Excerpt
THE COMING ANARCHY
(February 1994)
THE MINISTER'S EYES were like egg yolks, an after-effect of some of the manyillnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also anirrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, thevoice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blueAtlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. "Inforty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselveswell after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse—therevenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bringup children in a modem society." Then he referred to the recent coup in the WestAfrican country Sierra Leone. "The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come fromhouses like this." The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shackteeming with children. "In three months these boys confiscated all the officialMercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully wrecked them on the road." The Ministermentioned one of the coup's leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot thepeople who had paid for his schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation andmitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over him."
Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it isnow part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significantthan any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime waswhat my friend-a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatenedwere I to identify him more precisely-really wanted to talk about. Crime is whatmakes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what thepolitical character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century.
The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world.Streets are unlit, the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armedburglars, carjackers, and muggers proliferate. "The government in Sierra Leonehas no writ after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was in thecapital, Freetown, last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into thehouse of an American man. They tied him up and stole everything of value. ForgetMiami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala MuharnmedAirport, in neighboring Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been suspended byorder of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security atthe terminal and its environs. A State Department report cited the airport for"extortion by law enforcement and immigration officials." This is one of the fewtimes that the U.S. government has embargoed a foreign airport for reasons thatare linked purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of the Coted'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick- and gun-wielding guards whowalk you the fifteen feet or so between your car and the entrance, giving you aneerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An Italianambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers invaded an Abidjan restaurant. Thefamily of the Nigerian ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in theambassador's residence. After university students in the Ivory Coast caughtbandits who had been plaguing their dorms, they executed them by hanging tiresaround their necks and setting the tires on fire. In one instance Ivorianpolicemen stood by and watched the "necklacings," afraid to intervene. Each timeI went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of young men with restless, scanningeyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows, demanding"tips" for carrying my luggage even though I had only a rucksack. In cities insix West African countries I saw similar young men everywhere—hordes of them.They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that wasclearly on the verge of igniting.
"You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the villages of Africa it isperfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the citiesthis communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invitedfor food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, theybecome lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminalprocess.
"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued, "there is much lesscrime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination.Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficialChristianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable toa moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spiritsare used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group againstanother." Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied tobelief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus onAfrica, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said tohave "a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always walkingbackwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made herinvisible, so that she could cross to the army's positions and there bury charms... to improve the rebels' chances of success."
Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral wayof life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it isincreasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road inWest Africa told me that they were from "extended" families, with a mother inone place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loosefamily structures are largely responsible for the world's highest birth ratesand the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism andanimism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of lifein cities. In those cities African culture is being redefined whiledesertification and deforestation-also tied to overpopulation-drive more andmore African peasants out of the countryside.
A PREMONITION OF THE FUTURE WEST AFRICA IS BECOMING the symbol of worldwidedemographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchyemerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovokedcrime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion ofnation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies,security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellinglydemonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriateintroduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that willsoon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will bea few decades hence-as I intend to do in this article-I find I must begin withWest Africa.
There is no other place on the planet where political maps are sodeceptive-where, in fact, they tell such lies-as in West Africa. Start withSierra Leone. According to the map, it is a nation-state of defined borders,with a government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra Leoniangovernment, run by a twenty-seven-year-old army captain, Yalentine Strasser,controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of the rural interior. Inthe government's territory the national army is an unruly rabble threateningdrivers and passengers at most checkpoints. In the other part of the countryunits of two separate armies from the war in Liberia have taken up residence, ashas an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. The government force fighting the rebelsis full of renegade commanders who have aligned themselves with disaffectedvillage chiefs. A premodern formlessness governs the battlefield, evoking thewars in medieval Europe prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ushered inthe era of organized nation-states.
As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are internally displaced,280,000 more have fled to neighboring Guinea, and another 100,000 have fled toLiberia, even as 400,000 Liberians have fled to Sierra Leone. The third largestcity in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is a displaced-persons camp. With an additional600,000 Liberians in Guinea and 250,000 in the Ivory Coast, the borders dividingthese four countries have become largely meaningless. Even in quiet zones noneof the governments except the Ivory Coast's maintains the schools, bridges,roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty. TheKoranko ethnic group in northeastern Sierra Leone does all its trading inGuinea. Sierra Leonian diamonds are more likely to be sold in Liberia than inFreetown. In the eastern provinces of Sierra Leone you can buy Liberian beer butnot the local brand.
In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as in Ghana, most of theprimary rain forest and the secondary bush is being destroyed at an alarmingrate. I saw convoys of trucks bearing majestic hardwood trunks to coastal ports.When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent ofthe country was primary rain forest. Now 6 percent is. In the Ivory Coast theproportion has fallen from 38 percent to 8 percent. The deforestation has led tosoil erosion, which has led to more flooding and more mosquitoes. Virtuallyeveryone in the West African interior has some form of malaria.
Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered andgradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: thewithering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains,the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. WestAfrica is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of aseries of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interiorthat, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as GrahamGreene once observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However, whereas Greene's visionimplies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown ofhis celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, thephilosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa'sfuture. And West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of therest of the world.
CONSIDER "CHICAGO." I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to a slum district ofAbidjan, which the young toughs in the area have named after the American city.("Washington" is another poor section of Abidjan.) Although Sierra Leone iswidely regarded as beyond salvage, the Ivory Coast has been considered anAfrican success story, and Abidjan has been called "the Paris of West Africa."Success, however, was built on two artificial factors: the high price of cocoa,of which the Ivory Coast is the world's leading producer, and the talents of aFrench expatriate community; whose members have helped ran the government andthe private sector. The expanding cocoa economy made the Ivory Coast a magnetfor migrant workers from all over West Africa: between a third and a half of thecountry's population is now non-Ivorian, and the figure could be as high as 75percent in Abidjan. During the 1980s cocoa prices fell and the French began toleave. The skyscrapers of the Paris of West Africa are a facade. Perhaps 15percent of Abidjan's population of three million people live in shantytowns likeChicago and Washington, and the vast majority live in places that are not muchbetter. Not all of these places appear on any of the readily available maps.This is another indication of how political maps are the products of tiredconventional wisdom and, in the Ivory Coast's case, of an elite that willultimately be forced to relinquish power.
Chicago, like more and more of Abidjan, is a slum in the bush: a checkerwork ofcorrugated zinc roofs and walls made of cardboard and black plastic wrap. It islocated in a gully teeming with coconut palms and oil palms, and is ravaged byflooding. Few residents have easy access to electricity, a sewage system, or adean water supply. The crumbly red laterite earth crawls with foot-long lizardsboth inside and outside the shacks. Children defecate in a stream filled withgarbage and pigs, droning with malarial mosquitoes. In this stream women do thewashing. Young unemployed men spend their time drinking beer, palm wine, and ginwhile gambling on pinball games constructed out of rotting wood and rusty nails.These are the same youths who rob houses in more prosperous Ivorianneighborhoods at night. One man I met, Damba Tesele, came to Chicago fromBurkina Faso in 1963. A cook by profession, he has four wives and thirty-twochildren, not one of whom has made it to high school. He has seen his shantycommunity destroyed by municipal authorities seven times since coming to thearea. Each time he and his neighbors rebuild. Chicago is the latest incarnation.
Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast's population is urban, and the proportionis expected to reach 62 percent by 2000. The yearly net population growth is 3.6percent. This means that the Ivory Coast's 13.5 million people will become 39million by 2025, when much of the population will consist of urbanized peasantslike those of Chicago. But don't count on the Ivory Coast's still e3dsting then.Chicago, which is more indicative of Africa's and the Third World's demographicpresent-and even more of the future-than any idyllic junglescape of womenbalancing earthen- jugs on their heads, illustrates why the Ivory Coast, once amodel of Third World success, is becoming a case study in Third Worldcatastrophe.
President Fe1ix Houphouet-Boigny, who died last December at the age of aboutninety, left behind a weak duster of political parties and a leaden bureaucracythat discourages foreign investment. Because the military is small and thenon-1vorian population large, there is neither an obvious force to maintainorder nor a sense of nationhood that would lessen the need for such enforcement.The economy has been shrinking since the mid-1980s. Though the French areworking assiduously to preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a possibilityworse than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminal violence-an urbanizedversion of what has already happened in Somalia. Or it may become an AfricanYugoslavia, but one without ministates to replace the whole.
Because the demographic reality of West Africa is a countryside draining intodense slums by the coast, ultimately the region's rulers will come to reflectthe values of these shantytowns. There are signs of this already in SierraLeone-and in Togo, where the dictator Etienne Eyadema, in power since 1967, wasnearly toppled in 1991, not by democrats but by thousands of youths whom theLondon-based magazine West Africa described as "Soweto-like stone-throwingadolescents." Their behavior may herald a regime more brutal than Eyadema'srepressive one.
The fragility of these West African "countries" impressed itself on me when Itook a series of bush taxis along the Gulf of Guinea, from the Togolese capitalof Lom6, across Ghana, to Abidjan. The four-hundred-mile journey required twofull days of driving, because of stops at two border crossings and an additionaleleven customs stations, at each of which my fellow passengers had their bagssearched. I had to change money twice and repeatedly fill incurrency-declaration forms. I had to bribe a Togolese immigration official withthe equivalent of eighteen dollars before he would agree to put an exit stamp onmy passport. Nevertheless, smuggling across these borders is rampant. The LondonObserver has reported that in 1992 the equivalent of $856 million left WestAfrica for Europe in the form of "hot cash" assumed to be laundered drug money.International cartels have discovered the utility of weak, financially strappedWest African regimes.
The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe border authoritiesseem to be in trying to prove otherwise. Getting visas for these states can beas hard as crossing their borders. The Washington embassies of Sierra Leone andGuinea the two poorest nations on earth, according to a 1993 United Nationsreport on "human development"-asked for letters from my bank (in lieu of prepaidround-trip tickets) and also personal references, in order to prove that I hadsufficient means to sustain myself during my visits. I was reminded of my visaand currency hassles while traveling to the communist states of Eastern Europe,particularly East Germany and Czechoslovakia, before those states collapsed.
Ali A. Mazrui, the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at theState University of New York at Binghamton, predicts that West Africa-indeed,the whole continent-is on the verge of large-scale border upheaval. Mazruiwrites,
In the 21st century France will be withdrawing from West Africa as she getsincreasingly involved in the affairs [of Europe). France's West African sphereof influence will be filled by Nigeria-a more natural hegemonic power... It willbe under those circumstances that Nigeria's own boundaries are likely to expandto incorporate the Republic of Niger (the Hausa link), the Republic of Benin(the Yoruba link) and conceivably Cameroon.
THE FUTURE COULD be more tumultuous, and bloodier, than Mazrui dares to say.France will withdraw from former colonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, and the IvoryCoast, where it has been propping up local currencies. It will do so not onlybecause its attention will be diverted to new challenges in Europe and Russiabut also because younger French officials lack the older generation's emotionalties to the ex-colonies. However, even as Nigeria attempts to expand, it, too,is likely to split into several pieces. The State Department's Bureau ofIntelligence and Research recently made the following points in an analysis ofNigeria:
Prospects for a transition to civilian rule and democratization are slim.... Therepressive apparatus of the state security service ... will be difficult forany future civilian government to control.... The country is becomingincreasingly ungovernable.... Ethnic and regional splits are deepening, asituation made worse by an increase in the number of states from 19 to 30 and adoubling in the number of local governing authorities; religious cleavages aremore serious; Muslim fundamentalism and evangelical Christian militancy are onthe rise; and northern Muslim anxiety over southern [Christian] control of theeconomy is intense ... the will to keep Nigeria together is now very weak.
Given that oil-rich Nigeria is a bellwether for the region—its population ofroughly ninety million equals the populations of all the other West Africanstates combined-it is apparent that Africa faces cataclysms that could make theEthiopian and Somalian famines pale in comparison. This is especially sobecause Nigeria's population, including that of its largest city, Lagos, whosecrime, pollution, and overcrowding make it the dich6 par excellence of ThirdWorld urban dysfunction, is set to double during the next twenty-five years,while the country continues to deplete its natural resources.
Part of West Africa's quandary is that although its population belts arehorizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away fromthe Sahara and toward the tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, theborders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore atcross-purposes with demography and topography. Satellite photos depict the samereality I experienced in the bush taxi: the Lome-Abidjan coastalcorridor-indeed, the entire stretch of coast from Abidjan eastward to Lagos-isone burgeoning megalopolis that by any rational economic and geographicalstandard should constitute a single sovereignty, rather than the five (the IvoryCoast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) into which it is currently divided.
As many internal African borders begin to crumble, a more impenetrable boundaryis being erected that threatens to isolate the continent as a whole: the wall ofdisease. Merely to visit West Africa in some degree of safety, I spent aboutfive hundred dollars for a hepatitis B vaccination series and other diseaseprophylaxis. Africa may today be more dangerous in this regard than it was in1862, before antibiotics, when the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton describedthe health situation on the continent as "deadly, a Golgotha, a Jehannum." Ofthe approximately twelve million people worldwide whose blood is HIV-positive,eight million are in Africa. In the capital of the Ivory Coast, whose modem roadsystem only helps to spread the disease, 10 percent of the population isHIV-positive. And war and refugee movements help the virus break through tomore-remote areas of Africa. Alan Greenberg, M.D., a representative of theCenters for Disease Control in Abidjan, explains that in Africa the HIV virusand tuberculosis are now "fast-forwarding each other." Of the approximately fourthousand newly diagnosed tuberculosis patients in Abidjan, 45 percent were alsofound to be HIV-positive. As African birth rates soar and slums proliferate,some experts worry that viral mutations and hybridizations might, justconceivably, result in a form of the AIDS virus that is easier to catch than thepresent strain.
It is malaria that is most responsible for the disease wall that threatens toseparate Africa and other parts of the Third World from more-developed regionsof the planet in the twenty-first century. Carried by mosquitoes, malaria,unlike AIDS, is easy to catch. Most people in sub-Saharan Africa have recurringbouts of the disease throughout their entire lives, and it is mutating intoincreasingly deadly forms. "The great gift of Malaria is utter apathy," wroteSir Richard Burton, accurately portraying the situation in much of the ThirdWorld today. Visitors to malaria-afflicted parts of the planet are protected bya new drug, mefloquine, a side effect of which is vivid, even violent, dreams.But a strain of cerebral malaria resistant to mefloquine is now on theoffensive. Consequently, defending oneself against malaria in Africa is becomingmore and more like defending oneself against violent crime. You engage in"behavior modification": not going out at dusk, wearing mosquito repellent allthe time.
And the cities keep growing. I got a general sense of the future while drivingfrom the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. Theforty-five-minute journey in heavy traffic was through one never-endingshanty-town: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself wouldnever have given credence. The corrugated metal shacks and scabrous walls werecoated with black slime. Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers,junked cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long puddle offloating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were everywhere. Children, many of whomhad protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went out, deadrats and the skeletons of cars were exposed on the mucky beach. In twenty-eightyears Guinea's population will double if growth goes on at current
rates. Hardwood logging continues at a madcap speed, and people flee the Guineancountryside for Conakry. It seemed to me that here, as elsewhere in Africa andthe Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its limits, and nature isnow beginning to take its revenge.
AFRICA MAY BE as relevant to the future character of world politics as theBalkans were a hundred years ago, prior to the two Balkan wars and the FirstWorld War. Then the threat was the collapse of empires and the birth of nationsbased solely on tribe. Now the threat is more elemental: nature unchecked.Africa's immediate future could be very bad. The coming upheaval, in whichforeign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outsideworld takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, willloom large in the century we are entering. (Nine of twenty-one U.S. foreign-aidmissions to be closed over the next three years are in Africa-a prologue to aconsolidation of U.S. embassies themselves.) Precisely because much of Africa isset to go over the edge at a time when the Cold War has ended, whenenvironmental and demographic stress in other parts of the globe is becomingcritical, and when the post-First World War system of nation-states-not just inthe Balkans but perhaps also in the Middle East-is about to be toppled, Africasuggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decadeshence.
To understand the events of the next fifty years, then, one must understandenvironmental scarcity, cultural and racial dash, geographic destiny, and thetransformation of war. The order in which I have named these is not accidental.Each concept except the first relies partly on the one or ones before it,meaning that the last two-new approaches to mapmaking and to warfare-are themost important. They are also the least understood. I will now look at eachidea, drawing upon the work of specialists and also my own travel experiencesin various parts of the globe besides Africa, in order to fill in the blanks ofa new political atlas.
THE ENVIRONMENT AS A HOSTILE POWER
FO R A WH I LE the media will continue to ascribe riots and other violentupheavals abroad mainly to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these conflictsmultiply, it will become apparent that something else is afoot, making more andmore places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable.
Mention "the environment" or "diminishing natural resources" in foreign-policycircles and you meet a brick wall of skepticism or boredom. To conservativesespecially, the very terms seem flaky. Public-policy foundations havecontributed to the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focused environmentalstudies replete with technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just letpile up on their desks.
It is time to understand "the environment" for what it is: the national-securityissue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact ofsurging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, waterdepletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical,overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh-developments that willprompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts-will be the coreforeign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate,arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War.In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in suchdiverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern UnitedStates. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water. Evenin Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming ofthe Danube, a classic case of how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic andhistorical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton adviser MichaelMandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign policy today in the shape of adoughnut-lots of peripheral interests but nothing at the center." Theenvironment, I will argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that willdefine a new threat to our security, filling the hole in Mandelbaum's doughnutand allowing a post-Cold War foreign policy to emergeinexorably by need rather than by design.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Coming Anarchyby Robert D. Kaplan Copyright © 2001 by Robert D. Kaplan. Excerpted by permission.
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