Allies were chosen and backed based on their allegiance.
US support for Joseph Mobutu in Zaire was almost entirely owing to his
utility in containing communism and Soviet influence in the continent. At
the same time, however, African leaders were able to manipulate Cold War
fears to extract resources, favors, or protection from both sides. Indeed,
there is little evidence that African leaders embraced either communism or
capitalism with much enthusiasm, preferring to pursue their own agenda
but wrapping it in the language of their preferred patron—thus allowing the
occasional changing of sides without much impact on the ground. Siad
Barre, dictator of Somalia from 1969 until 1991, for instance, switched from
Soviet to Western allegiance in the late 1970s.
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
there was a lot of concern in Africa in the early 1990s that the continent
would be forgotten. Although this does not appear to have materialized—
indeed, attention to Africa has probably never been greater than it is today—
the major world powers may still engage in Africa mainly as part of a
broader agenda, such as global security or the expansion of democracy.
Economic Legacy
The economic impact of colonialism on Africa is a tough question. On the
one hand, colonial rule was both justified and supported by explicit eco-
nomic exploitation. Africa’s natural resources, such as gold, rubber, copper,
and timber, were extracted without much benefit to Africa itself. The labor
of African workers was often for the benefit of foreigners. (In one of the
most blatant such cases, in the early part of the twentieth century African
workers from Mozambique were sent to work in the gold mines of South
Africa and payment for their labor was made in the form of gold sent di-
rectly to Lisbon!) The introduction of colonial taxes forced many Africans
into wage labor or pushed them to produce surpluses. Slavery, of course,
also exacted an economic toll. In many ways the form of crude capitalism
that colonialism introduced was highly imperfect, skewed heavily against
Africa, and was, by today’s standards, deeply unfair.
On the other hand, colonial rule brought some of the aspects and insti-
tutions of a modern economy. Europeans constructed roads, railways, and
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ports. Admittedly, these were built to serve the colonial economy. Railways,
for example, typically connected mines to ports in order to facilitate the ex-
traction and export of resources. But for many African countries, these basic
infrastructure investments are still crucial to the current economy. Colonial
administrations also brought formal schooling and healthcare to many parts
of Africa for the first time (although it was often inferior and targeted mainly
to help serve colonial interests). Literacy in Africa may have been only
around one-quarter of the population around the time of independence, but
this is from a base of near zero just a few generations earlier. However im-
perfect and unfairly the colonial economic impact was, it did in some small
measure help to prepare Africa for engaging with the modern world and
participating in the global economy.
Ties That Still Bind
One of the remarkable features of contemporary Africa is the enduring con-
nection to European powers. French-speaking Africa is perhaps the starkest
example of this, where the links between France and its former colonies are
strongest. In most of francophone Africa, French is still the official lan-
guage, large numbers of French citizens continue to work in Africa, and
France maintains security through active troop presence. Economically, trade
and business are dominated by French firms, the West and Central African
currencies are tied to the French franc (technically, to the euro since 1999, but
the relationship remains controlled by Paris), and even the budgets of many
countries are drawn up by French bureaucrats. Britain maintains a much less
intimate relationship with its former colonies, but nonetheless the economic,
political, and cultural connections remain strong. In fact, in parts of Africa
today, visitors still find children in British-style school uniforms, learning a
British curriculum, and having their exams graded in Cambridge.
For Further Reading
Here are only a few suggestions out of the huge literature on African history.
Thomas Pakenham gives an account of the critical period of colonization in
The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912(1991). Paul Nugent’sAfrica Since In-
dependence: A Comparative History(2004) is perhaps the best recent history
book accounting for the legacies of different colonial experiences. Another
solid choice is Crawford Young’sThe African Colonial State in Compara-
tive Perspective(1994). A very long-term perspective on African history
and the importance of endowments is contained inGuns, Germs, and Steel:
The Fates of Human Societies(1999) by Jared Diamond (this popular book
is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6). A recent accessible book on DNA
research and the African origins of humankind is Stephen Oppenheimer’s
The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey Out of Africa(2003).
36 The Domestic Context
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One of the early anticolonial revolutionary texts was Franz Fanon’sThe
Wretched of the Earth(1963). Other important inspirational anticolonial
works are those by Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Jomo Kenyatta
(see “For Further Reading” for Chapter 3). Two assessments of the impact
of colonialism on political and economic development are Mahmood Mam-
dani’sCitizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism(1996) and Pierre Englebert’s “Pre-Colonial Institutions, Post-
Colonial States, and Economic Development in Tropical Africa” (2000).
One author who argues some of the favorable benefits of colonialism (and
from a Marxist perspective) is Bill Warren in hisImperialism: Pioneer of
Capitalism(1981). Two books that seek to dispel the myths of “tribalism”
are Crawford Young’sThe Politics of Cultural Pluralism(1976) and Leroy
Vail’sThe Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa(1989).
Adam Hochschild provides a detailed but highly readable account of
Congo’s brutal colonial experience inKing Leopold’s Ghost(1998). On the
violence in Rwanda, seeWe Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be
Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwandaby Philip Gourevitch (1998)
and Gerard Prunier’sThe Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, 1959–
1994(1995). Of the many books on South African history, perhaps the most
comprehensive is Leonard Thompson’sA History of South Africa(2001).
History and the Legacy of Colonialism37
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TO THE TIGERS
SHEPPARD’S ESTIMATE OF THE GLADIATORIAL CONTEST
The gladiatorial combats were, above all things else, the
distinctive characteristics of Rome. Rome, in her fallen days, without
virtue, without faith, without trust in her gods or in herself, loved,
believed in, deified one idol still—Homicide. The butcheries of the

amphitheatre exerted a charm upon the minds of men, for which
literature, art, philosophy, religion, and the simple enjoyments of
domestic life were flung aside. Existence became a frightful
phantasmagoria—an alternation of debauch and blood.
The practice itself can be traced back to one of the darkest
superstitions of the human mind. It originated in the barbarous
instinct of the savage to sacrifice his victim upon the tomb of the
dead as a satisfaction, and perhaps as an attendant upon the
departed spirit. The example, from whatever source derived, was
first set to the Roman people by Marcus and Decimus Brutus, who
matched together gladiators in the Forum Boarium, for the purpose
of casting unprecedented éclat upon the obsequies of their father,
264 b.c. The seed fell upon fruitful ground, for it soon grew and
ripened into a harvest more destructive than the dragon’s teeth of
Grecian fable. The wealth and ingenuity of the Roman aristocracy
were taxed to the uttermost to content the populace and provide
food for the indiscriminate slaughter of the circus, where brute
fought with brute and man with man, or where the skill and
weapons of the latter were matched against the strength and
ferocity of the first. In one day Pompey poured six hundred lions into
the arena. Augustus delighted the multitude with the sight of four
hundred and twenty panthers. Twenty elephants, Pliny tells us,
contended against a band of six hundred Gætulian captives. The
games given by Trajan lasted for more than one hundred and twenty
days. Ten thousand gladiators descended to combat, and more than
ten thousand beasts were slain. Titus, that “delight of the human
race,” had upwards of five thousand animals slaughtered in a single
day. Every corner of the earth was ransacked for some strange
creature whose appearance was hailed with frantic applause by the
spectators. We hear of camelopards, white elephants, and the
rhinoceros. Scaurus produced upon the stage a hippopotamus and
five crocodiles. Game of the nobler sorts became scarce. The Roman
populace was as indignant with those who in any way damaged its
supplies, as the country sportsman is with a poacher or with the
unlucky culprit who has made away with a fox. In the time of

Theodosius it was forbidden by law to destroy a Gætulian lion, even
in self-defence.
But the death-agonies of the wild animals of the desert were too
tame a spectacle to satisfy the Roman thirst for blood. It was when
man strove with man, and when all that human strength and skill,
increased by elaborate training and taxed to the uttermost, could do,
was put forth before their unrelenting eyes, that the transport of
their sanguinary enthusiasm was at its height. It is impossible to
describe the aspect of the amphitheatre at such a time. The
audience became frantic with excitement; they rose from their seats;
they yelled; they shouted their applause, as one blow more ghastly
than another was dealt by lance, or sword, or dagger, and the life-
blood spouted forth. “Hoc habet”—“he has it, he has it!”—was the
cry which burst from ten thousand throats, and was re-echoed, not
only by a debased and brutalised populace, but by the lips of royalty,
by purple-clad senators and knights, by noble matrons, and even by
those consecrated maids whose presence elsewhere saved the
criminal from his fate, but whose function here it was to consign the
suppliant to his doom by reversing the thumb upon his appeal for
mercy. His blood was soon licked up by the thirsty sand, or
concealed beneath the sawdust sprinkled over it by the ready
attendant; his body dragged hastily from the stage by an iron hook,
and flung into a gory pit; his existence forgotten, and his place
supplied by another and yet another victim, as the untiring work of
death went on.
And we must remember that these things were not done casually,
or under the influence of some strange fit of popular frenzy. They
were done purposely, systematically, and calmly; they formed the
staple amusement, I had almost said the normal employment, of a
whole people, whose one audible cry was for “panem et
circenses”—“bread and blood.” Neither were they fostered by the
brutalised habits and associations which surround the cockpit or the
prize-ring. When men were “butchered to make a Roman holiday,” it
was among all the delicate appliances of the most refined
sensualism. An awning, gorgeous with purple and gold, excluded the

rays of the midday sun; sweet strains of music floated in the air,
drowning the cries of death; the odour of Syrian perfumes
overpowered the scent of blood; the eye was feasted by the most
brilliant scenic decoration, and amused by elaborate machinery; and,
as a crowning degradation to the whole, the Paphian chamber of the
courtesan arose beside the bloody den into which were flung the
mangled bodies of men and brutes.
Such things seem impossible to those who live beneath a
civilisation which Christianity has influenced, however imperfectly, by
its presence. And indeed it needs much—the concurrent testimony of
poet, historian, and philosopher; the ruins of a hundred
amphitheatres before our eyes; the frescoes of the Museo
Borbonico; the very programmes of the performance, which
something higher than accident has preserved; the incidental
witness of an inspired apostle—it needs all this to convince us of the
truth. But they are true, undisputed facts of history, and facts which
carry with them no obscure intimation of the reasons which worked
the fall of the imperial city. They prove that she deserved to fall, and
by the hands of those in whose persons she had outraged humanity.
It was not a poet remarkable for overstraining the religious
sentiment of divine retribution, who wrote:
“Shall he expire,
And unavenged! Arise, ye Goths! and glut your ire.”
The gladiator, whether directly a captive or a refractory slave, was
generally the child of those races who wreaked, in after times, a
bloody vengeance upon the city of blood. And if her own degenerate
sons, freedman, knight, or senator, nay, even her degraded
daughters, descended into the arena and combated by his side, this
could only bespeak her more entire debasement and unfitness to
direct the destinies of the world.
i
FOOTNOTES

[36] [It is well to bear in mind that a more optimistic view of
the early empire has its supporters. As has already been pointed
out, there are different estimates of such emperors as Tiberius. It
is urged, also, that the cruelties and vices of the emperors
affected but a limited circle; and that meantime the provinces
might be well governed, healthful, and prosperous. It has been
alleged, e.g., that Tiberius and Domitian ruled the provinces
better than the Antonines.]
[37] The Appian way was the fashionable drive of the Roman
nobility.
[38] The Romans rode in carriages on a journey, but rarely for
amusement, and never within the city. Even beyond the wall it
was considered disreputable to hold the reins one’s self, such
being the occupation of the slave or hired driver. Juvenal ranks
the consul, who creeps out at night to drive his own chariot, with
the most degraded of characters: that he should venture to drive
by daylight, while still in office, is an excess of turpitude
transcending the imagination of the most sarcastic painter of
manners as they were. And this was a hundred years later than
the age of Augustus. See Juvenal, VIII, 145.
[39] The leges Juliæ allowed two hundred sesterces for a
repast on ordinary days, three hundred on holidays, one thousand
for special occasions, such as a wedding, etc. Gellius
d
II, 24.
[40] The structor or carver was an important officer at the
sideboard. Carving was even taught as an art, which, as the
ancients had no forks (χειρονομᾶν, to manipulate, was the Greek
term for it), must have required grace as well as dexterity. Moreau
de Jonnès observes, with some reason, that the invention of the
fork, apparently so simple, deserves to be considered difficult and
recondite. The Chinese, with their ancient and elaborate
civilisation, have failed to attain to it.

[161-183 a.d.]
CHAPTER XXXIX. A HALF CENTURY OF
DECLINE: COMMODUS TO ALEXANDER
SEVERUS
The day of the death of Marcus Aurelius may be taken as the decisive
moment in which the ruin of the old civilisation was determined.
Now after the great effort of reason in high places, after Nerva, Trajan,
Hadrian, Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, the reign of evil begins again, and
is worse than ever. Farewell to goodness, farewell to reason! Now, all
hail, folly! All hail, absurdity! All hail to the Syrian and his questionable
gods! Genuine physicians have been able to do nothing; the sick man is
more sick than ever: send for the charlatans.—Renan.
We come now to a time of obvious decline.
Even in the golden epoch the nation was
probably static rather than progressive,
notwithstanding the glory that surrounds the great names of its
emperors. But now the deterioration is too rapid and too marked to
be questioned. The period has no importance except as a transition
time from the great days of the empire to the days of its
degradation. Nevertheless, the events of this transition age marshal
themselves before the eye in one of the most striking panoramas in
all history. These events group themselves into a few strange

scenes. The first shows us a philosopher’s son given over to the
lowest forms of vice; demeaning himself in the arena; associating
with gladiators and slaves; and finally coming to an ignominious
death at the hands of his wife and freedmen, who kill him that their
own lives may be saved.
The second scene shows us, in sharp contrast to the ignoble son
of the philosopher, the noble son of a slave assuming the purple.
Pertinax passes across the stage as a good old man, well-meaning,
but incompetent to stem the tide of the times. He meets what may
be called the normal imperial fate—assassination; and the historic
stage is cleared for one of the strangest spectacles that it has yet
witnessed—the auction of an empire. This, to be sure, is not the first
time that money has made its power felt in the disposal of the
imperial office. It has long been the custom for a new emperor to
make “presents” to the soldiers. But now the affair is reduced to the
frank terms of sale and purchase.
In due course the man who has thus bargained for an empire pays
the penalty of his ambition; then a turmoil ensues between the rival
aspirants to the succession, which ends, naturally enough, with the
death of all but one; he, Septimius Severus by name, gives to the
empire a moment of relative tranquillity; and at last presents a
spectacle hardly less strange than all the others,—the spectacle of a
Roman emperor dying a natural death. We shall not see the like
again for many a reign.
Following Severus come his two sons, Caracalla and Geta. The
former plays well the part of heartless despot; he kills his brother
and slaughters a host of helpless subjects in the East; and then, to
emphasise a paradox, grants the bauble of Roman citizenship to all
subjects of the empire. In due course he meets the imperial death,
and is succeeded by Macrinus, who, slain at once, is followed by
Elagabalus. This degenerate youth typifies his era; sinks to depths of
debauchery which horrify even the Roman conscience; introduces
new forms of worship from the East; wins the title of Sardanapalus;
and, finally, slaughtered, his body thrown into the Tiber, is

nicknamed Tiberinus, in mocking remembrance of his ignoble death
and yet more ignoble life.
And now, at last, a ray of light pierces the gloom, and with the
coming of Alexander Severus there is a brief recrudescence of the
days when Rome was something more than the battle-ground of
mercenaries and the court of voluptuaries. Yet, in the end, even this
good emperor meets the fate of all the rest. Truly, the time is out of
joint.
Let us take up now in more detailed presentation—yet still as
briefly as historical completeness will permit—the story of these
strange events, beginning with the reign of that renegade
Commodus, who owed his position on the throne to the parental
affection rather than the philosophic judgment of the best of
emperors.
a
Commodus (180-192 a.d.)
Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by his son, usually known as
Commodus, whose full name was Marcus Lucius Ælius Aurelius
Commodus Antoninus. This unworthy scion of a glorious house was
born at Lanuvium on the 31st of August, 161, and proclaimed cæsar
on the 12th of October, 166. In the year 177 the tribunician authority
was bestowed on Commodus and he was summoned to take his
place as “augustus” by his father’s side.
Three years later, on the 17th of March, 180, Aurelius died, and
Commodus, who was at that time less than nineteen years of age,
assumed the reins of government without difficulty. But he was not
the man to rise to the occasion and reap the advantage of his
father’s victories. He made a peace with the Germani, which might
pass for honourable, but was far from furnishing a satisfactory
safeguard for the interests of Rome. The principal conditions were
the same that Marcus Aurelius had imposed upon the enemy five or
six years before, but Commodus yielded up all the strongholds which
the Romans had established in the heart of the enemy’s country. The

[183-186 a.d.]
lustre of the Roman arms was restored for the time, it is true, and
the old and new commanders, trained in the school of the Parthian
and German wars, guarded the frontiers of the empire at all points.
But the change for the worse soon manifested itself in the internal
policy of the empire.
b
At Rome, for the space of about three years, all was tranquillity;
for Commodus, whose natural character, as we are assured, was
weak and timid rather than wicked, allowed himself to be directed by
the able and upright men to whom his father had recommended
him. His hours were devoted to luxury and indulgence, till at length
(183) an event occurred which revealed the latent cruelty of his
nature.
After the death of L. Verus, Marcus had given
his daughter Lucilla in marriage to Pompeianus,
a most respectable senator; and after the death
of her mother he allowed her all the honours of an empress, which
her brother also continued to her. But on the marriage of Commodus
with a lady named Crispina, Lucilla was obliged to yield precedence
to the reigning empress. Her haughty spirit deemed this an indignity,
and she resolved on revenge. Fearing to entrust her design to her
noble-minded husband, she first communicated it to Quadratus, a
wealthy young nobleman, with whom she carried on an adulterous
intercourse; she also engaged in the plot Claudius Pompeianus,
another of her paramours, who was betrothed to her daughter;
some senators also were aware of it. As Commodus was entering
the amphitheatre through a dusky passage, Pompeianus, who was
lying in wait, drew his sword and cried, “The senate sends thee this.”
But the words prevented the execution of his design, and he was
seized by the guards. He, Quadratus, and some others were
executed; Lucilla was for the present confined in the isle of Capreæ,
but she was erelong put to death, and a similar fate soon befell her
rival Crispina on account of adultery. In her place Commodus took a
freedwoman named Marcia, who had been the concubine of

[186-189 a.d.]
Quadratus, and to whom he gave all the honours of an empress,
except that of having fire borne before her.
CRUELTIES AND DEATH OF COMMODUS
The unwise exclamation of Pompeianus sank
deep in the mind of Commodus; he learned to
regard the senate as his deadly enemies, and
many of its most illustrious members were put to death on various
pretexts. His only reliance was now on the guards, and the
prætorian prefects soon became as important as in former times.
The prefects now were Tarruntenus Paternus and Perennis, but the
arts of the latter caused the former to be removed and put to death,
and the whole power of the state fell into his hands, for the timid
Commodus no longer ventured to appear in public. The prefect
removed all he dreaded by false accusations, and he amassed
wealth by the confiscation of the properties of the nobility. His son
was in command of the Illyrian legions, and he now aspired to the
empire. But he had offended the army of Britain—the army that in
184 had won brilliant success,—and they deputed (186) fifteen
hundred of their number to accuse him to Commodus of designs on
the empire. They were supported by the secret influence of the
freedman Cleander, and Perennis was given up to their vengeance.
Himself, his wife, his sister, and two of his children were massacred;
his eldest son was recalled and murdered on the way to Rome.
The character of Perennis is doubtful, but that of Cleander who
succeeded to his power was one of pure evil. Cleander, a Phrygian
by birth, had been brought to Rome as a slave and sold in the public
market. He was purchased for the palace, and placed about the
person of Commodus, with whom he speedily ingratiated himself;
and when the prince became emperor he made Cleander his
chamberlain. The power of the freedman, when Perennis was
removed, became absolute; avarice, the passion of a vulgar mind,
was his guiding principle. All the honours and all the posts of the
empire were put to sale; pardons for any crime were to be had for

money; and in the short space of three years the wealth of Cleander
exceeded that of the Pallas and Narcissus of the early days of the
empire.
A conspiracy of an extraordinary nature occurred not long after
the death of Perennis. A great number of men who had deserted
from the armies put themselves under the command of a common
soldier named Maternus; they were joined by slaves whom they
freed from their bonds, and they ravaged for some time with
impunity the provinces of Gaul and Spain. At length (187) when
Maternus found the governors preparing to act with vigour against
him, he resolved to make a desperate effort and be emperor or
perish. He directed his followers to disperse and repair secretly to
Rome, where he proposed that they should assume the dress of the
guards, and fall on the emperor during the license of the festival of
the Megalesia. All succeeded to his wishes; they repaired safely to
Rome, but some of them out of envy betrayed the secret, and
Maternus and some others were taken and executed.
The power of Cleander was now at its height; by gifts to
Commodus and his mistresses he maintained his influence at court,
and by the erection of baths and other public edifices he sought to
ingratiate himself with the people. He had also the command of the
guards, for whom he had for some time caused prætorian prefects
to be made and unmade at his will. He at length divided the office
between himself and two others, but he did not assume the title. As
an instance of the way in which he disposed of offices, we find in
one year (189) no less than five-and-twenty consuls.
What the ultimate views of Cleander may have been is unknown,
for he shared the usual fate of aspiring freedmen. Rome was visited
at this time by a direful pestilence, and the emperor on account of it
resided out of the city. The pestilence was as usual attended by
famine, and this visitation of heaven was by the people laid to the
charge of the odious favourite. As they were one day (189) viewing
the horse races in the circus, a party of children entered, headed by
a fierce-looking girl, and began to exclaim against Cleander. The

Peculiar Head-dress of a Standard -bearer
[189-193 a.d.]
people
joined in
the cries,
and then rising rushed to where
Commodus was residing in the
suburbs, demanding the death
of Cleander. But the favourite
instantly ordered the prætorian
cavalry to charge them, and
they were driven back to the city
with the loss of many lives.
When, however, the cavalry
entered the streets they were
assailed by missiles from the
roofs of the houses, and the
people being joined by the
urban cohorts rallied and drove
them back to the palace, where
Commodus still lay in total
ignorance of all that had
occurred, for fear of Cleander
had kept all silent. But now
Marcia, or as others said the
emperor’s sister Fadilla, seeing
the danger so imminent, rushed
into his presence and informed
him of the truth. Without a
moment’s hesitation he ordered Cleander and his son to be put to
death. The people placed the head of Cleander on a pole and
dragged his body through the streets, and when they had massacred
some of his creatures the tumult ceased.
The cruelty of Commodus displayed itself more and more every
day, and several men of rank became its victims.
c
Thus, after many
years of tranquillity, the upper classes of Roman society again found
themselves in the intolerable position of going in perpetual fear of

death. Once more Rome witnessed the spectacle of a wicked lad on
the throne of the Cæsars, falling a victim to the “madness of
empire,” trampling the dignity of his great office underfoot in furious
lust of pleasure of every sort, and, in pompous dull-wittedness,
playing the part of a sanguinary practical joker and a foolish
spendthrift.
b
At the same time his lust was unbounded; three
hundred beautiful women and as many boys of all ages and
countries filled his seraglio, and he abstained from no kind of infamy.
He delighted also to exhibit proofs of his skill as a marksman, and he
assumed the title and attributes of the hero Hercules. For some
time, like Nero, he confined his displays to the interior of his
residences, but at length the senate and people were permitted to
witness his skill in the amphitheatre. A gallery ran round it for the
safety and convenience of the emperor, from which he discharged
his darts and arrows with unerring aim at the larger and fiercer
animals, while he ventured into the arena to destroy the deer and
other timid creatures. A hundred lions were at once let loose, and
each fell by a single wound; an irritated panther had just seized a
man, a dart was flung by the emperor and the beast fell dead, while
the man remained uninjured. With crescent-headed arrows he cut
off the heads of ostriches as they ran at full speed.
But his greatest delight was to combat as a gladiator. He appeared
in the character of a secutor: he caused to be recorded 735 victories
which he had gained, and he received each time an immense
stipend out of the gladiatorial fund. Instead of Hercules he now
styled himself Paulus, after a celebrated secutor, and caused it to be
inscribed on his statues. He also took up his abode in the residence
of the gladiators.
At length the tyrant met the fate he merited. It was his design to
put to death the two consuls-elect for the year 193, and on New
Year’s Day to proceed from the gladiators’ school in his gladiatorial
habit and enter on the consulate. On the preceding day he
communicated his design to Marcia, who tried in vain to dissuade
him from it. Q. Æmilius Lætus, the prætorian prefect, and the

[193 a.d.]
chamberlain, Eclectus, also reasoned with him, but to as little
purpose. He testified much wrath, and uttered some menaces.
Knowing that the threats of the tyrant were the sure precursors of
death, they saw their only hopes of safety lay in anticipation; they
took their resolution on the moment;
[41]
and when Commodus came
from the bath, Marcia, as was her usual practice, handed him a bowl
(in which she had now infused a strong poison), to quench his thirst.
He drank the liquor off, and then laid himself down to sleep. The
attendants were all sent away. The conspirators were expecting the
effect of the poison when the emperor began to vomit profusely.
Fearing now that the poison would not take effect, they brought in a
vigorous wrestler named Narcissus; and induced by the promise of a
large reward, he laid hold on and strangled the emperor.
[42]
Pertinax (P. Helvius Pertinax ), 193 a.d.
The conspirators had, it is probable, already
fixed on the person who should succeed to the
empire, and their choice was one calculated to
do them credit. It was P. Helvius Pertinax, the prefect of the city, a
man now advanced in years, who had with an unblemished
character, though born in a humble rank, passed through all the civil
and military gradations of the state. Pertinax was the son of a
freedman who was engaged in the manufacture of charcoal at Alba
Pompeia in the Apennines. He commenced life as a man of letters,
but finding the literary profession unprofitable, he entered the army
as a centurion, and his career of advancement was rapid.
It was yet night when Lætus and Eclectus proceeded with some
soldiers to the house of Pertinax. When informed of their arrival he
ordered them to be brought to his chamber, and then, without rising,
told them that he had long expected every night to be his last, and
bade them execute their office; for he was certain that Commodus
had sent them to put him to death. But they informed him that the
tyrant himself was no more, and that they were come to offer him

the empire. He hesitated to give credit to them, but having sent one
on whom he could depend, and ascertained that Commodus was
dead, he consented to accept the proffered dignity. Though it was
not yet day they all repaired to the prætorian camp, and Lætus,
having assembled the soldiers, told them that Commodus was
suddenly dead of apoplexy, and that he had brought them his
successor, a man whose merits were known to them all. Pertinax
then addressed them, promising a large donative. The soldiers swore
fidelity to the emperor.
Before dawn the senate was summoned to the temple of Concord,
whither Pertinax had proceeded from the camp. He told them what
had occurred, and, noticing his age and his humble extraction,
pointed out divers senators as more worthy of the empire than
himself. But they would not listen to his excuses, and they decreed
him all the imperial titles. Then giving loose to their rage against the
fallen tyrant, they termed him parricide, gladiator, the enemy of the
gods and of his country, and decreed that his statues should be cast
down, his titles be erased, and his body dragged with the hook
through the streets. But Pertinax respected too much the memory of
Marcus to suffer the remains of his son to be thus treated, and they
were by his order placed in the tomb of Hadrian.
Pertinax was cheerfully acknowledged by all the armies. Like
Vespasian, he was simple and modest in his dress and mode of life,
and he lived on terms of intimacy with the respectable members of
the senate. He resigned his private property to his wife and son, but
would not suffer the senate to bestow on them any titles. He
regulated the finances with the greatest care, remitting oppressive
taxes and cancelling unjust claims. He sold by auction all the late
tyrant’s instruments of luxury, and obliged his favourites to disgorge
a portion of their plunder. He granted the waste lands in Italy and
elsewhere for a term of years rent free to those who would
undertake to improve them.
The reforming hand of the emperor was extended to all
departments of the state; and men looked for a return of the age of

the Antonines. But the soldiers dreaded the restoration of the
ancient discipline; and Lætus, who found that he did not enjoy the
power he had expected, secretly fomented their discontent. So early
as the 3d of January they had seized a senator named Triarius
Maternus, intending to make him emperor, but he escaped from
them and fled to Pertinax for protection. Some time after, while the
emperor was on the sea coast attending to the supply of corn, they
prepared to raise Sosius Falco, then consul, to the empire; but
Pertinax came suddenly to Rome, and having complained of Falco to
the senate, they were about to proclaim him a public enemy, when
the emperor cried that no senator should suffer death while he
reigned; and Falco was thus suffered to escape punishment.
Some expressions which Pertinax used on this occasion irritated
the soldiers; and Lætus, to exasperate them still more, put several
of them to death, as if by his orders. Accordingly on the twenty-
eighth of March a general mutiny broke out in the camp, and two or
three hundred of the most desperate proceeded with drawn swords
to the palace. No one opposed their entrance. Pertinax, when
informed of their approach, advanced to meet them. He addressed
them, reminding them of his own innocence and of the obligation of
their oath. They were silent for a few moments; at length a Tungrian
soldier struck him with his sword, crying, “The soldiers send thee
this.” They all then fell on him, and cutting off his head set it on a
lance and carried it to the camp. Eclectus, faithful to the last,
perished with the emperor; Lætus had fled in disguise at the
approach of the mutineers. The reign of the virtuous Pertinax had
lasted only eighty-six days; he was in the sixty-seventh year of his
age.
Julianus (M. Didius Severus Julianus ), 193 a.d.
The mutineers on their return to the camp found there
Sulpicianus, the prefect of the city, the late emperor’s father-in-law,
who had been sent thither to try to appease the mutiny. The bloody
proof which they bore of the empire’s being vacant excited when it

should have extinguished his ambition, and he forthwith began to
treat for the dangerous prize. Immediately some of the soldiers ran
and ascending the ramparts cried out aloud that the empire was for
sale, and would be given to the highest bidder. The news reached
the ears of Didius Julianus, a wealthy and luxurious senator, as he
sat at table; and urged by his wife and daughter and his parasites,
he rose and hastened to the camp. The military auctioneers stood on
the wall, one bidder within, the other without. Sulpicianus had gone
as high as five thousand denarii a man, when his rival at one bidding
rose to 6250. This spirited offer carried it; the soldiers also had a
secret dread that Sulpicianus, if emperor, might avenge the death of
his son-in-law. The gates were thrown open, and Julian was
admitted and saluted emperor; but the soldiers had the generosity
to stipulate for the safety of his rival.
From the camp Julian, escorted by the soldiers, proceeded to the
senate house. He was there received with affected joy, and the usual
titles and honours were decreed him; but the people stood aloof and
in silence, and those who were more distant uttered loud curses on
him. When Julian came to the palace, the first object that met his
eyes was the corpse of his predecessor; he ordered it to be buried,
and then it is said sat down and passed the greater part of the night
at a luxurious banquet, and playing at dice. In the morning the
senate repaired to him with their feigned compliments; but the
people still were gloomy, and when he went down to the senate
house and was about to offer incense to the Janus before the doors,
they cried out that he was a parricide and had stolen the empire. He
promised them money, but they would have none of it; and at length
he ordered the soldiers to fall on them, and several were killed and
wounded. Still they ceased not to revile him and the soldiers, and to
call on the other armies, especially that of Pescennius Niger, to come
to their aid.
The principal armies were that of Syria commanded by Niger; that
of Pannonia under Septimius Severus, and that of Britain under
Clodius Albinus, each composed of three legions, with its suitable
number of auxiliaries.

C. Pescennius Niger was a native of Aquinum, of a simple
equestrian family. He entered the army as a centurion, and rose
almost solely by merit till he attained the lucrative government of
Syria. As an officer Niger was a rigorous maintainer of discipline; as
a governor he was just, but mild and indulgent, and he succeeded in
gaining alike the affections of the soldiers and the subjects. In his
private life he was chaste and temperate.
L. Septimius Severus was born at Leptis in Africa. He received a
learned education, and devoted himself to the bar, and M. Aurelius
made him advocate of the Fisc. He acted as civil governor of several
provinces, and had occasionally a military command, but had seen
little or no actual service. After his consulate, Commodus, through
the influence of Lætus, gave him the command of the Pannonian
legions, as reported in the Augustan History.
D. Clodius Albinus was also an African. He was born at
Hadrumetum, of an honourable family, which derived its origin from
the Postumii and Ceionii of Rome. He entered the army early, and
rose through all the gradations of the service, being highly esteemed
by M. Aurelius. He commanded in Bithynia, at the time of the revolt
of Cassius, and kept his legions in their duty. Commodus gave him
the command in Gaul and in Britain, and designed him for his
successor. Albinus was a strict and even severe officer. He was fond
of agriculture, on which subject he wrote some books. He was
charged with private vices, but probably without reason.
When the intelligence of the murder of Pertinax and the sale of
the empire to Julian reached the armies of Syria and Pannonia, their
generals saw the prospect of empire open to them as the avengers
of the emperor whom they had acknowledged. Each of them
assembled his troops and expatiated on the atrocity of the deed
which had been perpetrated at Rome, and each was saluted
Augustus by his army and the subjects. But while Niger, seeing all
the provinces and allied princes of Asia unanimous in his favour, and
therefore indulging in confidence, remained inactive at Antioch,
Severus resolved to push on for the capital, and possess himself of

that seat of empire. Having secured the adherence of the army of
Gaul, he wrote a most friendly letter to Albinus, giving him the title
of cæsar, and adopting him as his son; by which he made sure of his
neutrality, if not of his co-operation. He then advanced by rapid
marches for Rome. Day and night he appeared in full armour, and
surrounded by a guard of six hundred chosen men, who never laid
aside their corslets. Resistance was nowhere offered; all hailed him
as the avenger of Pertinax.
The wretched Julian was filled with dismay when he heard of the
approach of the formidable Pannonian army. He made the senate
declare Severus a public enemy; he distributed large sums of money
to the prætorians to induce them to prepare to defend him; but
these dissolute troops were vigorous only for evil, and they could not
resume the discipline they had lost; the marines summoned from
Misenum were still more inefficient; and an attempt at training
elephants for war in the oriental manner only excited derision. Julian
also caused an entrenchment to be run in front of the city, and he
secured the palace with strong doors and bars, as if that could be
maintained when all else was lost. He put to death Marcia, Lætus,
and all concerned in the murder of Commodus, probably with a view
to the favour of the soldiery.
Severus meantime had reached Ravenna and secured the fleet.
Julian, having made some fruitless attempts on his life, caused the
senate to declare him his associate in the empire. But Severus now
disdained such divided power; he had written to the prætorians,
assuring safety to all but the actual assassins of Pertinax, and they
had accepted the conditions. The consul, Silius Messalla, assembled
the senate, and it was resolved to put Julian to death and give the
empire to Severus. When those charged with the mandate for his
death came to Julian, his only words were, “What evil have I done?
Whom have I slain?” He was then killed by a common soldier, after a
reign of only sixty-six days.
Severus (L. Septimius Severus ), 193-211 a.d.

[193-194 a.d.]
Severus was met at Interamna (Terni), in
Umbria, seventy miles from Rome, by deputies
from the senate. He received them with favour,
and still continued to advance. As he drew nigh to Rome he
commanded the execution of the murderers of Pertinax, and he sent
orders to the remaining prætorians to leave their arms in their camp
and come to meet him, dressed as they were wont when attending
the emperors on solemn occasions. They obeyed, and Severus
received them in the plain before his camp, and addressed them
from a tribunal, reproaching them with the murder of Pertinax and
the sale of the empire to Julian. He would spare their lives, he said,
but he would leave them nothing save their tunics, and death should
be the fate of any of them who ever came within a hundred miles of
the capital. While he was speaking his soldiers had imperceptibly
surrounded them; resistance was vain, and they quietly yielded up
their swords and their rich habiliments, and mournfully retired. A
detachment had meantime taken possession of their camp, to
obviate the effects of their despair.
Severus entered the city at the head of his army. The senate and
people met him with all the marks of joy and festivity. He ascended
the Capitol and worshipped; he then visited the other temples, and
at length proceeded to the palace. In the morning he met the
senate, to whom he made a speech full of the fairest promises,
assuring them that Marcus should be his model and swearing that he
would put no senator to death unless condemned by themselves—an
oath which he kept but indifferently. The usual titles and powers had
been already decreed him; among these was the title of Pertinax, of
which prince he affected to be the avenger, and the ceremony of
whose deification he performed with the greatest magnificence and
solemnity. He distributed large sums of money among the soldiers
and people; he regulated the supply of provisions, and he examined
into the conduct of several governors of provinces, and punished
those who were proved guilty of oppression.
Severus restored the prætorian guards on a new model, and
raised them to four times their original number. Augustus had

Seétimius Severus
(From a bust in the Capitoline
Museum)
[194-197 a.d.]
admitted none but Italians into this
body; the youth of Spain, Noricum,
and Macedonia had gradually been
suffered to enlist in it; but Severus
threw it open to all, selecting the
ablest and most faithful soldiers from
the legions for the higher pay and
more easy life of the guardsmen.
After a stay of
only thirty days in
Rome, Severus
set out for the war against Niger, who
was master of all Asia and held the
strong city of Byzantium in Europe.
The preparations on both sides
occupied some time; at length
Severus took the field, and leaving
part of his troops to carry on the siege
of Byzantium, he sent the main body
of his army, under his generals, over
the Hellespont. Æmilianus, the
proconsul of Asia, gave them battle
(194) near Cyzicus, but was defeated. He fled to Cyzicus, and thence
to another unnamed town, where he was seized and put to death.
Niger in person afterwards engaged the Severian general, Candidus,
between Nicæa and Cius. The contest was long and arduous, but
victory declared for the European army, and Niger, leaving troops to
guard the passes of Mount Taurus, hastened to Antioch to raise men
and money. The elements, however, favoured Severus; heavy falls of
rain and snow destroyed the defences constructed by Niger, and his
troops were obliged to abandon the passes and leave Cilicia open to
the enemy.
Niger made his final stand at the Cilician Gates, as the pass from
Cilicia into Syria at the head of the Bay of Issus was named, a place
famous for the defeat of Darius by Alexander the Great. The troops

of Niger were more numerous, but they were mostly raw levies, yet
they fought with constancy; but the elements, we are told, again
favoured the Severians, a storm of rain and thunder came over the
sea and blew full in the faces of the Nigrians, and they fled with the
loss of twenty thousand men. Niger hastened to Antioch, and
thence, on the approach of the enemy, he fled to the Euphrates, in
order to seek refuge with the Parthians; but he had hardly quitted
the town when he was seized, and his head was cut off and sent to
Severus.
CONQUESTS OF SEVERUS
This emperor, who had been in none of the preceding actions,
now appeared. He put to death all the senators who had borne arms
for Niger; he banished some, and seized the property of others. He
put numbers of inferior rank to death, and he treated severely
Antioch and some other towns. He then (195) led his army over the
Euphrates, and his generals employed this and a part of the
following year in reducing the various tribes and princes of
Mesopotamia. While he was thus engaged (196), he received the
joyful intelligence of the surrender of Byzantium, which, strong by
situation and fortifications, had held out for nearly three years
against the valour and skill of the besieging army, and was only
subdued at last by famine. The magistrates and soldiers were all put
to death; the property of the inhabitants was sold; the walls and the
public edifices were demolished; Byzantium was deprived of its title
of city, and subjected as a village to the jurisdiction of Perinthus.
It is said that Severus was meditating an invasion of Parthia, but
his thoughts were more fixed on securing the succession to his
children by removing Albinus. Suitably to his character, he resolved
to proceed by treachery rather than by force. He wrote to Albinus in
the most affectionate terms, as to his dearest brother; but the
bearers of the letter were instructed to ask a private audience, as
having matters of greater importance to communicate, and then to
assassinate him. The suspicions of Albinus, however, being awaked,

he put them to the torture, and extracted the truth. He saw that he
had no alternative, that he must be emperor or nothing, and he
therefore declared himself Augustus and passed with his army over
to Gaul. Severus returned with all possible speed from the East, and
advanced in person into Gaul against his rival. He crossed the Alps in
the depth of winter, and after some minor engagements a decisive
battle was fought on the 19th of February, 197, in the
neighbourhood of Lyons. The united number of the combatants was
150,000 men; the battle was long and dubious, the left wing on
each side was routed, but Severus, who now fought for the first
time, brought up the prætorians to the support of his beaten troops,
and though he received a wound and was driven back, he rallied
them once more, and being supported by the cavalry, under his
general, Lætus, he defeated and pursued the enemy to Lyons. The
loss on both sides was considerable; Albinus slew himself, and his
head was cut off and brought to his ungenerous enemy, who meanly
insulted it; his wife and children were at first spared, but they were
soon after put to death, and their bodies cast into the Rhine.
The city of Lyons was pillaged and burned; the chief supporters of
Albinus, both men and women, Romans and provincials, were put to
death, and their properties confiscated. Having spent some time in
regulating the affairs of Gaul and Britain, Severus returned to Rome,
breathing vengeance against the senate, for he knew that that body
was in general more inclined to Albinus than himself, and he had
found, among his rival’s papers, the letters of several individual
senators. The very day after his arrival he addressed them,
commending the stern policy of Sulla, Marius, and Augustus, and
blaming the mildness of Pompey and Cæsar, which proved their ruin.
He spoke in terms of praise of Commodus, saying that the senate
had no right to dishonour him, as many of themselves lived worse
than he had done. He spoke severely of those who had written
letters or sent presents to Albinus. Of these he pardoned five-and-
thirty, but he put to death nine-and-twenty, among whom was
Sulpicianus, the father-in-law of Pertinax. These, however, were not
the only victims; the whole family of Niger, and several other

[197-202 a.d.]
illustrious persons perished. The properties of all were confiscated;
[wherefore the usual charge of avarice was brought against
Severus.]
After a short stay at Rome Severus set out
again for the East; for the Parthians, taking
advantage of his absence, had invaded
Mesopotamia, and laid siege to Nisibis. They retired, however, when
they heard of his approach, and Severus, having passed the winter
in Syria making preparations for the war, crossed the Tigris the
following summer (198) and laid siege to Ctesiphon. The Roman
soldiers suffered greatly for want of supplies, and were reduced to
feed on roots and herbage, which produced dysenteries, but the
emperor persevered, and the city at length was taken. All the full-
grown males were massacred, and the women and children, to the
number of one hundred thousand, were sold for slaves. As want of
supplies did not permit the Romans to remain beyond the Tigris,
they returned to Mesopotamia, and on his way to Syria (199)
Severus laid siege to the redoubtable Atræ, but he was forced to
retire, with a great loss both of men and machines. He renewed the
attack some time after (it is uncertain in what year) but with as little
success, being obliged to retire with loss and disgrace from before
the impregnable fortress.
Severus remained in the East till the year 202. He spent a part of
that time in Egypt, where he took great pleasure in examining the
pyramids and the other curiosities of that country. He at length
returned to Rome, to celebrate the marriage of his elder son.
The family of Severus consisted of his wife and two sons. The
empress, named Julia Domna, was a native of Emesa in Syria, whom
Severus, who was addicted to astrology, is said to have espoused
because she had a royal nativity. She was a woman of great beauty,
sense, and spirit, and a cultivator of literature and philosophy. The
elder son was at first named Bassianus; but his father, at the time of
the war against Albinus, created him cæsar, by the name of Aurelius
Antoninus;
[43]
and he was subsequently nicknamed Caracalla,

[202-208 a.d.]
which, to avoid confusion, is the name employed by modern
historians. In the year 198 Severus created him augustus, and made
him his associate in the empire. The name of the emperor’s younger
son was Geta, and he also was styled Antoninus.
The bride selected for Caracalla was Plautilla, the daughter of
Plautianus, the prætorian prefect. This man was a second Sejanus,
and it is very remarkable that two emperors of such superior mental
powers as Tiberius and Severus should have been so completely
under the influence of their ministers. Plautianus, like his master,
was an African by birth; he was of mean extraction, and he seems to
have early attached himself to the fortune of his aspiring
countryman, whose favour and confidence he won in an
extraordinary degree; and when Severus attained the empire, the
power of Plautianus grew to such a height, that he, the historian
observes, was, as it were, emperor, and Severus captain of the
guards. Persons like Plautianus, when elevated, rarely bear their
faculties meekly. He was therefore proud, cruel, and avaricious; he
was the chief cause of so many persons of rank and fortune being
put to death, in order that he might gain their properties. He seized
whatever took his fancy, whether sacred or profane, and he thus
amassed such wealth that it was commonly said he was richer than
Severus and his sons. Such was his pride that no one dared
approach him without his permission; and when he appeared in
public criers preceded him, ordering that no one should stop and
gaze at him, but turn aside and look down. He would not allow his
wife to visit or to receive visits, not even excepting the empress. As
his power was so great, he was of course the object of universal
adulation. The senators and soldiers swore by his fortune, and his
statues were set up in all parts of the empire. He was in effect more
dreaded and more honoured than the emperor himself.
Such power is, however, unstable in its very
nature, and the marriage of his daughter with
the son of the emperor caused the downfall of
Plautianus. The wedding was celebrated with the utmost
magnificence; the dower of the bride, we are told, would have

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African Development Making Sense Of The Issues And Actors Todd J Moss

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