Reading 2024 - Fantastic Invasion by Patrick Marnham

I chose Fantastic Invasion (the title comes from Conrad's Heart of Darkness) because it cost 20p and because it is about Africa and I am very interested in Africa but never want to go there. Patrick Marnham's reason for writing the book is to set out the thesis that Africa's problems all arise from the interference of "the North" in its affairs. The North is us. Marnham is convinced that trying to force our ways on Africans is a big mistake. 

To construct his interesting argument, Marnham tells all sorts of great stories, presents a both dispiriting and hilarious picture of what is really going on when game parks are set up and highlights many absurdities caused by outsiders thinking they know better than indigenous locals. He convincingly argues that the repeated Sehel disasters are the result of Westerners imposing their agricultural demands on lands that they don't understand - lands that had, until our arrival, been tended successfully by those who had lived on them for centuries. He conjures up the life of expatriates in the development industry, displaying considerable scepticism and scorn, with good reason I suspect. 

The book is now probably largely out of date in its details - although if you look up Sehel you will see that a lot of UN employment is being generated in trying to address the problems that Marnham argues were created by outsiders and can only be solved by leaving things in the hands of those who understand the area's environment because they are of the place. All the same there are things that leap out and make sense even today. 

Here, for example, are his remarks on refugees:

"African refugees have been presented as many things in [an] effort to avoid describing them as what they are. There is the refugee as 'a problem', an inexplicable abstract demanding general compassion. This is only briefly satisfactory, and the refugee is a persistent presence, so next we have the refugee as an idealist. In the words of the All-Africa Conference of Churches, refugees are 'people who somewhere, somehow, sometime had the courage to give up the feeling of belonging, which they possessed, rather than abandon the human freedom which they valued more highly'. This kind of analysis, 'somewhere, somehow, sometime', has a purpose: to prevent the exact consideration of particular refugees, here and now, and to forestall awkward questions as to 'how'.

Refugees are not just idealist; there is also the refugee as a sign of progress. 'The refugee is a by-product of the development of Africa. Refugees are therefore one aspect of the growing pains that Africa has to suffer before she attains the maturity that is essential to ensure freedom and equality of all races, tribes, creeds and the expression of controversial political opinions.' [Canon Burgess Carr, general secretary of the All-Africa Conference of Churches] This leads to the refugee as pioneer, not someone 'to be pitied, far more people to be admired'. And so, naturally, to the refugee as an opportunity, 'assets of the economic and social balance of the countries' development'. [UN High Commissioner for Refugees]. In fact, as elsewhere in the world, the refugee is nothing to do with pioneering or continental maturity or national development. If he is a sign of anything, he is a sign of national sickness. The refugee is the awkward evidence of Africa's inability and unwillingness to be reorganised into countries that have nothing to do with the real organisation of the people who live there.'

Everyone I have ever met who has had anything to do with Africa talks about tribalism, and Marnham is no exception:

"The obligations of African tribalism are honourable, and they are constantly honoured. They are an extension of the obligations of the family, and they are supported by customs and language to an extent that simply does not exist on a national scale. They have survived colonialism and independence and all the high hopes of an Africa of sovereign states. For Africans to deny tribal feeling or to indulge it covertly is for them to compromise their fundamental identity, that which they know intuitively, which governs much of their daily behaviour, and which unites people across the continent.

Marnham's arguments might sometimes be construed as racist, if suggesting that Africans and Europeans are profoundly and irrevocably different is racist (although to infer racism you would have to assume that in calling them different you thought one superior to the other as well). He says:

"For those members of the administrative class who are responsible for making things work ... there are certain refuges. One refuge is the theory of backwardness, the commonly held opinion that Africa is a 'backward' area which is 'progressing' (as opposed to a different society which is being forced to conform' ) and that African society is accomplishing in half a century - as it moves from tribalism to nationalism - what it took Europe a thousand years to achieve." 

adding: 

"Thanks to the system of nation-states, we see Africa more and more in our own likeness, as a primitive version of Europe which just needs time to catch up."

However, his central assertion is that all this is wrongheaded and in fact:

"Until Africa has achieved self-determination and stepped out of the colonial shadow which was cast at the time of independence, the real nations of Africa will never have a chance to develop. Until they do, the pseudo-nations that exist today will remain under the control of the powers that set them up and of the native rulers who act as their proxies. And the strain this causes to African society will continue to be felt by the citizens of these states, the mortal men of Africa."

I found this book really, really interesting, full of vivid anecdote and surprising perceptions. I would very much like to read an update that includes Marnham's thoughts on China's growing involvement in Africa and his predictions for how that new development might turn out.