I should immediately apologize to the readers for the deliberately provocative and (somewhat) misleading title of this review. This is a review of Martin Welz’s book “Africa Since Decolonization” published by the Cambridge University Press in 2021. Understandably, Welz says nothing about Ukraine or the Russo-Ukrainian War in that book.
Yet, the most interesting and substantive parts of the book that analyze Africa’s interactions with the external world shed light on the ambivalent response of African states to the conflict in Ukraine, including the ongoing controversy about Putin’s in-person participation in the BRICS summit in Cape Town in August this year (2023). It also helps frame the inefficiency of international institutions, such as the UN, in conflict and dispute resolution in a broader historical context.
The most interesting parts of the book concern the manifestations of African agency in interactions with various external parties and international institutions. The author asserts that throughout history, Africans always have had agency when engaging with political entities and people from other world regions. At the same time, he notes that African influence diminishes significantly once African demands run counter to the interests of major states, such the UK, France, or the United States. The space created by the Cold War and the Great Power rivalry for African leaders to trade their support and exercise unprecedented leverage is just a fading memory (although the situation has somewhat changed with the rise of China and expansion on the African continent).
Welz is critical of the UN Security Council’s “paralysis” in matters of international peace and security due to the uneasy relationship between Russia, China, and the United States (this is written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine). In this context, the inability of the Security Council to deal with the Ukrainian crisis should not surprise anyone. The Security Council has failed to act in many other critical situations, but so long as those situations unfolded somewhere else (not in Europe), these failures were tolerated. This is of course orientalism pure and simple.
The book describes Africa’s uneasy relationship with the International Criminal Court as an expression of African agency and continuation of the attempts to protect African sovereignty against the great powers. As the book argues, the original criticism of the ICC as an instrument of (Western) neo-colonialist policies has subsided not because African states have changed their view of this institution but because African governments have reached a stage of “mutual accommodation” with the ICC, in other words a situation that is beneficial to them and the ICC.
Welz describes two aspects of this “mutual accommodation”. On the one hand, there are many signs that there were political deals between the Prosecutor and the referring governments so that the ICC would only try rebels and not incumbents and their forces. In effect, referring governments used the ICC to weaken domestic opponents. On the other hand, the African Union has succeeded in creating a non-cooperation or limited cooperation environment. As a result, many African governments see it now as politically acceptable to not arrest heads of state and not to cooperate with the ICC in such cases without being punished for that. Even inviting indicted leaders appears acceptable. Hence, in the view of African governments the merits (or demerits – because there are polar views) of the ICC arrest warrant are less important than the future implications on African states due to upsetting the existing delicate balance between them and the ICC.
One of the strategies employed by the West to influence this attitude is to present the relations between Russia and Ukraine in colonial terms. This approach significantly simplifies the historical dynamic between the two countries. It presents a very curious and unusual case of a colony being as rich as the metropole: If the same relationship had held between Uganda and the United Kingdom in 1962 on the eve of independence, Uganda’s per capita GDP would have been US$ 12,789 whereas in reality it was US$ 1,106, 11 times less. But more importantly, this strategy approach smacks of “whataboutism”: True, Western countries were bad colonizers, but Russia was as bad as any other Western colonial power in Africa. This strategy does nothing to address the root causes of mistrust to the ICC on the continent and is unlikely to change the attitudes of African states. (The chart below, produced by Branko Milanovic, shows the relative income and Gini coefficient for each of the Soviet republics in 1989.)
The book contains two (less interesting) sections dealing with issues of African economic and social development. The sections present a rather unsystematic overview of different theories and issues (from dependence and geographic theory of development to industrialization, informal economy and corruption).
The interesting historic experiment of African countries to build alternative socio-economic models (African socialism) deserved just a short paragraph (neither does the book mention the subversive role of Western countries in making sure that these bold experiments fail). The other powerful irritating factor in the relationships between Africa and the West, that is slavery, is covered only in passing. Whereas the impact of the 300 years of slave trade on African economies is disputed, what is indisputable is the fundamental long-term negative impact that it has produced on perception of the Western world by African societies. Welz extends the concept of African agency too far when he subscribes to the opinion that “we must accept that African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers… Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves.” Walter Rodney retorted this position a long time ago in his book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”: “The trade in human beings from Africa was a response to external factors… As though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions!”
The brief overview of the dependence theory mentions the secular decline in the terms of trade but provides no evidence. Instead, the author focuses on export statistics, which show only the main export destinations but not the export composition, which is critical for understanding both the terms of trade and the structural transformation dynamic. The Chart below (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/africas-exports-1995-2020/) shows the reorientation of Africa’s exports from the global North and the global South. Just 15 years ago (2005), the global North accounted for 65% of African exports. In 2020, its share dropped to 35%. Yet despite new destinations, the export structure has changed little.
Incidentally, the situation is similar for Ukraine. Despite the dramatic reorientation of its exports from Russia to the European Union (Russia accounted for about 25% of exports in 2013 but only 5% in 2021), the structure of exports has not changed significantly. Unprocessed and semi-processed products (mostly agriculture) continue to dominate exports. The top exports of Ukraine include iron ore ($6.83B), seed oils ($6.34B), wheat ($5.87B), corn ($5.86B), and semi-finished iron ($4.08B). Will Ukraine’s economic reorientation enable its structural transformation or will it remain locked in an inequal relationship of dependence with the more developed world as has happened to most African countries in the post-colonial period?
The sections dealing with economy and development are rather confusing as the author criticizes both the Washington consensus and government regulation, hails at the same time market economy and state-led development model (like the one in Ethiopia). Uncritical treatment of some theories (be it the dependence theory or De Soto’s thesis on the importance of property ownership for uplifting of the informal economy) is another weak point.
Welz is obviously at his best in the areas where he has produced original research. The section on intra-African cooperation and integration (together with the subsequent section on political crises in Africa) is both interesting and substantive. It provides a historical perspective on the emergence and functioning of various regional and continental institutions, the African Union being the pre-eminent example. This section details the external and internal influences that have been driving various cooperation initiatives in peace and security, economy, social development, humanitarian sphere. It shows the complex interaction dynamic and conflicts between different African institutions.
The critical issue of the book in general is that the author offers no overall explanatory framework, which makes the narrative and explanations he presents little more than just a random collection. Hence, the same phenomena (e.g. open markets or government regulations or neopatrimonial regimes or electoral violence) may figure as both positive and negative but without clarity about what makes them such in particular circumstances. This reduces the theoretical and utilitarian value of the book. It also makes it rather difficult to argue for or against its specific statements because they are almost always nonconclusive. To say that a certain phenomenon has multiple causes may be substantively true, but it offers little help in dealing with this phenomenon.
In his praise for the book Horst Kohler, former President of Germany and IMF head, compared the book to a mosaic: “From up close you see all the details and differences, from geography and history to the defining personalities of the African countries… When you have finished reading the book, however, if you step back, you’ll recognize the underlying connections and structures.” I should admit that I’m less shrewd than the former President. I haven’t been able to see the proverbial forest behind the many trees of the book. But it’s a book rich in fact and coverage (if not in depth and explanation), and others may do better than me.