The text of his presentation is available here: Thabo Mbeki Africa Day Lecture

First among the six steps identified by Mbeki, is to nurture and build Africa’s intellectual cadre, including “to rebuild and sustain our universities and other centres of learning, attract back to Africa the intelligentsia that has migrated to the developed North, build strong links with the intelligentsia in the African Diaspora, and give the space to these the time and space they need to help determine the future of the Africans.” He appeals for the reinvigoration of the African Renaissance Movement, that was prominent a decade ago but which has fallen by the wayside subsequently.

As with material goods, Africa is a primary producer of intellectual resources, and also a consumer of finished intellectual products, but makes little contribution to the value that is added in between. Much (perhaps most) African intellectual production occurs under northern (American and European) contracts. Consequently, Africa’s intellectual agenda is set outside the continent, with African scholars are co-opted as consultants and primary researchers, while the ablest of them are provided with careers in western universities, research institutes and policy institutions. The final product is then re-exported, its value having been multiplied many times over, to Africa for consumption by African people, governments and institutions. The fact that African names appear as authors of these products does not necessarily mean that they are more “African-owned” than a mobile phone containing African coltan is an African product. Meanwhile African leaders have become so estranged from the structures of intellectual production that they overlook the strategic importance of paying for domestic universities and research and hence owning the processes of generating and refining ideas.

Meeting in Libya last August, African heads of state and governance recognized the importance of intellectual leadership to the continent’s peace and security agenda. Paragraph 19 of the Tripoli
Declaration on the Elimination of Conflicts in Africa and the Promotion of Sustainable Peace, reads:

“Making and sustaining peace and security is also an intellectual challenge. We therefore undertake to build the capacity of our universities and research institutes to explore the nature of African conflicts, to investigate what succeeds and what fails in conflict resolution efforts, and to arrive at African-centered solutions, drawing from our own distinctive and unique experience.”

They might have gone further, as Mbeki indicates, to assert that intellectual leadership is a central strategic challenge for Africa. Controlling the intellectual agenda is claiming the future: abdicating that leadership is surrendering the future.

I was wrong. It was an error to endorse this dichotomy. There are distinct differences between the political traditions of Equatorial Africa and those of the peoples who live north of the eleventh parallel. But these historical divergences are eminently explicable, especially if we see the Sudanic states as a hybrid of form of governance, in which rulers have adapted indigenous patron-client systems, making use of the opportunities provided by contacts across the Sahara. The characteristic form of successful Sudanic states was an assimilatory empire, managed through clientelism and organized violence.

The trans-Saharan links enabled the states in the Sudanic belt to adopt organizational technologies that could allow clientilistic political models to function on a far larger scale. Paramount among these was Islam. Adoption of Islam was extremely advantageous to rulers. It provided an off-the-shelf legal code, covering not only personal and family law and penal law, but also commerce, state administration and diplomacy. Rulers could hire scholars and jurists from highly literate societies to legitimate their authority, and could draw upon a socio-political archive of centuries of management of the affairs of state. They could not only acquire material technologies such as weapons, horses, coinage and writing, but also management technologies that enabled the administration of larger, more complicated and socio-culturally diverse domains. The discipline imposed by Islamic practice forged better military units. This made these kingdoms hegemonic over their immediate southern neighbours, whom they could not only defeat, but dominate. (In the Nile Valley, the southern limit of this domination was the Nilotic frontier, elsewhere it was considerably deeper into the forest zone.)

The Sudanic sultans and amirs and Ethiopian kings governed as emperors, over diverse peoples who had their own distinctive forms of socio-political organization. Some historiography of Ethiopia (by scholars with political sympathies with Eritrea or Oromo nationalism) has described the expansion of the Ethiopian empire as almost indistinguishable from European colonialism, with the Emperor Menelik acting as junior partner in the “Scramble for Africa.” This is an exaggeration and doesn’t apply elsewhere. But there are important similarities and continuities in the way that Ethiopia and the Sudanic states ruled their hinterlands, and the mechanisms of indirect rule adopted by the British.

These continuities are evident in Darfur, and especially Dar Masalit. Local rulers adapted to the intrusion of European colonialism in much the same way as they had dealt with powerful neighbouring and Mediterranean empires in previous centuries. Dar Masalit is a limiting case because it was on the periphery of African empires (Dar Fur and Wadai) until 1874, was then administered indirectly as the furthest frontier of a hybrid Ottoman-Egyptian empire, and achieved quasi-autonomy before being the purest case of British indirect rule (1923-55). On the northern border of Dar Masalit, the Gimir sultan achieved fame for his truculence and procrastination, leading exemplar of the attitude that if he held on long enough, the British and French would depart as surely as had their predecessors. (He was not mistaken.)

At their zenith, the Sudanic and Ethiopian empires ruled their domains as three concentric circles. The inner circle was the fully administered territory, where a centralized patrimony controlled political life. In the second circle loyalty was bargained, with local chiefs enjoying a degree of autonomy, and negotiating their obligations to the centre. The outer circle was a zone of influence, where power was exercised by the intermittent use of force. The nature of patron-client relations varied according to the circle.

Indigenous African empires expanded through conquest, purchase and religious conversion. Conquest is self-explanatory, but force alone cannot sustain external control. Where only force was used, the form of governance was the raiding party, and control was exercised by the capture of slaves. The territory itself was left ungoverned, and in many cases increasingly depopulated as well. The outer circle of African empire, where the ruler’s religion did not extend, was a zone of plunder and lawlessness in which no reciprocity existed. People who lived there were by definition actual or potential slaves.

In the Sudanic states, the frontier between the zone of negotiated allegiance (second circle) and the zone of lawlessness (third circle) was defined by Islam, in the form of the distinction between dar al Islam and dar al harb. This boundary was not fixed: groups could negotiate their entry into the second circle.

Buying slaves and buying the allegiance of chiefs are different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Individuals and communities converted to Islam, adopting Islamic lineages, partly as protection from enslavement. Selling collective allegiance was usually preferable to the alternative, of being treated as enslaveable, and hence subject to individual capture and sale.

In stateless societies, the status of a slave was similar to that of someone outside the kinship structure. In Islamic societies, this concept continued, hybridized with the concept of individual rights under Islamic law. The slaving frontier of a Sudanic state was an extreme form of “political marketplace,” in which members of a group which had not professed loyalty to the sovereign order, could only resist the complete subjugation of enslavement by force. Once enslaved, either through capture or sale, the individual slave possessed no standing at all in the marketplace, save as the possession of another. His or her loyalty was absolute and non-negotiable.

When a local chief converted to Islam, along with his followers, he entered the second circle of imperial control, a political system regulated by Islamic law, refracted through Sudanic tradition, but run ruthlessly according to the power calculations of the sovereign and the chiefs themselves. Islam specified the ruler’s obligations towards his subjects, but individuals’ rights were meagre, and violence was widely used to bargain. Those who remained outside the second circle could resist (as with the Nilotic peoples of south Sudan) or try to escape (as with the Nuba and Fertit), but they never managed to challenge the overall domination of the Sudanic states.

European colonial conquest brought a different form of authority. European control was spatially complete in a way that the Sudanic empires never achieved: the opportunities for escape were limited indeed. Meanwhile, its powers of military subjugation were greater. For the rulers of the major Sudanic states, it was a disaster (e.g. Ali Dinar of Darfur, killed by the British after his defeat in 1916). For many of the minor rulers, it was a chance to rescue limited authority (e.g. Sultan Andoka of Dar Masalit) or even increase their powers. For their subjects, demands and obligations changed too. The imposition of taxes paid in cash compelled many to enter the wage labour market, usually at a steep disadvantage; the opportunities for making demands on chiefs dwindled; and after the devastation of the initial European conquest, rule became less violent. Non-Muslim foreign rulers could never obtain any sacred authority, leaving a legitimacy gap that was fatally inherited by their nationalist successors.

In summary, pre-colonial chiefly administration in the Sudanic states was more instrumental in support of a power hierarchy than the world of reciprocal obligation described by Chabal for elsewhere in Africa. But neither did it constitute a relationship of simple subjugation as in the case of colonial direct rule or in places where the colonial rulers instituted chiefly systems ab initio. In Darfur, for example, the British adopted and adapted an existing system. They certainly narrowed the chiefs’ social obligations, and strengthened the material dependence of chiefs on their rulers.

For historians, there is much to be gained by joining up the analysis of pre-colonial Africa’s complex Muslim states with that of the largely stateless peoples of tropical and southern Africa. It allows for the comparative analysis of imperialisms (in the plural). For today’s political scientists, this allows for a much richer historicization of the structures of patrimonialism and clientelism, showing how the configurations of material and symbolic reward have altered in response to different circumstances. Nothing in these structures is immutable: they have been changed in the past by religious faith, military and administrative technologies, and by cash. They are changing still.

This review will focus on one of Chabal’s themes, which is the nature of political representation and how this was transformed by the colonial interlude, creating structures for political authority that in superficial ways resemble both traditional chiefly power and also institutional government, but which in reality possess a distinct pattern. His key theme is how the nature of reciprocity has changed. Kinship translates into structures of obligation and reciprocity. This is neither traditional nor antiquated, nor a drag on the organization of political life: it provides the very foundation of a functioning social order and indeed define the nature of political power.

Chabal notes two aspects of exchange: tangible and symbolic.

“It is not just a question of leaders acting as Big Men – that is, redistributing to their clients what they acquire by dint of their holding office or exercising power – although that is clearly at the heart of the material embodiment of exchange. It is also a matter of combining the material and symbolic in ways that satisfy the expectations of reciprocity held by both sides.

“Such relations of exchange are unequal, based as they are on a clear reality of power: rulers expect to rule. Nevertheless, perhaps the most common blind spot among Africanist political scientists is the assumption that African leaders are merely corrupt dictators because they are not elected, or not elected properly, and because they ostensibly abuse their office. It is not so simple. What matters for members of the networks is less how politicians come to hold office and with what probity they occupy it than how they discharge their obligations under existing systems of reciprocity.” (pp. 51-2).

Chabal argues that in pre-colonial African societies, chiefs and followers had patron-client relations structured by mutual obligation, and that the legitimacy of clientelism as the basis of a political compact remains the bedrock of the common good. In conventional western political science, clientelism is seen as a purely private process, intrinsically antithetical to the generation of public goods including public institutions. It is grouped with larceny under the umbrella term “corruption” with all the latter’s normative force. Chabal disagrees: he writes not only of obligations but a world of obligation.

Colonial conquest introduced the idea and practice of subjugation without reciprocal ties. For ordinary Africans colonial rule was a double subjection, because Africans became subjects of the colonial power, while chiefs became the intermediaries of colonial power, sundering their formerly reciprocal relations with their followers. The link between temporal and sacred authority, was severed, and with it the relationship of accountability.

“Since chiefs had access to [colonial state] resources, they continued to command clients. Therefore, on the surface, clientelism remained as it ever was in pre-colonial times. In fact, it had mutated drastically. The patrimonial quality of chieftancy no longer rested on the legitimacy conferred upon it by the ties of reciprocity that bound leaders and followers. It came increasingly to depend on the chiefs’ capacity to distribute resources to clients. This change in the nature of patrimonialism, this move towards starker forms of patronage, had a decisive impact on the texture of accountability. Chiefs, who were now primarily accountable to the colonial state, lost their authority. They were merely disbursers of clientelistic favours, no longer the keepers of the socio-political order. The result was a thinning of the patrimonial relation and the gradual emergence of a non-accountable form of clientelism – that is, a clientelism narrowed to the strictly instrumental, increasingly divorced from the moral and ethical dimensions of pre-colonial rulership.” (p. 95)

This analysis can also shed light on the role of Christian authorities in legitimizing European imperial rule. Arguably, colonial conquest did not so much sunder the general association between temporal and sacred, as reconfigure it—the moral crisis of defeat creating a situation in which new gods were needed, in addition to but also more powerful than, the old ones.

In Chabal’s account, nationalist revolution further dissociated instrumental and moral. It put in place an order with no room for chiefly authority, forced even greater chiefly allegiance to the state, and commuted the clientelistic relation from the traditional to the modern sector, making the state itself the commander of clientelistic resources. Under colonial rule, material clientelism was confined to the intermediate and lower levels of political power, but in the independent era they reached to the summit of power, while remaining divorced from moral attributes and focused solely on the need for politicians to placate as large a clientele as they could muster. Chabal writes:

“The fact that this form of instrumental patrimonialism could be justified on the grounds of the letter of the ‘traditional’ morality of reciprocity did not obscure the fact that the spirit of such morality had been left behind or simply perverted.” (p. 96)

The word “perverted” is uncharacteristically pejorative: Chabal would have been better to have written “changed”. Traditional morality was of course never fixed, and was forced repeatedly to adjust to the consequences of events such as wars, epidemics, migrations, and famines. For many societies, mythologies of foundational catastrophe were based on real historical experience of slave raids, forced displacement, and collective survival against the odds (see for example Wendy James, War and Survival in Sudan’s Borderlands.)

Independent states have yet to resolve the challenge of legitimacy. National citizenship commands popular assent but remains an aspiration without practical benefit. On the other hand, clientelism continues to provide the basics of citizenship: belonging and protection—it “works.”

Chabal notes that if a fully-functioning liberal democratic order were imported, fully formed, into Africa, it is likely that Africans would be better off. But this has clearly failed to happen, and the challenge for scholars of Africa is “to understand how Africans make do in less than agreeable conditions.” He notes, “what makes the ‘modern’ liberal-democratic dispensation desirable is less its morality than its management efficiency in the running of institutionalized organizations based on bureaucratic rather than personal logic.” (p. 71)

Chabal’s discussion of rent and rent-seeking is refreshingly frank. “On this issue, again, political science is singularly devoid of any critical angle other than the normative. It considers this state of affairs as pathological and posits from the outset that it is incompatible with development. Furthermore, it assumes that rent-seeking is the mark of ‘traditional’ societies and that it disappears as polities become more institutionalized and democratic.” (p. 120). He notes that rent-seeking has become more, rather than less, pronounced in Africa over the years, and seeks an explanation for this. It lies in the fact that accumulation of non-productive wealth conveys status, and allowed the chief to fulfill his duty to exhibit generosity, as socially required, through festivals, shrines, burials, and above all redistribution for economic and political reasons.

Again, the colonial conquest changed the nature of rent. The non-material and reciprocal aspects of status became irrelevant, now that chiefs worked for the colonial authorities. Chiefly position became an opportunity for accumulating material resources only. Chiefs were bought off by the imperial rulers, given license to become rich without responsibility other than demonstrating the required loyalty to the occupier.

“In retrospect, the consequence of colonial rule was the notion that power conferred possibilities of rent-making that were not sanctioned by collective responsibility and legal accountability. More generally, it induced a mentality whereby all those who exercised some degree of power (e.g. interpreters) within the colonial administration felt entitled to negotiate it for personal benefit. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why work in the colonial administration became so popular as a means of social and economic advancement.” (p. 124)

In short, the experience of colonial occupation introduced power and wealth with minimal social responsibility, and successor independent states maintained clientelism as an almost exclusively material relationship. Chabal writes, “The outcome was a form of modern patrimonialism, often dubbed neo-patrimonialism, in which the equation between power and rent was not questioned so long as politicians agreed to redistribute some of their wealth to their clients.” (p. 126)

I think Chabal’s conclusion here is incomplete. Surely, chiefly power was always exercised to personal benefit. What colonialism and the various post-colonialisms, have done is to reconfigure that benefit in more narrowly material terms, while the more recent phenomenon of globalization has made those benefits portable. In pre-colonial societies, exile was punishment that spelled the end of political aspiration and social standing, not least because social status and wealth didn’t travel except with a heavy discount. Today, wealth can be spirited away to foreign bank accounts, status markers are globally marketable, and much African political life is conducted among diasporas and in foreign capitals.

Chabal has much more to say, about the informal networks that channel power and the way in which modern communication technologies have strengthened these networks, about the human consequences of violence including the degradation of the human body, collapse of shared values and the breakdown of the social order, and way in which the de-institutionalization of politics that contributes to conflict, not as an occasional calamity but rather as an endemic condition. A wide-ranging discussion of Chabal’s book was convened by Critical African Studies. Also see my review of Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly at Making Sense of Darfur.

Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, the most irrepressible Pan Africanist of his generation, died in Nairobi on 24 May 2009. His friends and colleagues are stunned at the loss of a man who was so full of life and humour, such a determined Afro-optimist, and such a devoted father to his children, Aisha and Aida. Africa is impoverished by his untimely death.

Tajudeen was born in Funtua, Katsina State, Nigeria, in 1961. His commitment to his home town and family remained undimmed throughout his life. He was educated at Government Schools in Funtua from where he went to Bayero University, Kano, where he graduated with a first class honours degree. He was winner of the Nigerian Government’s Merit Award as the best student of Political Science between 1980-82 at Bayero University.

After his National Youth Service, Tajudeen applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He challenged the selection committee by dressing in traditional style for his interview and exam and demanding why they should want to associate someone like him with the name of the grand imperialist, Cecil Rhodes. To the credit of the Rhodes Scholarship, they selected him, and Tajudeen spent three years at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, writing his DPhil degree in politics. While there, he invigorated the Africa Society (serving as president) and injected his unique mix of humour, anecdote, sharp political analysis and enthusiastic optimism into the university’s African debates. Tajudeen was engaged in an astonishing range of African and anti-imperial activities including the Pan African Movement, the All African Anti-Imperialist Youth Front, the Movement for Awareness and Advancement, the Anti Apartheid Movement, the Save the Sharpeville Six Campaign and several magazines including the Africa Research and Information Bureau (ARIB).

Tajudeen was an energetic journalist and writer, contributing regularly on contemporary Africa in newspapers, magazines, journals and radio. Those who knew him cannot forget his rapid one-fingered typing, bold and articulate and immediately dispatched into the public realm without a spellcheck. He was fearless in denouncing hypocrisy or abuses wherever he encountered them, from whatever quarter. He was as resolute in condemning the violations of Africa’s dictators and warlords as he was in pointing the finger at the double standards of international agencies and the shortcomings of Africa’s would-be liberators. Tajudeen’s candid lack of guile and good humour enabled him to say things that for many others were unsayable, and to ask the most difficult questions without provoking defensiveness. At the time of the constitutional referendum in Zimbabwe, he demanded of the government, “what happens if you lose?” and of the opposition, “what happens if you win?”, discovering that neither had planned for this. He castigated his pan-Africanist allies in government without hesitation when they fell short. When told that Kofi Annan had won the Nobel Peace Prize he famously retorted, “for what?”

Tajudeen broadcast for the BBC’s World Service Programmes on Africa both in Hausa and English and Voice of America (VOA). He was editor of the journal, Africa World Review and edited the book Pan Africanism in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 1996) which included contributions from the OAU Secretary General, Dr Salim Ahmed Salim, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Professor Horace Campbell and other leading figures in the Pan African Movement. Tajudeen wrote many academic and specialist journals, including Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), Journal of African Marxists (JAM), Southern Africa Political Economy Monthly (SAPEM), New Internationalist, and International Journal of Development. He became widely known for his regular column Tajudeen’s Thursday Postcard for Uganda’s largest selling national newspaper, The New Vision, which was syndicated in a number of other African newspapers such as The Weekly Mirror (Harare), The Daily News (Harare) The Weekly (Dar es Salaam), The Weekly Trust (Kaduna) and occasionally in the Business Day (Johannesburg). Tajudeen was also a columnist for the journal, Democracy and Development, published by the Centre for Democracy and Development, of which he chaired the International Governing Council.

Tajudeen lectured at a number of colleges including the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London and Goldsmith College London and several universities in the USA. He was a visiting UNESCO professor at the Centre for Global Studies, University of Trier, Germany. Beneath his exuberant public persona and wit, he leveled incisive analysis and a sound elaboration of the political economy of African crisis. Tajudeen’s lectures were always unforgettable due to his refreshing honesty, command of language and superb sense of dramatic timing. Speaking to a human rights conference in the UN conference centre in Addis Ababa in 1996 on the then-unfolding war in Zaire, the electricity suddenly went off and he declaimed, “even speaking of Mobutu makes the lights go out!” In the same hall a few years later he challenged Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, noting that European and American delegates to the conference could get an Ethiopian visa at the airport—but not Africans. “How can this happen in the capital of Africa?” he demanded. Prime Minister Meles said that no answer could match the passion of Tajudeen’s questioning. A couple of weeks later the Ethiopian government waived visa regulations for African delegates to international conferences.

In 1992 Tajudeen was appointed General-Secretary for the Secretariat organizing the Seventh Pan African Congress in Kampala, Uganda. Held in 1994 with delegates from 47 countries, this was the largest Pan African gathering for twenty years. The theme was ‘Africa: Facing the Future in Unity, Social Progress and Democracy’. But the Congress was overshadowed by the unfolding genocide in Rwanda. A delegation from the Pan African Movement travelled with the RPF to Rwanda, falling into an ambush near Kigali from which Tajudeen was lucky to escape unscathed. Thereafter, he was closely involved in the Pan African mobilization to respond to the crisis in the Great Lakes and Zaire—though he became critical of the record of the liberation movements in power and at the time of his death was working on a historical account and political analysis of the liberators and where they had gone astray.

Tajudeen often bemoaned the fact that so many of the giants of African liberation had passed away without writing their memoirs, and that the treasures of Africa’s history, as forged by Africans and written by Africans, was passing without record. It is a sad irony that much of his own life will remain insufficiently recorded, though still vibrant in the memories of his innumerable friends.

Tajudeen was a Director of Justice Africa, Chairperson for the Pan African Development Education and Advocacy Programme (PADEAP) and Chair of the International Governing Council of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD). He joined the United Nations as its coordinator for outreach on the Millennium Development Goals in Africa, and was living and working from a base in Nairobi in recent years.

Tajudeen never allowed his critical sense degenerate into cynicism or disillusion. His confidence in Africa and Africans to resolve their problems, whatever the setbacks, was always undimmed. His untimely death leaves a vacuum of human energy and hope that will be difficult to fill.

Tajudeen was married to Mounira Chaieb and has two daughters, Aisha and Aida, to whom he was completely devoted. Our thoughts are with them in their inconsolable loss.

]]> http://africanarguments.org/2009/05/in-memoriam-tajudeen-abdul-raheem/feed/ 4 http://africanarguments.org/2009/03/the-icc-sudan-and-the-crisis-of-human-rights/ http://africanarguments.org/2009/03/the-icc-sudan-and-the-crisis-of-human-rights/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:31:57 +0000 Alex de Waal http://africanarguments.org/?p=213 The ICC arrest warrant against President Omar al Bashir heralds a new era for global governance and human rights. But it is not at all clear what will be the character of this new era. Is Luis Moreno Ocampo the vanguard of the human rights international, bringing a new dawn of justice and accountability, in which tyrants quiver at the prospect of the fearless prosecutor, speaking for the voiceless victims, armed only with the precious norms of universal human rights? Or is the Prosecutor a stormtrooper for judicial neo-colonalism, kicking down the doors of others’ hard-won independent sovereignties, brushing aside the protests of peace mediators, to demand the unconditional surrender and handcuffing of those without the protection of a superpower?

Let me argue that the Bashir arrest warrant is something else—a moment of crisis in the project of building a global human rights order. The immediate cause of this is Moreno Ocampo’s overreach. Possibly his status as a celebrity prosecutor, feted by the Hollywood stars who have converged on the Darfur crisis, led him astray.

In turn the fact that the Prosecutor was able to demand an arrest warrant against a sitting head of state, without the possible risks for peace and security being subject to debate at the UN Security Council, reveals a major weakness in the international architecture. The Rome Statute of the ICC requires the Prosecutor to consider the interests of justice and the victims when deciding whether to prosecute. But he is within his rights if he interprets this is a narrow and negative obligation, which is only not to prosecute if the individual characteristics of the accused (age or mental state) don’t allow for a meaningful trial, or if the victims and witnesses might be harmed by a prosecution. The UN Security Council has the responsibility for weighing the interests of peace and security. But with the U.S., Britain and France (the ‘P3’) all sensitive to the demands of domestic activist constituencies, and the Secretary General abdicating any responsibility for the issue, the Council has done nothing except rebuff the entreaties of the African Union.

No mechanism or institution has safeguarded the interests of peace or represented those whose overriding concern is peace. Unconstrained by any countervailing or moderating considerations, the Prosecutor has had his way. The Pre-Trial Chamber that threw out the genocide charges did so solely on evidentiary and legal grounds—the Prosecutor had not met their (rather low) threshold of demonstrating that Bashir had a case to answer on those charges. Politics did not intrude into their deliberations.

There is also no mechanism which obliges the UN Security Council to listen its African counterpart. More than 60 percent of UN Security Council business concerns Africa, but there are no permanent African representatives on the Council and Africa has no veto. Last July the African Union Peace and Security Council voted for the ICC action against President Bashir to be suspended. Twice the AU petitioned the UNSC for this to be considered, twice it was rebuffed. African governments, including Sudan’s neighbours, argue that the P3 have the luxury of endorsing high principles to satisfy their domestic constituencies, but it is Africans who will pay the price if Sudan’s peace agreements unravel. It is African peacekeepers who are in the front line if Darfur explodes. This division of responsibilities was workable when the UN Security Council was sensitive to African concerns, and Africa had no option but to go along with P3 dictat. It’s no longer acceptable. The mantra ‘no peace without justice’ is not a substitute for political analysis.

And in turn, this tells us much about how the world now looks different to when the Rome Statute was adopted eleven years ago. In 1998, at the zenith of unipolar western hegemony, when history had been briefly interrupted (not, it turned out, ended), the march of liberal values and norms seemed unstoppable. There was no contest over human rights, only over the speed at which they would be enforced.

Today, global governance and especially its human rights component, is rather more contested. The American ‘might is right’ project was neither as mighty nor as smart as the neo-cons anticipated, substituting too much wishful thinking for facts and analysis—a shortcoming that seems to be shared with the enthusiasts for indicting Bashir. China and Russia always saw the world differently to America, and are more confident in saying so, while smaller countries such as Iran and Venezuela are emboldened to challenge the wounded Leviathan. Africa’s democratic progress has stalled (though not yet reversed).

Africans were the early enthusiasts of the ICC and it was African ratifications that ensured that the Rome treaty came into effect in 2002. The Court’s first three cases were all referred by African governments. This fact is cited by those who want to argue that the ICC is not unfairly singling out Africa. But the ICC’s advocates should be a little more attentive to how Africans understood the role of the Court at that time—they expected that it would work in partnership with African NGOs and judicial systems to develop comprehensive justice and peace responses to crises such as northern Uganda and DRC. And at first, Moreno Ocampo advocated this joined-up and locally-sensitive approach—as late as 2005 he told the Assembly of States Parties that governs the ICC, ‘We reached consensus that we are bringing a justice component to a comprehensive effort to achieve justice and reconciliation and bring an end to violence in northern Uganda.’ He indicated he wouldn’t take any step that might endanger peace.

Moreno Ocampo’s tune changed. Last month he told Foreign Policy journal that there should be no negotiation with President Bashir and that the Court is ‘a fact’ and ‘I’m sorry if I disturb those who are in negotiations.’ Increasingly, the Prosecutor sounds like an NGO activist—Save Darfur with legal powers. He should not be surprised that African governments and activists are also changing their tune. The reasons for governments’ unhappiness is self-evident. Human rights activists are worried about a backlash in which they will become victims, without anyone to protect them (least of all a Prosecutor whose careless insinuations about the sources of his evidence exposes national activists and humanitarian organizations to the suspicion of having conducted investigations on his behalf). They are also worried that the project of building justice at the local and national levels will be jeopardized by association with the Court.

The Sudan Government rejects the ICC as part of a neo-colonial conspiracy. It is easy to scoff at this—there has been too little coordination, let along conspiracy, among the internationals to make this a credible allegation as such. But the neo-colonial charge resonates. Western powers are ready to subject Africa to intrusive experiments in governance that they would never allow at home and could never impose on major powers. In New York, Washington DC or London, Africa’s voices can be ignored without consequence.

It is inconceivable that the British Government would permit the ICC to investigate crimes committed in Northern Ireland, either by the IRA or the security forces. Some might argue that the ICC should have jurisdiction because the UK is a State Party to the Rome Statute and it shows no interest in prosecuting these crimes—having extended a de facto amnesty that the ICC cannot in law recognize. The interests of peace in Northern Ireland mean that the victims of these abuses will never see their perpetrators brought to a British court. In the U.S., President Obama is in no rush to prosecute members of the previous Administration for what he recognizes correctly as torture and surely will not allow the ICC to do the job that the U.S. courts are unwilling to do.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote recently in support of the ICC, asking ‘Will Africa let Sudan off the hook?’ What Tutu didn’t mention was that in the 1990s he himself ‘let Apartheid off the hook’ with his Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which involved granting amnesty to those who confessed—a process that would be impossible today in the presence of an ICC Prosecutor in uncompromising mood. The TRC showed that there are forms of justice other than retributive justice in a courtroom. If they were in command of their own destiny, it is likely that Sudanese would set up something like the TRC.

The double standards matter because human rights are a matter of politics and power. The Prosecutor likes to project an image that he is an essentially powerless individual, battling the world’s dictators and war criminals, armed only with the truth. But his decisions have real consequences. Most probably, when Sudan refuses to comply with the arrest warrant, the Prosecutor will demand that the UN Security Council impose sanctions or undertake military action to execute an arrest. The Prosecutor’s six monthly report on Darfur is due in June so this is the likely occasion for such a demand. We will hear a lot of rhetoric about justice and obligations that cannot be compromised or negotiated. It’s unlikely that we will see military action conducted in the name of human rights, but it’s not impossible.

One of the many tragedies in the ICC’s Sudanese adventure is that it may signal a turning point for international justice, but in the opposite way to that hoped by the Court’s advocates. It’s possible that the Libyan campaign for African countries to de-ratify the Rome Statute may gain some traction, at least insofar as Africa freezes its cooperation with the Court. It’s probable that, quietly encouraged by China and Russia, African governments will rediscover the value of a hard interpretation of sovereignty. They will remind the rest of the world—as Sudan is doing now—that foreigners are guests in their countries and should behave accordingly.

The ICC has brought on a crisis for human rights in Africa. This crisis has no obvious solution, save the reminder that where human rights are most enduring, it is because they have been struggled for and won by citizens, country by country.

Jonathan Glennie’s book, coming in the wake of a growing number of critiques of the international aid, shows just how flimsy are the intellectual foundations of the aid-for-development experiment. Even before the financial crash, the promises of huge increases in ODA to reduce world poverty were becoming increasingly doubtful.

One of many ironies of this situation is that most of the proponents of aid—including its most ardent advocates such as Jeff Sachs—have all along promoted ODA as part of a wider package that includes debt relief, trade reform and improved economic governance in developing countries so as to generate improved investment and growth. Aid has been seen as just one of the instruments for economic growth, and arguably the least important one. But, aid seems to displace the other parts of the development debate. Of the other pillars, only debt relief has seen any significant progress in the last ten years. Trade reform and economic governance are much harder, and far less progress has been made.

Aid donors and recipients alike have good reason for preferring to focus on aid rather than trade or governance. Industrialized countries don’t want to liberalize trade in agricultural products, while making new commitments to aid targets provides popular headlines. African governments like aid because most of it comes to them, and while they are strongly in favour of trade reform they are understandably resistant to governance reform. Therefore we see that NEPAD began with a focus on governance, trade, and debt, with aid at the margins, but was reduced very rapidly to an aid disbursement mechanism.

Even before the financial crisis hit last year, the limits of the ODA-driven response to global development needs were becoming apparent. The system is geared far too much to vertical systems which can generate short-term monitorable results. It is inefficient, with dozens of parallel aid missions in recipient countries all doing much the same thing. It is open to manipulation and abuse to support other policy objectives of donors and lenders, which as Glennie explains, undermines the stated objective.

All these shortcomings are politically tolerable in donor countries. What will make the existing system unmanageable is that cannot generate or disburse the scale of funding needed to respond to mitigate the impacts of climate change, let alone finance the transition to a low-carbon energy system. However, for so long as nobody has a practicable idea for what can replace the current system, ODA seems set to continue. At the moment, that serves the purpose of pretending to get to grips with these momentous challenges.

Fragile states are typically defined by what they are not–they are not Weberian states in which autonomous state institutions administer the rule of law and regulate political conflicts, and not states in which governments deliver services on an efficient and impartial basis. International policies for dealing with such states, from Afghanistan to Congo, assume that these states can build ‘normal’ institutions in a brief historical span. Kofi Annan’s 2001 report, ‘No Exit Without Strategy,’ defined the criteria for success for peacekeeping operations in an identical way: ‘domestic peace becomes sustainable, when the natural conflicts of society can be resolved through the exercise of State sovereignty and, generally, participatory governance.’ This is, I fear, a formula for peacekeeping missions without end.

In this month’s International Affairs I have an article, “Mission without End” which outlines my analysis of why this is so. I argue that our starting point should be, how these states actually function–often as a patrimonial political marketplace, in which loyalties are up for auction at every level, and violence is a routine tool for political bargaining. Because international peace support missions enter these countries with a legal-technocratic frame of mind, they assume that problems are amenable to institutionalized fixes and that every agreement is legally binding. This isn’t the case, and a mission that tries to operate in this way becomes both frustrated and deeply enmeshed in the host country’s socio-political fabric. And because a mission will act, by design or default, as a patron itself, it influences the price of loyalty, inflating or deflating the cost according to which groups it supports or opposes. Which in turn means that a peacekeeping mission cannot withdraw without expecting a ‘market correction’, usually violent. I do not have any ready to hand fixes for this problem, but begin to sketch the outlines of how we might better understand it.

Those listening to the opening statement of the ICC Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, might have been forgiven for thinking that Lubanga was also being charged with the crimes of “kill, pillage and rape,” which numerous witnesses describe as having been committed by his forces (both the child soldiers and others). In fact, he is not. The words are simply colouring on the case for public consumption.

Perhaps the reason why the Prosecutor chose to emphasize these crimes against humanity alongside the crimes for which Lubanga is actually standing trial is that when Lubanga was spirited away from the Congolese prison where he was incarcerated, he was actually facing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. During the campaigns conducted by Lubanga’s Union of Congolese Patriots from 1999-2003, many hundreds of people were reportedly massacred, and among Congolese at least, these mass killings are considered graver crimes than the recruitment of child soldiers. In an article in the current issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Prof. William Schabas comments on this irony: “It would appear that the ICC has removed Thomas Lubanga from jeopardy before the criminal tribunals of his own country for crimes that are more serious than those for which he is being prosecuted in The Hague.” Schabas correctly notes that there were worries about the adequacy of the Congolese prosecution and also a fear that Lubanga might be released, and that prosecuting him for something at the ICC was a better option than seeing him acquitted or released at home. But, noting the DRC government’s cooperation with the international community on a host of governance and security issues, surely the option was open of pushing for a better trial within a domestic legal system that was at least functioning. Schabas notes, “As for Lubanga himself, he must be delighted to find himself in The Hague facing a prosecution for relatively less important offences concerning child soldiers rather than genocide and crimes against humanity.”

The Lubanga case is historic. It is the first trial to open before the judges of the ICC. It is a historic precedent for prosecuting for the international crime of recruiting child soldiers, and–as the Prosecutor so eloquently explained, that is a crime that has irreparably scarred the lives of those children as well as the communities they came from and those where they were deployed as part of the Lubanga’s forces. Let us hope the trial itself becomes a victory for justice. But, for many Congolese, the question remains, is Lubanga being tried for the most heinous crimes which he may have committed?

The veteran American civil rights activist Bill Sutherland has described how Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta “were visibly impressed when, on that fateful night in 1957, the British flag was lowered, and the flag of Ghana was raised. Nkrumah, dressed in traditional kente cloth, his fists waving in the air, tears streaming down his face, shouted over and over again, ‘Free at last! Free at last!’” King used those same words himself at his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial, attributing them to a Negro spiritual. Sutherland wonders whether, perhaps, “those thunderous words in Washington DC had not come from King’s memory of that historic evening in Ghana.”

Tragically, by the time of King’s triumph, Nkrumah had been deposed and humiliated. The mountain he had set himself to climb was too steep, and his enemies were too many. Perhaps most fatefully, Nkrumah’s embrace of violence as the means of liberation—albeit under extreme duress—scarred the previously civic and peaceable tradition of Africa’s emancipation. The addiction to armed struggle and the coup d’état disfigured the African left for a long generation and also estranged African liberation from its erstwhile broad base of sympathy in America.

Nelson Mandela was the inspiring exception, for both Africans and Americans. In May 1994, President-elect Mandela spoke at the African National Congress’s victory celebration. He wrote later, “Mrs Coretta Scott-King … was on the podium that night, and I looked over to her as I made reference to her husband’s immortal words. ‘This is one of the most important moments in the life of our country. I stand before you filled with deep pride and joy – pride in the ordinary, humble people of this country. You have shown such a calm, patient determination to reclaim this country as your own, and now the joy that we can loudly proclaim from the rooftops – Free at last! Free at last!’”

Mandela’s triumph was the last echo of the civic tradition of African independence struggle, achieved—against the odds—peaceably in the continent’s most fractured country. During those long years in which African liberation had lost its way, swamped in repeated disappointment, Mandela was an icon of principled resistance and hope—not just to South Africans, but to Africans and Americans too.

On a balmy November night just ten weeks ago, Senator Barack Obama made only passing reference to the civil rights struggle and never mentioned his own identity save as an American. He did not need to. The picture of an African American family on the podium, about to enter the White House, said it all. Across America, the night of November 4/5 was a liberation day, celebrated with astonishing euphoria. A peaceful revolution. African Americans walked inches taller. In Harvard Square—not, admittedly, characteristic of the U.S.—where I joined the revelry with my wife and small son, there was total jubilation. Among the Obama stickers was a Kenyan flag.

Today outside the Capitol, as President Barack Hussein Obama stumbled through the oath of office—an uncharacteristic verbal infelicity in someone so skilled in oratory—the dream came true. Again, Obama made only glancing reference to the village in which his father was born and his own racial identity, and again, he did not need to do so. More telling was his insistence in his inaugural address that American principles and American power were one and the same, that the country would once again lead the world. Perhaps most telling of all was the ceremony itself and the seamless way in which the entire apparatus of government transferred from loyalty to the outgoing President George W. Bush—symbol of American militaristic hegemonic ambitions—to President Barack H. Obama, who symbolizes so many opposite ideals.

There’s no doubt that Obama’s victory restores the world’s—and America’s—faith in American democracy and the American promise of equality and boundless possibility. There’s no question that this resonates particularly deeply in Africa, where young people cannot fail to draw the contrast between what has just happened in America, and their own leaders who possess a less-than-total commitment to democracy and human rights. Whatever policies the Obama Administration pursues towards Africa, the simple fact that he has been elected and taken office transforms America’s standing. The gracious concession speech by John McCain on that fateful November night should also be studied by African leaders. America’s political system has shown itself more principled and robust than many could have imagined. It challenges Africa’s leaders to take democracy and human rights with the commensurate seriousness.

An earlier version of this posting was published in “Making Sense of Darfur” on November 5.