Category: Development

Africa Reading Challenge review: Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

David Evans5 Comments

I enjoyed pretty much all of this book, which is saying something for a tome of 765 pages.  That said, it took me months to finish (which has been my previous experience with Ngugi).  My thoughts:

rarely lags, many laughs: Thiong’o hits the mark

Ngugi has here written a weighty but engaging tale of … well, it’s a little hard to describe. There’s an African dictator, three sycophantic government ministers (so sycophantic that one had his eyes surgically enlarged to be able to spot the Ruler’s enemies, another his ears…), a traditional healer, an activist, an opportunistic businessman, a wife fed up with beatings, condescending representatives from the “Global Bank,” and Much, Much More.

Having worked in and read about African countries for a number of years, many of the players seemed familiar: for example, the former revolutionaries co-opted into the ruling party reminded me of Richard Leakey, the Kenyan opposition politician who lost credibility by joining the ruling party.

In short, I really enjoyed this piece: part farcical satire, part magical realism (as the Ruler blows up like a balloon and begins to float – yes, really), part political activist’s anthem, and occasionally just a drama. In the drama occasions, I usually wished for more farcical satire, but still, I highly recommend this book.

I’ve read three novels by Ngugi wa Thiong’o: The River Between, Petals of Blood, and this one. This is definitely the most fun (okay, it’s the only remotely funny one). I’d recommend Petals of Blood for a much more serious and depressing account of post-colonial disillusionment with local leadership. Another novel that I found illustrative of post-colonial African politics was Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People.

Note on content: the book has a bit of strong language and lots of absurdity.

advice to students visiting a developing country for the first time

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Tyler Cohen and then Chris Blattman offer some great advice to aspiring researchers visiting poor countries.  I endorse their comments and can add little, but here’s the little.  (The above is some of the finest street food I’ve had recently, in Sierra Leone: if I can see you cook it, I’ll eat it.)

  1. Attend a religious service if you have the opportunity.  In many of the countries I work in, religiosity is much higher than in the USA and so experiencing this can be very revealing.
  2. Buy and read a local newspaper.
  3. Even short of learning the local language (which is excellent advice but not always realistic for a short visit), make the effort to learn greetings and simple phrases in local language(s) [not just the colonial language].  This garners an immense amount of good will and can open doors.
  4. Buy a good map of the country and ask people where they are from. 

Oh, and don’t accept soda on a bus, don’t walk around downtown Nairobi early in the morning, don’t walk around the bus station in Aruba at night, don’t leave love letters lying around your hotel room…

a fresh definition of multi-party democracy

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I just finished Wizard of the Crow, a 765 page satire by Ngugi wa Thiongo.  The Ruler of the fictional Aburiria introduces his political philosophy of multiparty democracy:

There are no moral limits to the means that a ruler can use, from lies to lives, bribes to blows, in order to ensure that his state is stable and his power secure.  But if he could keep the state stable through sacrificing truth rather than lives, bending rather than breaking the law, sealing the lips of the oustpoken with endless trickeries rather than tearing them with barbed-wire and hot wax, if he could buy peace through a grand deception rather than a vast display of armored behicles in the streets, which often gave his enemies material for propaganda, it would be the sweetest of victories. (p703)

throw out the development experts, bring in … everybody?

David Evans1 Comment

Bill Easterly – the development industry’s angriest critic* – had a column in the Financial Times this week.

 

[I didn’t realize, as I wrote this off-line on my commute home yesterday, that Chris Blattman was writing something closely related at more or less the same time.]

 

He starts out with a reasonable argument that experts don’t know that much about how to make poor countries grow:

 

The report of the World Bank Growth Commission, led by Nobel laureate Michael Spence, was published last week. After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11- member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out…

 

Why should we care about the debacle of a World Bank report? Because this report represents the final collapse of the “development expert” paradigm that has governed the west’s approach to poor countries since the second world war. All this time, we have hoped a small group of elite thinkers can figure out how to raise the growth rate of a whole economy. If there was something for “development experts” to say about attaining high growth, this talented group would have said it.

 

What went wrong? Experts help as long as there are useful general principles, such as could be established by comparing low-growth and high-growth countries. The Growth Commission correctly pointed out that such an attempt to find secrets to growth has failed. The Growth Commission concluded that “answers” had to be country specific and even period specific. But if each moment in each country is unique, then experts cannot learn from any other experience – so on what basis do they become an “expert”?

 

Unfortunately, Easterly then turns expert!  What’s the magic bullet?

 

The answer is freedom for multitudinous individuals to figure out their own answers. (emphasis added)

 

The evidence provided is a quote from Friedrich Hayek (another expert) and five examples: “old, despotic, poor Europe compared with modern, free, rich Europe,” “South Korea compared with North Korea, former West Germany compared with East, New Zealand compared with Zimbabwe.”

 

I don’t disagree that freedom leads to growth, and I make no defense of development “experts,” but this analysis is about as helpful to poor countries in implementation and evidence as, well, saying “we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.”

 

* I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Easterly this week, and he is pleasant and funny.

* Easterly is the development industry’s angriest critic among mainstream economists.  Outside our profession, there are definitely angrier.

not knowing whether aid works vs knowing it doesn’t work

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The research exploring the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth has shown a fragile relationship (when it has shown a relationship at all!).  I just enjoyed Aid Effectiveness – Opening the Black Box, by Bourguignon and Sundberg (2007), which gives a nice summary of why we shouldn’t assume that means that aid doesn’t work.  (Rather it means that either aid doesn’t work or we’re measuring aid wrong or we can’t capture how long aid should take right or …)

It is no surprise that reduced form analysis shows tenuous links between aid and development outcomes. Aid has often been for non-developmental objectives, such as disaster relief or for military and political ends. Much aid is lost due to instability and conflict: roughly half of aid to Sub-Saharan Africa has gone to countries facing civil war and/or frequent military coups (Fitzpatrick et al, 2007). Much (though not all) aid has also been wasted on poorly conceived and executed projects and programs, often fettered by debatable conditionality. And from a statistical point of view many technical problems arise: distinguishing short vs. long term impact, problems with endogeneity of the aid-growth relationship, difficulty determining the direction of causality or controlling for country-specific characteristics, etc, (Bourguignon and Leipziger, 2006).

Case studies do not avoid this due to the difficulty of establishing the counterfactual: Easterly (2006) argues that aid is not associated with growth in Africa, whereas Collier (2006) argues that in the absence of aid growth would have been far worse. Moreover, the multi-dimensionality of development objectives-mean income, poverty, literacy, access to sanitation, inoculations-further complicates empirical analysis.

Herbst’s States & Power in Africa – the heavily abridged version for the concentration-challenged

David Evans1 Comment

Jeffrey Herbst’s States and Power in Africa has been recommended to me by various sources, not least of which is Chris Blattman’s recommended reading in Africa list.  But while everyone tells me it’s excellent, I haven’t made much progress.  It’s too dense for my pleasure reading (hello Wizard of the Crow, which I’m still reading), and too off the topics of my own research to read for work.

So today I was pleased (more than pleased: almost giddy) to encounter Harvard professor James Robinson’s ten-page review of Herbst from the Journal of Economic Literature.  Better yet, this ten-page review has a two-page summary of the book in the middle (as well as some interesting analysis).  If you’re not sure you want to invest in Herbst (or if you’re just lazy like me), I highly recommend the Robinson article.  I reproduce an abridged and highlighted version of the two-page summary here:

The starting point of Herbst’s analysis is that Africa is plagued by “state failure.” A state is meant to provide certain public goods in society, such as law and order, defense, contract enforcement,
and infrastructure. Yet in Africa most states provide very few of these.  They are unable to exercise control over much of their territory; they do not provide order or public goods. The literature talks dramatically about state “failure,” even “collapse.” What then is different about African states that leads them to diverge so radically from our ideal?

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book review: The Sex Lives of Cannibals, by J. Maarten Troost

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Some of you have read funny stories that I post on this blog while traveling in Africa.  If I made those stories into a book (and if I were a better writer), they might be like this book.  Maybe I’ll stick to the blog.  My thoughts:

alternate title: funny stories from life as an ex-pat on a tiny Pacific island

Having finished graduate studies in International Relations, Troost (he’s Dutch) finds himself unclear on the next career step, so he accompanies his girlfriend who takes a job as an aid worker in Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas), where he tries to write a novel and has funny experiences.

Troost is funny, sarcastic, and self-deprecating. I enjoyed much of the book. If I were reading the stories periodically (e.g., on a blog or in an occasional email), I would have found it even more funny, but in rapid sequence the style got tiresome (especially in the middle of the book). At times the humor felt unpleasantly smug (although I give him credit for being as deprecating to himself as to others).

He also sheds some light on a part of the world that I know very little about: life on a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific? It’s a whole different world, one very different from other poor countries. When he includes history, he succeeds in making it entertaining. Ultimately, though, most of the book felt like a trifle: I enjoyed it on net but considered stopping halfway and am not rushing out to read his two more recent books (about life in Vanuatu and travels in China). Sort of like he says himself: “I like my entertainment not too serious, not too stupid, sort of like this book” (p84).

I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by Simon Vance (British accent) and published by Blackstone Audio (7 CDs). The narration was good.

[Note on content: This book is not about anyone’s sex life, has very little sexual content, very little violence, but a significant amount of strong language.]

free copy of African Psycho for Africa Reading Challenge readers

David Evans4 Comments

I received this sweet offer in my in-box:

I just wanted to offer folks participating in the challenge a gratis copy of African Psycho, by Alain Mabanckou. I attach some of the reviews…Any blogger participating the challenge can email me for a gratis copy and they do not need to promise to review it, either!

Just email Richard at Richard AT softskull DOT com.

I took a look at some of the reviews and the book looks well-written, intriguing, and – well – not for everybody.  Here is the Amazon page.  I’m pasting a couple of quotes from professional reviews beneath the fold.

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the most dangerous country in the world!

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A friend asked me if Sierra Leone is the most dangerous country in the world.  Forbes magazine puts out a list of the world’s most dangerous destinations.  And the winners (?) for 2007 were

  • Somalia
  • Iraq
  • Afghanistan
  • Democratic Republic of Congo
  • Cote d’Ivoire
  • Pakistan
  • Burundi
  • Sri Lanka
  • Haiti
  • Chad
  • Lebanon
  • Liberia

Not even in the top 12!  Sierra Leone was very dangerous when it was in the midst of civil war, but that ended in 2002.  Now, I certainly feel safer in Freetown than in Nairobi (perhaps simply due to the fact that I haven’t yet been mugged in Freetown).

Following the footsteps of Sudhir Venkatesh, I managed to infiltrate one of Freetown’s most insidious street gangs a few days ago.  Luckily, I escaped with my life and this photo.