Archive for the ‘african history’ Category

Is child labour wrong?

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

How awful….

Child labour is right below child soldiering on the won’t-someone-please-think-of-the-children scale of moral outrage. Child labour, everyone agrees, is a Problem. And it is an apparently huge problem: the International Labour Organization counts 5-11 year olds as child labourers if they do one hour of work a week!1 Concerned parents should buy a dishwasher ASAP.

But as long as violence and coercion aren’t involved then I’m not convinced that child labour is such a problem, and it’s certainly not a problem solved by feeling guilty about who sewed your socks together, passing unenforceable laws or making empty Declarations.

The roots of child labour

Despite child labour being forbidden by the constitution and the Children’s Act in Ghana, for example, child labour is still common.2 There is a simple reason for this. The use of child labour is not driven by legislative fiat but by a cost-benefit analysis: can a family - or a whole society - afford its children to be an economic burden rather than an economic asset? That is, do the the long-term benefits of education or carefree innocence outweigh the loss of labour power to the family unit for some or all of childhood? Legislation probably complicates this decision - by adding the threat of prosecution, say, or immediate rewards for schooling - but it doesn’t override it.

One of my research aims is to explore the changing use and usefulness of child labour in colonial Ghana. I suspect it is an uneven process, and that an increase in societal wealth does not necessarily lead to a linear decline in child labour. Instead, the value of children’s labour is determined by numerous economic, technological and demographic shifts.

Historical approaches

Some possible determinants of child labour in African history include:

- The availability of adult labour. Demographic trends and shocks - for example the Atlantic slave trade or the present AIDS epidemic - inevitably alter a society’s reliance on child labour.

- New uses for child labour: tending cash crops (cocoa etc) on family farms might be a relevant historical example, and industrialisation and the factory system a possible future dilemna.

- Childhood choice and ambition based on new economic opportunities. The growth of education and an African staffed colonial bureaucracy, for example, created a growing disdain for manual work. I have found one case from the late-1940s of a boy living vagrant in Accra after running away from his home and apprenticeship because he thought that ‘washerman’ was a dishonourable trade.

- Technical and infrastructural changes. The availability and quality of education affects long-term planning. And the availability of mains water and electricity and kitchen appliances cuts down on demand for child labour within the household. But other trends might increase the need for child labour - there is some intriguing evidence that this was the case in the Gold Coast.

Given the complexity of the topic, it is a bit rich for the West to simply say that you can’t use child labour because it’s morally wrong and all children should be in school. Maybe it is and maybe they should - but maybe not.

References:
1Kaushik Basu and Zafiris Tzannatos, “The Global Child Labor Problem: What Do We Know and What Can We Do?,” World Bank Econ Rev 17, no. 2 (December 1, 2003)
2For example: ‘Child Labour Still Prevalent, LRC Calls for Affirmative Action’, Ghanaian Chronicle, 13th June 2008, http://allafrica.com/stories/200806130975.html

Posted in african history, child labour, economics, ghana, history of childhood | 1 Comment »

African history in the Old Bailey?

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Last weekend the full archive of the Old Bailey court records from 1674-1913 went live. It’s freely accessible and full-text searchable. It’s an incredible resource - and it ground to an expected but gratifying halt due to the volume of traffic at launch.

The digital promise

The great thing about digital archives for historians is that peripheral sources that are normally too time consuming to track down can be used with the same ease as those from a subject- or location-specific archive. The history of Britain’s African colonies, for example, relies on a canon of missionary and government sources held in the UK, and national and regional archives in Africa. Other archival sources are underused because the ratio of useful material to research hours is too unrewarding. With searchable archives, data-mining etc., the potential cost of research could become trivial.

As an experiment, I spent half an hour looking for African history in the records of a London courtroom - and it’s there alright. I ran searches on place names, personal names, ethnic epithets and racial slurs. Even that wasn’t very time-consuming, but it’s easy to imagine APIs that would allow you to query a digital archive, or set of archives, with a set of keywords relevant to your research, and return a group of potential files. This kind of stuff has enormous potential.

The African diaspora: crime and respectability

Using a series of fairly obvious search terms, for example, threw up some intriguing material on African history. Most obviously, there is information on the lives of Africans or their descendants in London, of whom there were many. The defence of highwayman Joseph Guy in 1767 was that ‘There are a thousand black men in London besides me’. Unsurprisingly, most appear in criminal contexts. Poor Thomas Robinson (’a Negro Black Boy ‘), for example, was sentenced to death for house-breaking and stealing ‘divers Goods’ in 1724. But others were respectable citizens. John Bardoe was bought as a slave in Lagos by a Genoese sea-captain and, when their ship docked in London in 1859, Bardoe apparently freed himself with the aid of a fellow countryman and began working for another Italian. Bardoe then fell ill and, in a feverish state, assumed he was being recaptured. He first barricaded himself into his room, then made a break for it and stabbed a policeman in a rooftop chase. An interesting story in itself - but the translator at the trial was ‘Miss. M. B. Servano, a native of Yorubah, and educated in England’. There are lots of interesting analytical details there: social networks among Africans in London, the continuation of slavery at sea, perceptions of freedom, and the education of African women. Bardoe was found to have acted in self-defence and judged not guilty.

Young migrants

But the Old Bailey material also has the potential to feed back into research on Africa itself. One area of my research that looks particularly promising is the migration of children within and to the Gold Coast. The detailed records I have of this phenomenon date from after WWII, so I was fascinated to discover the story of John Prince, a West African who in 1908 was working as a servant in London. A Doctor Bayfield had employed Prince, then aged about sixteen, in West Africa and brought him to London on his return to Europe. Prince later defrauded Bayfield and was imprisoned for one day before being seen off to Liverpool by the court missionary. I have no idea what court missionaries do, so I’m not sure if Prince’s treatment was normal - or if this was exceptional treatment doled out to an African.

The great ship robbery

Conditions on the West African coast also make an appearance because some crimes at sea seem to have been prosecuted in London rather than locally. In 1848, for example, the prominent Gold Coast merchant Andrew Swanzy had chests containing 1760 ounces of gold dust - now worth a cool $1.5 million - stolen from the brig Lemuel while it was anchored offshore close to the town of Cormantine. Three crew members struck out in a longboat laden with booty. They were captured on a beach eastwards of Cormantine, where ‘a great number of natives’ were hauling the booty away from the surf. This is an interesting crime. Was it pre-arranged? How much contact did European crews have with locals in African port towns? Was this a criminal alliance where class (or greed) was more important than colour? Or were the ‘natives’ robbing the robbers?

Potential histories

There are, I’m sure, a lot more intriguing cases in these archives that would illuminate history far beyond the parochial borders of London or Britain. Digital history is so exciting because it provides the potential for a truly global history - a history not just written about the whole world, but that draws its evidence from a global store of knowledge, and is written, researched and distributed using methods that are independent of place.

Posted in african history, archives, crime, digital history | 2 Comments »

Cool things from the Ghana National Archives in Accra

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Instead of a proper post, here are some things I took photos of when I was in the archives in Accra.

Court Records

This is basically my PhD - a vast tome of misbehaving children. Some dastardly colonialist decided not to spring for a new book so it’s stuffed full of extra papers - I had many “it came apart in my hands, guv” moments while working with it. After taking photos of every single page, I set fire to it so that no one else can research my topic.

Olde Worlde Maps

After WWII the colonial government decided that wartime trauma could best be assuaged by building children’s playgrounds. This led to an outbreak of NIMBYism on an epic scale. I particularly like this map that shows a proposed children’s playground in between the HQ of the United Africa Company (Unilever), a prison and the palace of the Ga chief. Guess whether it got built or not?

These two maps are of the playgrounds themselves. They were on weird wax paper and had mostly disappeared, but they look quite cool anyway.

Currency

A cheque with an elephant on it from the Bank of British West Africa:

I don’t understand why this receipt/invoice has a stamp stuck on it:

Jack Sharpe, Scout Outfitter:

Full size photos are on my flickr page.

Posted in african history, archives, ghana, history of childhood | No Comments »

Review: Tim Harford - The Logic of Life

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

I’m a fan of Tim Harford, aka the Undercover Economist, and author of a very interesting blog at the FT. He is an excellent example of the division of labour, one of his favourite things, successfully hoovering up dull economics papers and rolling out readable prose. His second book, The Logic of Life, is not really about Africa. It is mostly about how cities are great, and how people who live in the country are carbon-hungry subsidy-hounds. It’s really good.

The undercover Africanist

But there are a couple of relevant sections, including a useful discussion of post-colonial African agriculture drawn from Bates’ Markets and States in Tropical Africa. Harford also discusses disease and development. He argues that malaria control is of secondary economic importance to AIDS control because, while malaria mostly affects children, AIDS primarily affects economically more productive adults. (He’s not totally heartless, just an economist.) He also argues that disease control is itself secondary to, and follows from, the establishment of institutions that incentivise economic innovation and wealth creation.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

I think he might be wrong about malaria. This is mostly guesswork on my part. But, judging by the notes, it was also mostly guesswork by Harford - so wild conjecture is allowed (and fun of course).

Even if we just consider malaria in younger children - the least economically productive demographic - the disease has a spillover impact on household economics. First, children don’t suffer an illness alone: they are nursed, probably by a more economically-productive family member. Serious treatment probably involves a time-consuming trip to a non-local medical facility. Sickness in the young therefore removes important child labour from the household economy, and the labour of healthy adults. Second, the high likelihood of a child dying creates a rational incentive to have more children. Pregnancy, childbirth and post-natal care reduce the availability and productivity of female household labour for lengthy periods. High childhood mortality reduces the eventual economic payoff for this sacrifice. And, third, medical facilities spend an inordinate amount of time on childbirth or treating childhood malaria, skewing medical provision away from temporarily-sick, but otherwise economically-productive adults.

AIDS and malaria

Harford goes on to argue - correctly I suspect - that AIDS is a more significant direct economic problem than malaria. But in areas with a high incidence of both diseases, AIDS and malaria may be linked. AIDS has already reduced the stock of econimcally productive adults and created a scary number of child-headed households: their economic viability is thus under great pressure from childhood malaria. And, in adult-headed households, child mortality may increase AIDS infection rates. First, the replacement of childhood malaria victims by (un)knowingly HIV-positive parents, perhaps with a new partner, is a rational choice with socially harmful consequences. And second, pregnancy does not just reduce the domestic and agricultural productivity of women, it may also temporarily remove their sexual labour from the household. Bored and impatient fathers thus have an increased incentive to find another sexual partner, and the corollary increased risk of contracting and passing on AIDS.

Disease and development

Harford ultimately argues that disease has been controlled elsewhere after economic growth, and that growth was secured by establishing institutions that preserved and encouraged the creation of economic wealth. True enough, I expect. But it is also true that the technology to control malaria already exists, and where these technologies are imperfect, the incentive to innovate certainly exists. African history has been marked by efforts to control, direct and increase labour power (if not always productivity). So if African governments need to create or reform economic institutions then a good place to start might be anti-malarial projects that protect and encourage such ‘wealth in people’.

Tim Harford, The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World:
Buy from amazon.co.uk or amazon.com

Posted in african history, aids, development, disease, economics, malaria, tim harford | No Comments »

What is tradition? Ritual mutilation and traditional ignorance at the UN.

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Some jargon

‘Embodied power’ is an important concept for my research on the history of childhood in colonial Africa. This pretentious academic jargon simply means the physical markings on the body that are used to display citizenship, to mark the transition through age grades, or to complete puberty rites. In Africa this means things like scarification, circumcision, clitoridectomy and other forms of ritual mutilation. Most of these operations are performed by adults on children, or on children who are becoming adults, so ritual mutilation is vital to a historical understanding of generational power.

Embodied power now: the UNPFA and the trouble with aid workers

Ritual mutilation is still a live issue. In Ghana, you can get 5-10 years for practising female genital mutilation. Sounds fair. The 6th February was catchily declared the International Day Against Female Genital Mutilation by the United Nations Population Fund. It’s hard to fault their good intentions. But the UNFPA also claim that genital mutilation is “deeply entrenched in social and cultural tradition”.1 The word tradition is always bad news.

Traditions might be old and they might be entrenched. But they might be very young and not entrenched at all. Cultural practices have historical roots, and history springs up all over the place. To be fair, the UNFPA website does ask “Where does the practice come from?”. But, to return to being unfair, this is answered with meaningless waffle and a meek admission that its origins are “unclear”.2 The social causes are apparently the economic weakness of women and the desire to control female sexuality. Well, duh. But why now, why here and since when?

The UNFPA, in short, has no idea what it is trying to combat. Shouldn’t it try and find out? Well, no, probably not.

For western development and aid workers - as for colonial officials - detailed local knowledge is unnecessary and annoying: it makes your job more difficult.3 You don’t need to know much about the roots of the problem at all. You need to know how to arrange a conference, how to extract funding from governments, how to write a glossy report - and which paved streets in Accra are too narrow for your air-con SUV. In fact, knowing too much might make your job irrelevant. Maybe your mate who works for the imaginary UN Road Building Initiative has more influence over clitoridectomy than you do, so it’s probably best not to find out. And, ultimately, if your development or advocacy group is successful - and understanding the problem makes this more likely - then you put yourself out of a job.

Not that I’m cynical.

Embodied power in history: a Xhosa example

But if the UNPFA did get its act together, what might it find? I think they’d find that clitoridectomy etc are not ‘traditional’, but contingent on local historical dynamics.

Let’s ignore clitoridectomy and consider a South African example of embodied power: the Xhosa ‘custom’ of ingqithi, the exarticulation of the last joint of a finger. It was a marker of citizenship, control and belonging; children normally had the operation at about three years old, but it could be delayed until as late as eighteen if the child lived away from the village. So far, so anthropological. But the statistical study of this practice also allows the problem to be approached from a historical perspective.4

In 1964, a Transkei mission-hospital doctor surveyed all visiting patients to see if they practised this ‘tradition’, and made two unsurprising findings: that incidence of ingqithi was smaller among both educated and Christian patients. But he also noted the age of his patients so it is possible to track the probable date of the operation and any chronological trends. Surprisingly, there is not a linear decline of this custom. There is a clear peak of ingqithi in the interwar years, approximately 50% higher than in the decades before WWI and after WWII. European cultural values were clearly not simply destroying an indigenous tradition – ‘tradition’ was itself a historical product and dynamic.

One useful route for histories of African childhood would be to trace the driving forces behind the desire, among young and old alike, to control children’s bodies and identities. For the Transkei, for example, this might involve studying Xhosa relationships to encroaching mission and independent Christianities, but also the increased incidence (not always with parental blessing) of migratory child labour to Natal. We can also speculate on the impact of ingqithi on productivity: if you have 9-and-a-bit fingers, are you still able to perform nimble-fingered tasks with industrial machinery, or are you only good for hoeing?

References:
1. Interview with UNFPA director.
2. “The practice of FGM/FGC has been followed by many different peoples and societies across the ages and the continents”. UNPFA FAQs on FGM.
3. On the similarities between aid workers and colonial officials see this review by Justin Willis.
4. All statistics are from Jansen, G., ‘Some observations about ritual mutilation in a Transkei mission hospital, with special reference to the ingqithi-custom’, African Studies, 25, 2 (1966), pp73-9.

Posted in UNFPA, african history, aid, development, ghana, history of childhood, south africa, the body, xhosa | No Comments »

Football in colonial Africa: an article by me on Pitchinvasion.net

Friday, February 1st, 2008

In honour of the thrilling footballing spectacle that is the Africa Cup of Nations, I’ve written an article about football in colonial Africa. It’s published on the excellent and intelligent Pitch Invasion site. The article draws quite heavily on the work of Peter Alegi on South Africa and Phyllis Martin on Congo Brazzaville, but also incorporates some research I’ve done on the Gold Coast and the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt.

I’ll post a pdf with full scholarly references as soon as I’ve figured out how Adobe InDesign works.

Posted in africa cup of nations, african cup of nations, african history, football, history of leisure, soccer | No Comments »

African Nations Cup and the history of football in Africa

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Great news, the Africa Cup of Nations has started. Or, if you are a Premier League manager, terrible news, the Africa Cup of Nations has started. I predict two things:

1. Everyone will call the tournament the African Nations Cup, which is much snappier and surely the name everyone used in the past?

2. Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire will both self-destruct, and someone else will win it. Holders Egypt are still available at 8/1 at Betfair, even after whacking Cameroon 4-2 in fine style. I’d say that’s good value, whereas Ghana (4/1) and especially Cote d’Ivoire (3/1!) are bad value. The tournament seems to be suffering from the credit crunch, so there isn’t much liquidity, but it might pick up in the later stages.

So, as the point of this blog is history, here is my take on the history of Ghanaian football. It’s not very representative as it’s based on a single file from the Ashanti regional archive. The documents were mainly produced during the WWII. But they are quite interesting, and it’s a good excuse to show some cool pictures. The main question is: is football just a game? Probably not.

Firstly, football may have reflected growing ethnic rivalries within multi-ethnic states. For example, in 1942 the New Britons, a team from Tarkwa in SW Ghana, resolved at their AGM “to crush down in this year all the Kotoko Teams”.1 Kotoko, a common team name, meant porcupine and was also symbol of Asante nationhood. The club motto of Asante Kotoko was “Thousand Killed, Thousand Comes”. This referred to the military strength of the defeated Asante empire, now a constituent part of Britain’s Gold Coast colony. But the motto was also a measure of Asante’s political tenacity. The slogan was later associated with the National Liberation Movement - a specifically Asante alternative to the nationalist party that would lead multi-ethnic Ghana to independence, Nkrumah’s CPP.2 By September 1942, the Mighty Britons had defeated four Kotokos, scoring 14 goals and conceding just four.

Football may also have added more formality and structure to divisions based on region, race and religion. The appeal of the game cut across such boundaries - matches were announced on the radio in Twi, Hausa and English - but teams were more divisive. Muslims in Obuasi, probably northern migrants or members of the Hausa diaspora, played in the Mahommedans team. There is evidence that elsewhere in Africa different ethnicities voluntarily kept their distance during leisure activities. But football had some unique structural features. Teams (and perhaps fans) were visually differentiated through uniforms. The continuity of team and player registration made these divisions more formal and persistent. And matches and tournaments made fans and teams antagonistic, rather than indifferent, to their sporting/ethnic/religious rivals. This interpretation is firmly embedded in the conspiracy theory school of history: it shouldn’t be taken too seriously without a lot more direct evidence.

Football was also inherently political. Its popularity made it a source of prestige. This could be the prestige of personal skill, as for Ekow Glenland, who told the FA he was “commonly known as Kimpo the Devil Boy”. Football also bestowed prestige by association. The patron of Asante Kotoko was none other than Agyeman Prempeh II - Prempeh was the Asantehene (the Asante king), an office abolished then later reinstated by the British. And football was inevitably subjected to the concerns of imperial power. Matches during WWII, for example, were frequently held to support war charities.

Anyway, that’s more than enough history. Here are some more football club letterheads, plus sarcastic comments about their mottos.


Bonos Mores = good manners in Latin. Unnecessary showing off.


From the days when it was OK to have Scottish football role models.


I agree.


A common defense in war crimes tribunals.


Definitely my favourite, despite its rubbishness. We can safely assume that biros were not rationed during the war.

References:
1. This, and everything else here, is taken from the Ashanti Regional Archive, ARG 7/10/4 Obuasi Football Association.
2. Jean Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Madison, 1993), p.16.

Posted in africa cup of nations, african cup of nations, african history, african nations cup, betting, football, gambling, history of leisure, soccer | 1 Comment »

Childhood, nationalism and racism in Algeria: Albert Camus’s The First Man

Monday, December 17th, 2007

Making nationalists

Children are not born as ideologues: so how and when do they become racists, nationalists, socialists, colonialists or subjects? And children are not necessarily born into ideologies: provincial societies do not become nations overnight; the transition from, say, communist revolution to hegemony is both gradual and uneven; and families may react to encroaching political or religious orthodoxies by eagerly adopting, opposing or just ignoring them. Children are thus often born into ambiguity and flux: the question is whether they eventually accept a social consensus and become citizens, or oppose it and become temporary or permanent rebels. So childhood is perhaps most interesting at those historical junctures where social identities are strongly contested, when children grow up between constellations of competing authorities, identities and opportunities – familial, religious, political, economic, racial, national and sexual.

Albert Camus’s autobiographical novel, The First Man, is a great source on white settler childhood in Algeria. Its complexities have made me rethink a few assumptions on African history - primarily that it’s OK to use “white settler society” as a shorthand for “racist, imperialist, exploitative, expropriating and privileged white settler society”. Camus was born into a poor, working-class family in Algiers in 1913: if his memoir is accurate then there was no settled or monolithic idea of “White French Algeria” for him to simply grow into. So where do hardened and fanatical French imperial citizens come from?

Roots of settler nationalism

One answer might be family and the home. But Camus’s family were not overtly ideological. The first language of his mother and grandmother was Mahon, a Balearic dialect, and so they were isolated by illiteracy and language from French metropolitan news, ideas and national identity - when quizzed by the young Camus, his mother doesn’t even know that France is “their” country. And children lived in close proximity to Arab lives and livelihoods, linked to this ostensibly separate culture by petty exchange and sensory experience: the coffee roasting in the courtyard, or the sweet-vendors outside the cinema.1

Another explanation might be state education. But school attendance and experience were not uniform: in Camus’s école primaire Arab children were educated alongside Europeans; and few working class children graduated to the more segregated lycée. Short periods of education were not decisive in creating an imperial identity: France was a textbook staple but, for Camus, it was still an exotic and distant place, interesting primarily for its snow and, later, for its sense of history - a history that did not yet extend to Algeria.2

Another influence might be the experience of colonial authority, and its hierarchical treatment of Europeans, Muslims and Jews. But what is striking about Camus’s childhood is how little the government affects his life. The authority he encounters is parental not political. And the sole human face of government is the municipal employee: trolley-bus drivers or an Arab dog-catcher. Crime and disorder erupt sporadically: but Camus has only indirect experience of policing, and no apparent concept of the hierarchical laws it enforced, only a nightmarish knowledge that the death penalty is the ultimate sanction. (This might have been slightly different for indigenous Algerian children.)3

Colonial architectures: leisure in the city

If this analysis is correct then the creation of imperial and settler identities is more subtle, and less structured by the state: it is not a conscious project but a gradual accretion grounded in everyday life. One possibility raised by Camus’s The First Man is the role that urban leisure and architecture played in shaping colonial identities during childhood. The photos below are actually from another French colonial city - Casablanca - but you get the general idea. The following discussion is based solely on Camus’s text.

Figures 1-3. Childhood leisure in 1920s/30s Casablanca: rockpools and blackjack on the beach; the cinema; the public swimming baths4:



The structured leisure activities of children - football and French cinema - were distinctly European. Speaking and reading French also opened up the metropolitan world through movies, the radio, newspapers and comics. And the venues for their unstructured play were creations of colonial architecture, often temporarily emptied of an adult presence: the experimental garden; the WWI veterans’ hospital, where they made poisons with discarded medical paraphenalia; apartment cellars; and a beach studded with bathing huts, separated from the city by a strip of industrial land. The city was divided by colour-coded tramlines; and at the nexus of race- and class-segregated neighbourhoods lay the lycée, the barracks and the Place du Gouvernement. Childhood time, too, had a colonial structure: playtime ended as the trolley-cars switched on their lights near dusk; and the year was split by school-terms.5 Leisure venues may have been multi-racial but perhaps children realised that such architectures, so separate in style and ownership, were a product of the colonial presence - and perhaps European children experienced this as something to which they belonged, and from which North Africans were excluded.

References:
1.Albert Camus, The First Man, (London, 2001), pp36-7,73, 103 162-3.
2.Camus, The First Man, pp112-3, 158, 161-2.
3.Camus, The First Man, pp109-10, 217-8
4.Jean-Louis Coen and Monique Eleb, Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures, (New York, 2002), pp254, 262, 267.
5.Camus, The First Man, pp39-40, 167-73, 188

Albert Camus, The First Man:
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Posted in african history, albert camus, algeria, algiers, autobiography, camus, colonialism, history of childhood, history of leisure, nationalism, racism | No Comments »

Lagos: crime and delinquency, past and present

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Here is a fascinating mini-documentary on Lagos, the world’s fastest growing mega-city, from current.com.


There is a cameo appearance from the infamous ‘Area Boys’ - a kind of youthful mafia, running protection rackets etc down the local markets. One of my research interests is the emergence and evolution of youth crime in African history, and this video is a nice little reminder of its modern-day relevance. There is also an awesome insight into juju policing: one vigilante claims that his magic can force a criminal to jump up and down on the spot until daybreak - that’s more embarrassing and more energetic than the stocks.

Anyway, Laurent Fourchard wrote a pertinent article about the colonial predecessors of the Area Boys, and their entrenchment in the urban economy by the late-1940s.1 He traces their origins to loosely-knit pickpocket gangs in the late-1920s, and the more organized and hierarchical Boma Boys during WWII.

Boma Boys acted as middlemen between billeted soldiers and the bars, brothels and prostitutes that kept them entertained. It was the sex trade that brought Boma Boys to the attention of the colonial government, primarily because girls as young as twelve were being kidnapped, pawned or sold to work as Lagos prostitutes. The colonial response was an ineffective crackdown on male delinquents, but also legislative restrictions on girls hawking goods on the street, or living in the city without their parents or guardian. The result, Fourchard argues, was the criminalization of the innocent, and the neglect of actual and damaging criminality: there were protection rackets in markets by 1946, and Lagos has suffered its Area Boys ever since.

The article is definitely very interesting but, as Fourchard admits, it is based on adult- and elite-produced sources. The experience of the youths themselves is not really explored - this is the side of delinquency that I’m trying to focus on in my own research. On Area Boys, for example, it would be really useful to track their life histories: what happens when they get older - do they get shoved aside by a new generation, do they become Neighbourhood Uncles, or do they never grow up at all?

References:
1. Fourchard, Laurent, ‘Lagos and the Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Nigeria, 1920-1960’, Journal of African History, 47 (2006), pp. 115–37.

Posted in african history, crime, delinquency, history of childhood, lagos, nigeria, youth | No Comments »

Review: Robert Calderisi, The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

“The rest of the world can now do very little for Africa…”

I rather enjoyed Calderisi’s short, readable and stimulating book about aid and development in Africa. Written by an ex-World Bank high-flyer, it deals with the post-1970 years: a period of almost unmitigated failure for Africa. Calderisi vividly illustrates the scale of African economic underperformance: of all the sub-Saharan countries, only Ghana and Uganda have now regained the same real income levels they had in 1970 – the rest have become poorer; and South Korea, poorer than Ghana in 1960, has now become an aid donor to Africa.[151, 156] Calderisi also addresses the political controversy surrounding the remedial economic liberalisation policies of the World Bank and IMF: he argues that this was not the cause of economic woes but a reaction to a more profound economic trend.

For the general reader, a reassessment of the cause and effects of structural adjustment is the most useful – and underdeveloped – aspect of the book. Calderisi argues that internationally directed liberalisation was primarily the result of a massive evaporation of African export markets from the 1970s onwards. In the face of growing international competition from other developing countries, Africa lost $70bn a year: “there was not enough money in the world - let alone in the World Bank - to fill this gap”. [18] He is right to emphasise this missing half of the debate on late-twentieth century Africa: but it is a shame there isn’t more detail on the affected products and sectors, and a detailed analysis of where the lost business went. What, if anything, could Africa have done to staunch the bleeding?

The idea that World Bank and IMF reforms are the cause of African poverty is, however, firmly entrenched in the left/liberal-ish mindset: SAPs were once memorably described to me as a “rolling clusterfuck” across the Ghanaian economy, a metaphor that I have stolen and applied ever since. If Calderisi is to be more persuasive then his argument needs to be more empirically detailed and anecdotally powerful: a counterweight to the emotive personal tales of neglect, suffering and privatisation that currently dominate public perception.

Calderisi is very strong on the unrealities and inefficiencies of many African economies, often caused by the absurdity of subsidising (modern, prestigious) industry at the expense of (dull, backward) agriculture. Forcing farmers in Cote d’Ivoire to use locally produced sacks and state-owned shipping services, for example, protects hundreds of industrial jobs, but imposes a ruinous cost on hundreds of thousands of agricultural producers.[146] He is also strong on corruption. I’ve often thought that elite African politics attracts the same type of people as privatized utilities/monopolies do in the West: why do something well, when you can do something badly and still make a great deal of money? Calderisi’s anecdotal style confirms this view.

The solution, or part of it, is to drastically cut back aid, and make it strictly conditional on good governance and human rights. But is it all doom and gloom? Well, no. His description of new accountability practices in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project is interesting, although the jury is still out on their effectiveness.[177-95] Calderisi also praises the actions of five “serious” African governments: Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania and Mali. These countries should be given an unconditional blank cheque, and allowed to get on with it.[209-10] Sadly, in the rush to condemn the rest of Africa, Calderisi rather ignores what these governments have done right.

This review has focused on the ideas behind the book, but much of the enjoyment comes from the anecdotal style, and the accounts of everyday life as a World Bank-er in Africa. Many of Calderisi’s stories are eye-opening and optimistic, if partial. He is an engaging writer, and I rattled through the book in one sitting. The one big weakness is an ill-advised attempt to pinpoint an “African” culture that encourages and embeds corruption and bad governance: ideologies are important, but this continent-wide dismissal was pretty unconvincing. That reservation aside, the book is well worth a read, and may alter a few opinions.

Robert Calderisi, The Trouble with Africa:
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