504 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS"strict obligation" to grow cotton from dawn to dusk, but complete
freedom to sell it.^23 Then the French uprooted and replanted peasants
and made them plant cotton bushes, and if the peasants made trouble
or brought in unsatisfactory cotton, they were marched off to jail. It
was, some like to think, a loose, easygoing jail—enough though to
make the point.
One would like to think that liberation changed all that, but in fact
the new governments had their own schemes of economic develop
ment and social engineering, inspired by a new world of peripatetically
eager experts and technicians—eager to spend money, to do good, to
wield power. These doers, be it said, had no trouble imagining
schemes, the bigger the better. And when the schemes failed?
That is the fault of the West. The West told us to build power stations,
bridges, factories, steel mills, phosphate mines. We built them because you
said so, and the way you told us. But now they don't work, you tell us we
must pay for them with our money. That is not fair. You told us to build
them, you should pay for them. We didn't want them.^24Much of the gap between expectation and realization came from un-
preparedness. The postcolonial Africans had no experience of self-
government, and their rulers enjoyed a legitimacy bounded by kinship
networks and clientelist loyalties. Abruptiy, these new nations were
pressed into the corset of representative government, a form alien to
their own traditions and unprepared by colonial paternalism. In some
instances, this transition had been preceded by a war of liberation,
which mobilized passion and identity. But the legacy was rule by a
strongman, autocratic embodiment of the popular will, hence slayer of
democracy. Stability depended on one man's vigor, and when he weak
ened or died (or was helped to die), the anarchy of the short-lived
military coup followed.
The governments produced by this strong-man rule have proved
uniformly inept, with a partial exception for pillage. In Africa, the rich
est people are heads of state and their ministers.^25 Bureaucracy has
been inflated to provide jobs for henchmen; the economy, squeezed for
its surplus. Much (most?) foreign aid ends in numbered accounts
abroad.^26 These kleptocrats have much to gain by living in Switzerland,
near their banks. But maybe money alone is not enough.
Basil Davidson gives us two case studies in incoherence. The first,
Zaire (ex-Belgian Congo), was a skeleton of a state. The tyrant
Mobutu Sese Seko ruled in the capital Kinshasa and a few other cities,