A Tale of Two Continents

...Even an Asante Kingdom limited to the Asante themselves would not, Davidson thinks, succeed in reviving old "constitutional checks and balances" belonging to a past that "is not recoverable...

...Benin's real system used to be a relatively moderate form of kleptocracy...

...the new constellation of European states that emerged in 1918 was therefore less artificial than its African counterpart later on...

...Soldiers overthrew civilians and were over-thrown by soldiers of lower rank...

...It is too early to say whether these hopeful developments will succeed despite their roots in the existing pattern of nation-states...

...Everything else is indifferent or hostile...

...Delow the Sahara, the imperial era did not really commence until the end of the 19th century, when Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain expanded their formerly small coastal enclaves, and Germany, Italy and King Leopold of the Belgians first got into the act...

...In his view, this is the main difference between them...

...The regime of Uganda's Yoweri Museveni has "produced the makings of peace and reconciliation where no hope of either had existed...

...Kleptocracy it remains...

...Early nationalists, many of whom lived abroad absorbing the wisdom of Paris and London, "scarcely knew their own country...

...Africans largely ignored those strange entities and today ignore their successors: The "nation," like the colony before it, comprises the bureaucracy (including the Army and the police), the cities, districts producing exports, and the transportation corridors between them...

...One might easily be reading yesterday's newspaper...

...Africa's historic states had their own version of nationalism, which persons of high rank dominated, quite in the Polish and Hungarian manner...

...What I had thought could be my life's working plan vanished with it...

...Of the other distinct and indistinct ethnic groups inhabiting the zone separating Germany and Russia, a few had never formed states, and the remainder hadn't in centuries...

...These were and are arbitrary lines drawn in the late 19th century by diplomats who knew little about the sociology or geography of the places they claimed...

...Peasants typically spoke, not Polish or Ukrainian, let us say, but transitional dialects...

...After the patrols encountered a slave ship they would bring its contraband, the "recaptives," on shore at the colony of Sierra Leone...

...Nonetheless, they accepted the boundaries that the colonial powers, hoping to preserve a sphere of influence, pressed them to keep...

...During the mid-19th century, British Navy vessels cruised the waters off West Africa in a successful campaign to suppress the slave trade...

...On returning home he was posted to his unit's headquarters, near Cairo...

...The author's description of the indigenous political culture has given rise to the incorrect impression that he is defending tribalism...

...they and most traders, also plagued by arbitrary regulations, resort to smuggling...

...With Christianity and Constitution as their watchwords," Davidson notes, "the recaptive thinkers held that Africa needed to be saved, and salvation must come from outside the continent...

...Africa required only about a quarter of that time...

...An Asante Kingdom in Ghana would thus, he notes, resemble wretched Yugoslavia, in which a single nationality dominated the rest...

...Davidson argues that the older polities—for example, the Kingdom of the Asante (or Ashanti), roughly coextensive with Ghana—had devised institutional checks and balances that might have evolved into a modern democratic system if their development hadn't been terminated...

...At a refueling stop in the flat landscape of northern Nigeria, the navigator, another Englishman, told him, "There's a big city over there, a big African city nobody's ever heard of (nobody, that is, except its 50,000 or so residents...

...Having been earlier sold by Africans, they blamed slavery on the mores of Africa, not on whites, their liberators...

...After the War, he planned a career writing about Eastern Europe...

...The center cannot hold—indeed, hardly exists...

...Lately, he reports, signs of change have appeared in Africa...

...Would ethnically rational boundaries and traditional rulers conduce to a happier result...

...Unfortunately, the consequence was that their relations were more hostile and their minorities, in countries determined to be Polish or Romanian or whatever, more threatened...

...As the author points out, the fact that in the very years when Africa was being divided up a sovereign Japan became a formidable competitor to its Western rivals, while preserving its native culture, does seem to suggest that the historic states might have had something useful to contribute, at least then...

...He was lucky: The Duke of Aosta, a cousin of the King of Italy, soon fell into the hands of the British, who traded him for 100 of their servicemen, including Davidson...

...The peasantry wanted land, not sovereignty...

...Soon, however, it "vanished behind the barricades of the Cold War...

...The notion that the Christian inhabitants of these territories could be neatly parcelled out into separate peoples called "Croats," "Serbs," "Romanians," "Ukrainians," et cetera hardly existed...

...Some reforms probably will not overcome their tainted origins: In 1989, for example, the Leninist government of Benin announced its acceptance of democratic capitalism, a conversion that was probably as fraudulent as the Leninism had been earlier...

...Of course, the nation-state, with its centralized structures resting upon one officially recognized national culture, is not indigenous to either region...

...But the vision of Africa in 1941 was still with me, and...

...And if it were recoverable, it would not be desirable: The author firmly believes that "A hopeful future" in Africa and Eastern Europe "would have to be a federalizing future.'' Some might argue that the disintegration of Yugoslavia reveals the inherent instability of federations...

...Why not, for instance, entrust the fortunes of Ghana to the King of Asante...

...Ghana and Nigeria are fitfully introducing local democracy...

...I would embark on African studies that would hold me for the rest of my life...

...It was not to be his immediate future...

...as no more than 1 per cent of a duke might not be flattering," he recalls in the Introduction to The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (Times Books, 352 pp., $23.00)—his 23rd book on the history of that continent?but I was in no position to object...

...Ottoman rule started to unravel in the 1820s...

...Staring at the city's massive ancient walls, the author took "a glance into the past that was also, to me, a foretelling of the future...

...The prices of the region's primary goods fell dramatically...

...Another point recalling Europe is the possibility that certain "tribes" may have been created by people, in this instance colonial bureaucrats, who exaggerated the distinctness of overlapping native societies...

...Davidson disagrees...

...Otherwise, the fate of Eastern Europe in the 1920s and '30s anticipated that of Africa since the 1960s...

...What Yugoslavia really shows is that federalism without democracy is a sham...

...Davidson continued on to Egypt and eventually returned to the fighting in the Balkans...

...In Africa as in Europe, foreign empires confronted "historic" groups, comparable to the Hungarians and the Poles, who had achieved nationhood in pre-imperial times...

...Townsfolk usually spoke German—or Yiddish...

...Besides the historic states, there were African ethnic stocks, similar to the Slovaks and the Ukrainians, that had no memories of higher political organization...

...Landowners, meanwhile, typically spoke an entirely different language, often French...

...The generation of African politicians that actually presided over the restoration of African sovereignty admired Europe rather less fervently...

...The vicissitudes of Davidson's military service explain the focus of a book that might otherwise, though quite wrongly, seem to be rather odd...

...The Asante are merely one of Ghana's communities...

...Europe, concludes Davidson, "has needed two centuries to go through its experience of nationalism...

...No colony made ethnographic sense or reflected genuine patterns of trade...

...Kano, the man added, was said to be 500 years old...

...So their influence during the early colonial period would help to frame the structures of political sovereignty within which most colonies were to achieve their independence...

...Being reckoned...

...At the start of the 19th century, the lands to their east were enclosed within empires presided over by the Hapsburgs, the Romanovs and the Ottomans...

...it arose amid the wealth, and tidy ethnic and language borders, of England and France...

...Except in Czechoslovakia, constitutional formulas inspired by Britain and France did not survive...

...In the interests of the urban areas that are the stronghold of the African nation-state, regimes prohibit farmers from exporting their output...

...The mutually hostile republics that replaced the old union are hardly stable either, internally or externally, nor is there any prospect that they ever will be, whether or not negotiators persuade the Serbs and the Croats to diminish the intensity of their struggle...

...the Russian and Austrian Empires lingered on until the close of World War I. By this time, a century of propaganda and the movement of Slavs into urban areas had given the national idea greater reality...

...Today may be a different matter...

...Davidson flew out to the west coast of Africa, where he boarded a second plane for the trip east...

...Against them stood a class of native iconoclasts...

...as late as 1846, Austrian officials succeeded in mobilizing Polish peasants against Polish gentlemen attempting to launch a nationalist uprising in Galicia...

...Even the national traditions of the Poles and the Hungarians, the two populations that had recent experience in self-government, were long confined to landed proprietors...

...For the heart of Black Man's Burden is an elaborate, and very enlightening, comparison between the nation-states of Africa and Eastern Europe...