- Kevin Check: Good afternoon. Welcome to today's Global Hot Spots lecture. My name is Kevin Check. I'm senior director of School and College Relations at the Wisconsin Alumni Association. We're very pleased to continue our partnership with the Division of International Studies and PLATO and Continuing Studies to bring these Global Hot Spots lectures to you. Today we welcome Professor Daniel Bromley as our speaker. He is Anderson-Bascom Professor Emeritus of Applied Economics at UW Madison and visiting professor at Humboldt University Berlin. He is a fellow of two economics associations and is listed in Who's Who in Economics. He has worked and lectured in over 25 countries. He was an early adviser to the African National Congress in South Africa following the collapse of apartheid in 1990. 

He was an adviser to the Sudan People's Liberation Movement in southern Sudan and has advised the new Government of National Unity in Sudan on economic strategies for Darfur. He is currently leading a research project on the economic role of exports in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire and Mali. Professor Bromley has written or edited 12 books and authored 80 journal papers concerning the economic aspects of natural resources and the related problems of economic development. His most recent book, published by Princeton University Press, is entitled "Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic Institutions." He is just finishing a book manuscript for Cambridge University Press entitled "Vulnerable People, Vulnerable States: Redefining the Development Challenge." Please join me in welcoming Professor Dan Bromley. 
(applause)

- Daniel Bromley: Thank you. It's nice to be here on this bright, sunny day. My talk mentions Bismarck. 

You might think I did that just because I live in Berlin part of the year. Not so. A book you may want to check out is entitled the "Scramble for Africa," which also shows up here, "White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent." And, of course, Bismarck played a central role in that. The theme here, of course, is scramble, the theme is also hot spots, and the nice or the sad thing about Africa is that almost weekly it presents us with a new hot spot. If you've been following in the paper, now the president of Niger has gone missing. We're not sure where he is and this was yesterday. Next week, who knows. So we have a rich tableau of empirical phenomena that cries out for explanation. You want to know why, you want to know what's happening. 

People, when they find that I work in Africa, they give me this bewildered look like, what can be done about Africa? Don't expect me to tell you today. I want to tell you the way I see what's going on. So I'm going to start with a definition. Here's a definition of what a hot spot is. I'm trying to boil it down to really simple terms for us. Not because you're simple but because you get tired of hearing all these stories about religion or blah, blah, blah. What I want you to understand is that a hot spot is an economy, it's an economic activity, engaged in by males, that's right, males. Women are too busy doing important things to engage in this stuff. So it's a male sport. 

Predatory in nature. Driven by the absence of superior livelihoods. So I'm an economist, I want you to understand hot spots in a materialistic sense. That is to say, people do this because there's not much else to do. They're bored and there's not a lot of other economic activity in which to engage. So this is my definition of a hot spot, and it will carry through as we go on with our story. Why do they exist? Well, the absence of plausible livelihoods. I'm quite sure that if there were good livelihoods to be had, young men would engage in those livelihoods and would find the kind of predatory behavior they're engaged in not very useful. Hot spots exist because of weak civil structures and a weak state. 

Hot spots exist because there's local economic value that's worth capturing. Whether it's diamonds in the rivers of Liberia, whether it's gold lying about, whether it's oil, what have you, and because of the contested political boundaries, which of course in the case of Africa is the direct connection to Bismarck and the scramble for Africa and white man's carving up of this continent into small little fiefdoms, contested political boundaries. I presume you know that the national boundaries of Africa are colonial creations. They're white man's vision of what Africa ought to look like geographically. And, of course, whenever you start carving lines through large landscapes you transcend families, you transcend clans, you transcend history. And so, therefore, it's no surprise that Africa is a place with an abundance of hot spots. There are probably 10 or 12 on the continent today for a variety of reasons. So the question is, why is Africa plagued with so many of these hot spots? Bismarck, after his activities in Europe, decided it was time to put the French and the British on notice that Prussia was worth paying attention to. So he convened the Congress of Berlin in the fall of 1884, it ran over to February of 1885. 

And Bismarck's plan was to demarcate the control of this dark continent and to, in a sense, preempt a struggle and to make sure that the European powers knew where each other was going to be. And this was the program. Bismarck never had much interest in Africa directly, unlike the Brits and the French, but he wanted them to know that they would need to contend with them. So it was out of that Congress of Berlin, 1884-1885, that Africa was in a sense allocated, apportioned, carved up and given to white people in Europe. There were no Africans present in Berlin in 1884, why should they be invited to this meeting. So that's the political overlay on a piece of real estate that is really quite unforgiving. Africa, for most of you if you've been there or thought about it, you know it as an arid landscape. It's a place that's inhospitable to white people because of malaria and other things. And so other than the early provisioning stations that the Portuguese and the Dutch had along the coast of Africa, there was never any serious intent to become engaged in Africa the way white people became engaged in India. So I will return to this, but the economic history of Africa is one of foreign meddling without investment, foreign tourism without commitment, and weak and extractive governance regimes dating all the way back. 

African tribal leaders would sell ivory; they would sell slaves; they would sell timber. So in a sense what we have even before white man went to Africa was an extractive economy with little internal investment. The deal was to sell export commodities, whether people or ivory or something. And this is sort of extraction and sale, resembles very much what we see today in terms of the Middle East and its oil. So in economics we talk about the resource curse, the Middle East in a sense is plagued by this abundance of this sticky black stuff to which we are addicted and that, in a sense, creates when you have a, basically, free resource that can be exported, it creates an economic structure that is not really conducive to economic progress. So this the theme, this is why my title focuses on the colonial residue because you cannot understand the present if you don't understand the past. And if you want to understand Africa, you must understand the colonial history of that place. There are two general models of colonialism, what I call the administrative model and the absentee model. The administrative model is when the colonial power seeks to bring coherent administration to another place. And the best example of this and probably a successful one, if that's fair to use that word, is the British in India. 

The British built irrigation systems; they built railroads; they built post offices; they created staff colleges. You go to the big cities in India you will find an administrative staff college. The idea was to train Indians to assume governance responsibilities in what the Brits hoped would be a coherent state. So the Brits, for all of their meddling around the world, at least in the Indian case, wanted to create what you and I might think of as a coherent state. That's that. The absentee model applies to Africa. Africa was colonized late in the game, again, leaving aside the Dutch and the Portuguese sort of interest in refueling and acquiring citrus to deal with problems of sailing long voyages. What we have in Africa is a history of absenteeism. As I've hinted, Africa is not a hospitable climate. The rivers are short, by which I mean you can't get ships up river. 

The rivers in Africa, with the exception of the Nile, are short rivers. That means shortly in from the coast you encounter rapids, falls. So you can't take big ships up. And the struggles that the early Europeans went through to take machinery and boats up to Lake Victoria reminds you of just how inhospitable this place is for incursion by Europeans. The malaria problem, of course, is profound and what have you. So in a sense, the history of Africa is one of poking around the edges of it but being unable or unwilling to go in very deeply. So what we have today is what I call stateless nations. There is no history, leaving aside the sorry story of South Africa, there is no place that has had a consistent committed civic sort of administration that would, in a sense, impart transplant, as it were, what we think of as governance, which is not government but governance is a verb. It's a process of negotiation. So let's look at this place. 

There are 47 countries in Africa if you don't count the islands around the edge. We think of them, for those of us who work there, in terms of North Africa, going from east to west, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. And then the core of sub-Saharan Africa of 42 countries. I'll show you a map. For those of you in the back of the room you won't be able to make it out. But let me just point out to you some general ideas here. We see along the trade routes around the nose of Africa, people think the heart of Africa is over there, that's wrong. I was told not to wander for the TV camera. But this is the horn of Africa. It looks like a rhinoceros horn, doesn't it? 

So when you're in the horn of Africa, that's what they mean. But if you look at the geography of Africa, you'll see all these little tiny places along the west coast there. Well, this is where the Portuguese needed to take on fresh water or the Spanish needed to or the Brits needed to. So all these little tiny places along the west coast there were provisioning stops. That's where the boats would pull in, they would do whatever they had to do and then they would push off. And of course South Africa is the second kind of provisioning point. So what we see here is a geography, a political geography, driven by shipping needs and that's about all. And then the rest of it is there. What I want to show you is a linguistic map now. So here's kind of the way the map makers would depict this place. 

I want to show you a linguistic map. The reason I like to do this it reminds us of the role that colonialism played. So we have four language groupings that figure in Africa's history. Francophone Africa; Anglophone Africa; Lusophone, the Portuguese; and then the Arabic part. So here we have the red is the Francophone part of Africa. The blue is British. The Brits like to talk about from the Cape to Cairo was part of the British empire. Well, you could get up to Sudan speaking English, and then you had to sort of get through Sudan somehow then get into Egypt. But the Brits, at one time of course, controlled both Egypt and Sudan. So the blue was the British brag about being able to go from the Cape to Cairo speaking English all the way. 

The red is Francophone. The green is Arabic. Lusophone, Portuguese. Mozambique on the right, Angola on the left. So I like to show this because it reminds us that it's as if the United States, if we drew a colored map of the 48 or 50 states and put the dominant linguistic groups there, what you see here is a record of colonial dominance and a legacy that continues to this day to inform and, I think, predetermine much of what we see going on in Africa. I'll come back to this in a moment. The basic point is these countries have never had a coherent system of governance because the colonial powers A weren't interested in it and B didn't stay long enough to create it. So when you think about hot spots and my claim that it's driven by the lack of a civic governance structure, that is the destructive residue of colonialism in Africa. I did some statistical analysis of the economic performance of these countries as a function of their colonial history, and if you had the misfortune to be colonized by the Belgians, you were in really bad shape. King Leopold took over what we think of, those our age would have called the Belgian Congo. 

And this was Leopold's private hunting preserve. It was never really a structure of the Belgian state. It was Leopold's game park. So if you were one of these countries such as, what we used to think of Zaire, now it's called the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Central African Republic or the Congo, if you were colonized by the Belgians, today you're in bad shape. The second worst place to be would to have been colonized by the Portuguese. This is Angola and Mozambique, the orange. Things got a little better if the French dominated you, but not a lot. The French really only were interested in having you speak French, wear a beret and carry a baguette under your arm. 
(laughter)

 So today you go to Francophone Africa and you hear this fantastic language and you expect to get a good meal and you don't. 

So the worst part is the French somehow couldn't leave their cooking behind and you can't even get a good baguette. All you get is the language, which for the French, that's 90% of it. If you can speak French, you're good. And then the British have done the best of a bad deal. So the blue is British. And so there's sort of the history of the colonial interventions here. So let's talk briefly about what this means. The colonial legacy, I've touched on it. Slavery, ivory, timber, minerals, that's it. That's the role that Africa has played. 

And I guess I should add a fifth one here, big game hunting where great white hunters go and bring home lion and elephant heads for their den. This is what Africa has represented to white man throughout the ages. I want to talk about the slave trade. I don't think it's properly understood in its economic implications. Of course, we understand from our side what slavery did, what it was, what it has meant to this country. There's very little interest in what slavery did to Africa. And there's a nice new paper out on this very topic and I cited it here at the bottom. 12 million people were stolen from Africa over this period from 1400 to 1900. 12 million. Is that the population of Illinois? 

I don't know, 20 million in Illinois. That's a large group of people. You would not want to imagine that slavery was a random act of riding down the street on a donkey and scraping up whoever came in sight. You must understand that the supply side of slavery was motivated by local tribal leaders who could make money by picking the best and the brightest from within the village and selling them off and shipping them away. So 12 million of the best and the brightest, I will say to you, the biggest, strong men, big strong women, were taken from villages all across Africa and shipped overseas. Six million went out by the Indian Ocean across the Sahara. In 1850 it is estimated that Africa's population was one half of what it would have been had there not been slave trade. One half of the population was sold and taken out. Now the numbers here, some of you can't see it in the back, even if you're in the front you may not be able to make it out, it doesn't really matter, but here's where they went. The Angola, the top line Angola. 

Three and a half million slaves were taken out of Angola which was that orange spot on the west of Africa. And that's where Brazil got the bulk of its population. You go to Brazil you'll be stunned to see lots and lots of African ancestry there. They were taken to Brazil to work in the sugar plantations, rather like Haiti actually. Nigeria, 1.4 million. Ghana, where I'm working, 1.6 million. All of those came across the Atlantic. The Nigerians and the Ghanaians came here. The Angolans went to Brazil. And I suppose part of those out of the Francophone area went to Haiti and were set up as slaves on sugar plantations. 

So there's the numbers. The point is this is part of the export economy of Africa. People were the dominant export of much of Africa. So let's look at the current economic situation, just briefly give you some sense about what's going on. I'm sorry the numbers you won't be able to see. I'm interested in how food production in Africa has faired since 1960. I picked 1960 because that's when many of the African countries began to get their independence. We have four quadrants here. I'm sorry you can't see them all. There are only five countries in which per hectare yields of grain since 1963, which is the farthest back I can get data, there are only five countries in which the per hectare yield of grain is greater now than it was in 1963. 

Five countries. There are six countries in which there's been a modest decline in grain production. There's another large group of countries up here where there's been a serious decline. And we have over here 12 or so countries in which grain production now is 40% of what it was in 1963. Now, 1963 was the end of the colonial era in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is the economic performance of these countries that we thought we were doing such a great favor by walking away and saying, okay, you're on your own now. And the point is look at what we have left them. We have left them an economy of extraction, an economy of scrambled political alliances and it shows up in ways that seriously matter. This is a story of immiserization, creeping misery over the last 40, 45, 50 years. Here's something that you might be able to see. 

It's just a graphical sort of depiction of per capita cereal production in these countries. And, again, we see there isn't any group of them as a cluster whose per capita food production can beat what it was in 1963 at the time of independence. So you want to know what have we done to them since then. How is this possible that we've turned our back on them. Here's a graph. I put two really quite disparate places together. The pink line, now be careful what we're looking at here. This is an index where 1960 is 100, and I'm looking at an index of per capita GDP over time, and the pink is us and the black is Africa. And all we're interested in here is change over time. I put the absolute numbers. 

In 2006 per capita GDP in this country was $38,000 a year. Take our total GDP divided by the population of the United States, $38,000 a year. In Africa it's $1100. So please don't look at these two lines and think they relate that way. What we relate to is a trend in the growth. This black line shows you something. If you look at 1960 on the left, when African countries were becoming independent, their change in their income, per capita GDP, was keeping pace with us. That's all you want to look at here is this trend line. Not doing too badly. Of course, desperately poor by our standards but there's growth there. 

Comes 1975, 1976, it flattens out and it continues until about 1996. So we had a period of 20 years in Africa in which increases in economic well-being basically stopped, just shut down. The African economies simply shut down between 1976 and basically 1996. There are lots of reasons for it. I won't go into too much detail right now with you. But the point is this legacy, this lost generation between '76 and '96 was in fact a result of politically driven ideological development programs imposed on Africa by the World Bank, by the International Monetary Fund and by the reining sort of political ideology of getting government out of our lives and turning things over to the free market. And so the political ideology in Britain and in American, which also have given us, I think, the fiscal crisis we've just gone through, shows up in a generation of absolute immiseration and stagnation in Africa. This, too, is a way in which we continue to dominate the lives and the livelihoods of this place. I'm talking about a stateless nation. What we have in Africa is boundaries and we have names. 

So here's a line and Nigeria and here's a line and Mali and here's a line and here's Niger. So it looks to us, as we look at a map, it looks to us like, oh, yeah, they're just like us. Wrong. We have a stateless nation. That is to say there is no politically coherent idea of belonging to something called a nation, and the rulers in many respects find that they have little interest in and minimal commitment to those who reside inside those boundaries. We cannot see because we've never experienced the extent of statelessness that one encounters in Africa. The success of the Chinese economy, people ask me, gee, why does the Chinese economy perform so well and the Soviet economy has crashed. The answer is, whether you like it or not, the Chinese have kept a coherent state. You may not like it, that's your problem, get over it. They've kept a coherent state and they are doing things that creates income and wealth and the state collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia today is in the grips of a continuing economic incoherence created by the absence of a state and that is exactly the same problem that plagues virtually all of these countries. 

I'm going to show you a table of what the World Bank calls the ease of doing business. And that is to say the extent to which this economy is set up to create income, create jobs, what have you. China ranks 89th on that table. Russia ranks 120th. I'm going to show you this table which I know you have to take my word for it. Afghanistan is way down at the bottom. But you know what? There are 23 countries judged worse than Afghanistan for doing business and creating income and 19 of those 23 are in Africa. Worse. You think Afghanistan is bad. 

So here we are. Here's Afghanistan. That's the best. Singapore. Oh, yeah, Singapore, this great free marketplace. Wrong. But here's the list. All the way down to 183 countries. Here's Afghanistan here. And 19 countries in Africa are judged to be worse places to invest, worse places to make an income than in Afghanistan, which seems a little interesting, doesn't it. 

I'm going to return to my opening thought. Hot spots exist because there's nothing else to do. Hot spots are manifestations of plausible strategies of survival because there's nothing else to do. And making trouble pays better than trying to make a living other ways. And as my subtitle suggests, that is, to great extent, the destructive residue of colonialism. I know you're going to expect me to offer prescriptions so I'll do that now. 
(laughter)

 Here's what must be done. Before I retired I would give this advice away, now that I'm retired, I sell it. But in fact, this is part of the problem. 

Those of us from outside think we know how to fix all these problems. And I resist falling into that trap because for every problem there is a unique reason for it and a unique way out of it. So I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there's nothing there because in many respects I'm not sure we have anything to say. So thank you, I'll stop with that. 
(applause)