CHAPTER 4
The “Ibo of Cameroon”
Market-Dominant Minorities in Africa
OF ALL THE world’s regions, scarcity-stricken Africa has the greatest abundance and variety of market-dominant minorities. Some of these minorities are indigenous Africans. Others are “entrepreneurial” immigrant groups like the Indians or Lebanese. Still others are former European colonizers. All are deeply resented and, at times, the objects of homicidal fury.
The problem is starkest in southern Africa. In country after country, a handful of whites engorged themselves on natural resources and human labor, creating enclaves of spectacular wealth and modernization, surrounded by mounting, justifiable hatred among the indigenous black majority. The typical result has been horrific violence.
A tragic example is Angola, now largely forgotten in the West. For many the country, with its shocking death tolls and endless atrocities, is simply too depressing to think about. But Angola’s problems can be traced to a familiar colonial history.
Under the Portuguese, Angola suffered from one of the most oppressive forms of colonial rule: Until the nineteenth century, Portugal used the area as a “slave pool” for its more lucrative colony in Brazil while plundering Angola’s precious gemstones and metals. Even just thirty years ago, 335,000 Portuguese colonialists ruthlessly ran and controlled the virtual entirety of Angola’s economy. In Another Day of Life, Ryszard Kapuściński describes their almost overnight departure in 1975, when Angola was granted independence in the midst of rising chaos and violence:
At the airport in Lubango a group of terrified, sweaty, apathetic Portuguese sat on kit bags and suitcases beside their even more terrified wives, and their children asleep in the women’s arms. They rushed for the plane before it had even shut off its motors. …
Everybody was in a hurry, everybody was clearing out. Everyone was trying to catch the next plane to Europe, to America, to anywhere. Portuguese from all over Angola converged on Luanda. … People lived in the open, perpetually soaked because it was always raining. They were living worse now than the blacks in the African quarter that abutted the airport, but they took it apathetically, with dismal resignation, not knowing whom to curse for their fate. …
At about this time, someone brought news to the hotel that all the police had left!
Now Luanda, of all the cities in the world, had no police. When you find yourself in such a situation, you feel strange. On the one hand everything seems light, loose, but on the other hand there is a certain uneasiness. The few whites who still wandered the city accepted the development with foreboding. Rumors circulated that the black quarters would descend upon the stone city. Everyone knew that the blacks lived in the most awful conditions, in the worst slums to be seen anywhere in Africa, in clay hovels like heaps of smashed cheap pottery covering the desert around Luanda. And here stood the luxurious stone city of glass and concrete—empty, no one’s. … But according to the terrified Portuguese who passed themselves off as experts on the native mentality, the blacks would burst in, swept up in a madness of destruction and hatred, drunk, drugged with secret herbs, demanding blood and revenge. Nothing could hold back that invasion. … Everyone is lost and it will be the most hideous death—stabbed to death in the streets, hacked with machetes on their own doorsteps.1
Most of the Portuguese got out safely, leaving the country to disintegrate into a civil war of unspeakable brutality. According to the World Bank, the Portuguese took “with them the skills needed to run the economy; this lack of capacity has exacerbated Angola’s political and economic woes.”2 Although the United States was involved in Angola’s strife in the 1970s and 1980s, it lost interest when the Cold War ended.
The question for the other countries of southern Africa—all of which still have starkly market-dominant white minorities—is whether they can avoid Angola’s fate. In Zimbabwe, millions of dollars worth of sugar, tobacco, and maize has gone up in flames as gangs of landless “war veterans” continue to invade, loot, and burn white-owned commercial farms. In Namibia, widely praised for its racial harmony, President Nujoma recently condemned his country’s white farmers for their imperialist exploitation. “We have the capacity to fight you,” he declared at another point. “We will get you. I warn those whites it is the first and last time I hear you insulting us.”
Meanwhile, all hopes are on South Africa. Perhaps, inspired by Nelson Mandela’s inclusive vision, the country can beat the region’s bloody record. This was not the view expressed by the African National Congress (ANC) official who, stopped in November 1997 for driving while intoxicated, told the policeman: “When Mandela dies, we will kill you whites like flies.”3
Market-Dominant Whites in Southern Africa
In September 1997, I was invited by a young Afrikaner professor whom I’ll call Lucien to give some lectures at the University of South Africa, better known as UNISA, in Johannesburg. When I walked into UNISA’s lecture room I was taken aback. I had of course expected racial imbalance. Everyone knew that seventy years of white-minority rule would have lasting, nefarious effects. Still, I was not prepared to see an entire room filled with only white faces (and perhaps one person of South Asian descent). South Africa’s demographics are roughly the opposite of America’s: 77 percent of the population is black and 11 percent is white. In 1997, Mandela and his ANC party had been in power three years. Yet in one of the country’s major universities—at a lecture on democracy and race, no less—there was not a single black professor or student in the room.
After the lecture I asked to see Soweto, one of the unimaginably squalid, teeming black “townships” that surround South Africa’s urban centers. (Soweto, whose name originated as an abbreviation for South Western Township, was the site of the famous 1976 police massacre.) My hosts looked stricken. This could probably, possibly, perhaps be arranged, they equivocated, mumbling something about the difficulty of finding cars and drivers. But for the moment something else had already been planned. Along with a few other professors, I was going to Lucien’s house near Pretoria, the country’s genteel capital, for lunch. Lucien’s wife and family were waiting.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected Lucien’s home to be like, but I wasn’t close. Lucien’s “home” turned out to include a private safari park, covering not tens or hundreds, but thousands of acres of breathtakingly serene grassy slopes filled with waterfalls, streams, zebras, giraffes, hippo pools, ostriches, kingfishers, impala, kudu, gemsbok—seemingly every species of bird and antelope. Lucien’s wife Marina, a beautiful woman with some Italian ancestry, greeted us at the lodge with a rifle and three adorable daughters and gave us a private tour in a jeep she drove herself. We picnicked outside an 1800-era stone and timber-beamed farmhouse, which Marina’s brother operated as an inn. Lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches and warthog pie—I thought they were kidding, but it was a specialty of the house—served to us by a black manservant in a white jacket.
The really amazing thing was that, among whites in South Africa, Lucien and Marina didn’t count as wealthy. Lucien described himself to me as a struggling, middle-class descendant of Boer farmers. Land, yes, they had—he and his family never ceased being grateful for, and humbled by, the beauty of their surroundings. But truth be told, his professor’s salary was barely enough to cover his daughters’ tuition and music lessons. Like many Afrikaners, Lucien was not at all interested in business. That was the province of the so-called “English-speaking” whites, including most prominently the Oppenheimer family (of De Beers fame), who historically controlled the country’s most lucrative industries: gold, platinum, and diamond mining, finance, insurance, technology.
South African whites fall into two general categories: Afrikaners, descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch and French Huguenot settlers, and “English speakers,” most of whom have British origins. The English speakers have more of a claim to being “entrepreneurial.” Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century the Afrikaners were a rural, economically backward underclass compared to the commercially dominant British.4 (This changed with the aggressive pro-Afrikaner affirmative action policies pursued by the Nationalist Party between 1948 and 1976). But the main reason that South Africa’s present-day whites are so overwhelmingly market-dominant, vis-à-vis the black majority, is not because of any superior “entrepreneurialism.” It is because they have a gargantuan economic head start.
They have this head start because generations ago, their forebears turned the black majority around them into a mass pool of uneducated, disenfranchised, dehumanized labor held in check by a police state. For seventy years, while whites advanced and luxuriated—South Africa has fabulously engineered roads, first-class hospitals where some of the world’s first heart transplants were performed, and resplendent vine-yards—the apartheid regime deliberately and systematically destroyed the human capital of the black majority. So-called Coloureds (people of mixed African and European descent) and Asians, together about 11 percent of the population, occupied an intermediate niche, above blacks. They too, however, were disenfranchised and barred from living and mingling with whites.
Catching up will not be easy. Any way you look at them, the statistics are awful. Sixty-five percent of South African blacks today live in abject poverty. Eighty-eight percent have less than a high school education. A quarter over the age of twenty have had no formal schooling at all. In townships like Soweto, it is common for four thousand residents to share five toilets; electricity, where it exists, is generated with car batteries. There is almost no intermarriage between blacks and whites. AIDS is pandemic—in recent years, 40 percent of all adult deaths in South Africa have been AIDS-related—and strikes blacks extremely disproportionately. Seven years after the end of apartheid, whites still own 80 percent of South Africa’s land and account for 90 percent of the country’s commercial agricultural production.
Economic liberalization has produced some success stories. The case everyone knows is that of Cyril Ramaphosa, who went from trade union leader to chief negotiator for the ANC to media tycoon. A few former township dwellers have made it to Harvard. But while the hope is that in the long run free market policies will create thousands more such success stories, at the moment the unemployment rate among blacks is a frightening 48 percent. The townships are not shrinking but growing, at a rate of a million black Africans a year. As of August 2000, blacks controlled only 1.7 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s total capitalization. According to a recent report released by South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment Commission, almost all of South Africa’s mines, banks, and major corporations remain in white hands.5
LIKE SOUTH AFRICA, both the neighboring countries of Namibia and Zimbabwe have a market-dominant white minority who, because of their huge and hugely-undeserved head starts, would under laissez-faire market conditions overwhelmingly economically dominate the black majorities around them.
Unknown to most Americans, Namibia is one of the most mysteriously beautiful places in the world, from the wild Skeleton Coast in the north (vast stretches of foggy beach punctuated by eerie, rusting shipwrecks) to the brilliant red dunes of the Namib Desert to the immense Fish River Canyon in the south. Namibia was colonized by the Germans, who starting in the late 1890s turned the dozen or so major ethnic groups constituting black Namibia into forced labor—almost annihilating the particularly rebellious Herero tribe. Following the Second World War, Namibia was annexed by a belligerent South Africa. The country’s arable land was parceled into some six thousand lavish farms for white settlers. Members of the black majority were relegated to newly demarcated “tribal homelands,” where they received an offensively inferior education. Until the 1990s, 75 percent of Namibian children completed less than five years of schooling.
Today Namibia’s population of about 1.6 million has one of the African continent’s highest GDPs—but also, according to a recent World Bank report, one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. While the great majority of black Namibians engage in communal subsistence farming, a tiny minority of roughly eighty thousand whites own the most productive land and control all the most lucrative and globally-oriented sectors of the economy. A decade after the end of apartheid, Namibia’s business community is still almost entirely white.6
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Oppenheimer family has controlled Namibia’s diamond mines—the richest in the world—since 1908. (De Beers entered into a joint venture with Namibia’s current government in 1994). The Oppenheimers have been called “pioneers of globalization”; De Beers has offices all over the world and currently controls 60 percent of the global trade in rough diamonds. The conglomerate’s latest technological gambit is deep-sea diamond mining. “Special drill bits,” marvels Fortune’s Nicholas Stein, “23 feet in diameter, burrow into the ocean floor, releasing a mix of diamond and ore that is sucked through 300 feet of tubing to the surface, where machines separate the diamonds from the surrounding material and pack them, like chunky soup, into aluminum cans.”7
In 2000, De Beers recovered roughly 570,000 carats of high quality diamonds off the Namibian coast. That same year, roughly 60 percent of Namibia’s black majority had no access to sanitary toilets. Namibia also has what may be the world’s largest uranium mine. It, however, is owned by a British company.8
Zimbabwe, too, previously known as Rhodesia, is a country of glorious natural beauty. But you would never know it from our newspapers, which for decades have had nothing to report but human ugliness in Zimbabwe: from Ian Smith’s grotesquely oppressive white rule; to the guerrilla downing of two civilian airplanes in the late seventies, followed by the rape and hacking to death of crash survivors; to the recent confiscations and violence instigated by President Robert Mugabe.9
The British initially colonized Zimbabwe in the late nineteenth century, and whites continued to control the country’s economy and politics until 1980. Unlike South Africa, where Afrikaners own most of the land, the majority of Zimbabwe’s forty-five hundred white farmers are of British and Irish ancestry. Only fifty or so are of Dutch heritage.
For a variety of reasons, outside observers tend to regard the Anglo elite throughout southern Africa with greater sympathy than the descendants of the Boers. In South Africa the Afrikaners are viewed as the chief architects and perpetuators of apartheid, with many Anglo whites belonging to the opposition. In the case of Zimbabwe there is no doubt that Anglo whites were responsible for the worst oppressions. Yet the general impression, it seems, is that Zimbabwe’s white farmers, with their sun-leathered skin and khaki shorts, do not—despite their multiple servants and ownership of the country’s best land—live in the aloof luxury of their Afrikaner counterparts in South Africa. “With Zimbabwe’s whites,” mused a U.S. Justice Department official, “there seems to be more of a feel of a hard-working, dirt-under-the-finger-nails, landowner class rather than a true idle upper or gentry class.” Along slightly different lines, London’s Guardian recently observed, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that “Zimbabwe’s white landowners, being of British and Irish ancestry, get a much better press than do Afrikaners. Those sandy-faced Boers, with faces out of rural scenes by obscure Flemish painters, never sat well with British liberals. But the white elite of Zimbabwe, 0.6% of the population owning 70% of the land, seem to be a jolly good bunch: nice foreheads, English names, English accents even.”10
However affable, Zimbabwe’s whites did not come by their wealth legitimately. The original British settlers duped, killed, and expropriated their way to control of the country’s best land, leaving the indigenous majority to scrubby, marginal areas infested with the dreaded tsetse fly. In the 1930s white supremacy was legislated in the form of laws excluding black Africans from ownership of arable farmland, from skilled trades and professions, and from settling in “white areas,” including all towns and cities. The result was that Zimbabwe’s blacks were forced to work on white-owned farms, in white-owned mines, and in white-owned factories.
Although political power finally changed hands in 1980, the hard fact of white market dominance remains. With their vastly superior education, land, technological skills, foreign investment connections, and corporate and horticultural experience, members of Zimbabwe’s tiny white minority have a century-old edge that makes them as market-dominant as the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Throughout the eighties and nineties, forty-five hundred white commercial farmers produced more food than a million black farmers. In Hippo Valley, for example, two large-scale sugar estates, both white-owned, together produced about five hundred thousand tons of sugar annually, half of it for export. As late as 2000, Zimbabwe’s whites, not even 1 percent of the population, essentially owned and ran the country’s modern, immensely productive, commercial-agriculture-based economy, thriving on global markets, employing over two million people, and fueling the country’s high growth rates.11 Predictably, this enormous racial concentration of wealth and market expertise has produced combustible political conditions, not just in Zimbabwe but in Namibia and South Africa as well.
Kenyan Cowboys and “Capitalistic” Kikuyus
Ever since Hugh Cholmondeley, England’s third baron of Delamere, arrived in 1897 after a two-thousand-mile camel ride from Somalia, Kenya also has had an inordinately prosperous, disproportionately skilled white minority. Today numbering only about five thousand, they live, completely segregated, in the beautiful Nairobi suburbs of Langata and Karen, named after the Danish settler Karen Blixen. They live in large houses with small windows (to keep out the sun) and magnificent, sprawling gardens filled with fuchsias and English roses and avenues of jacaranda and eucalyptus trees.
Back in the days of Happy Valley—Nairobi’s legendary enclave of witty, winsome, morphine-and-orgy-addicted expatriate aristocrats—Kenya’s whites included luminaries like Evelyn Waugh, Edward, Prince of Wales, and the American millionaire Northrop MacMillan. After the dashing Josslyn Hay, earl of Erroll, was found murdered on the floor of his Buick with a bullet in his head—sixty years later the mystery remains unsolved—Happy Valley was never the same again.12
Today these aristocrats are mostly gone. Nowadays the most prominent white Kenyans are probably the Leakeys: a family of paleontologists and conservationists who first arrived in Kenya from Great Britain three generations ago. In the 1990s, Richard Leakey transformed the Kenya Wildlife Service, crucial for the country’s tourist trade, from a shabby, demoralized department into the pride of Kenya’s public sector, with its own efficient paramilitary force. Leakey’s recent foray into electoral politics, however—off-limits to whites since independence—prompted angry charges of “recolonization” from President Daniel Arap Moi and led to Leakey being whipped and beaten by Moi supporters. The two men have since made up. Astounding everybody, Moi appointed Leakey head of Kenya’s civil service in 1999, to help root out the “twin evils” of “corruption and inefficiency.” Most observers interpret Moi’s move as an attempt to court Western foreign aid donors, who have grown increasingly disgusted with Kenya’s kleptocratic politics.
Meanwhile, the so-called “Kenyan Cowboys,” or “KCs,” try to maintain the legacy of Happy Valley. Fun-loving, decadent, bafflingly immature, these young men and women are stuck in a time warp, somewhere in the heyday of British colonialism. While the great majority of Kenya’s roughly 31 million blacks struggle to survive on less than two dollars a day—45 percent are unemployed—the KCs spend their days sipping tea and playing bridge, polo, or cricket. Weekends, they go on safari. In the summer they jet set to Europe. The rest of the time they frequent anachronistic private clubs like Nairobi’s Muthaiga Country Club, where their predecessors amused themselves in the 1930s by swapping wives, throwing gramophones out the window, or shooting bullets into the stuffed lion still displayed in the hallway. The KCs strive to carry on this tradition, mainly through drinking and such activities as putting “butter pats on the carnations on the dinner table and throw[ing] them up at the ceiling to see if they will stick.” Although discrimination against Africans and Asians officially ended in the 1960s, the Muthaiga Club’s membership remains predominantly white. All the staff are black.13
IN ADDITION TO wealthy white former colonialists, Africa is also full of successful and in some cases market-dominant African minorities. This often comes as a surprise to Americans, who, because of the reality of our own inner cities, tend to associate “African” and “minority” with “poverty” and “economic backwardness.” But throughout Africa, for usually hotly disputed reasons, some indigenous ethnic groups have consistently prospered more than others.
Kenya’s Kikuyus, who are concentrated in the fertile Central Province and the capital city Nairobi, provide a typically complicated example. The Kikuyus are a minority in the sense that they represent roughly 22 percent of the population. On the other hand, out of Kenya’s approximately forty African ethnic groups, the Kikuyu are numerically the largest. (Kenyans do not use the term “ethnic group,” preferring instead the English word “tribe” or its Swahili equivalent kabila.) Next in size are the Luhya, with around 14 percent of the population, the Luo (13 percent), and the Kalenjin (12 percent).
As is often the case with ethnic statistics, however, these figures are somewhat misleading because there are cross-cutting cleavages within ethnic groups as well as complex, opportunistic relations between members of different ethnic groups. The Kalenjin, for example, comprise several smaller groups; President Moi belongs to one such group, the Tugen. Similarly, the Kikuyu, the powerful group of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, embraces two highly competitive factions: the Kiambu Kikuyu and the Nyeri Kikuyu.14
Despite these important qualifications, it remains the case that the Kikuyu view themselves, and are perceived by other Kenyans, as a distinct and distinctly successful group. Before colonization, Kikuyu territory stretched from Nairobi to the slopes of Mount Kenya. The British expropriated their land in order to produce cash crops (especially tea and arabica coffee), at the same time displacing nomadic groups like the Kalenjin, the Turkana, and the Maasai. Forcefully evicted from their homes, the Kikuyu became laborers and domestic servants on European farms or found employment in the cities. Many Kikuyu believe that as a group they suffered disproportionately under British colonization. Many non-Kikuyu disagree. In any event, as early as the 1920s, while the country was still under British rule, the Kikuyu emerged as a disproportionately urban, “capitalist” elite among Kenya’s indigenous tribes. The Kikuyu were also the driving force behind the country’s independence movement. In the fifties, the Mau Mau uprising was led principally by Kikuyu (although it was also a civil war among the Kikuyu), and as already noted, Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, was a Kikuyu.
Under Kenyatta’s rule, which lasted between 1963 and 1978, the economic prominence of the Kikuyu intensified. In part this is because Kenyatta adopted ethnically biased economic policies blatantly favoring the Kikuyu, especially his own family members. One component of Kenyatta’s “Africanization” campaign, for example, was to transfer to the Kikuyu large tracts of the fertile, cash-crop-producing land formerly controlled by whites to the exclusion of other groups. By 1978, Kenya had developed an indigenous “capitalist bourgeoisie” that was predominantly Kikuyu.15 But the reasons behind Kikuyu economic success remain bitterly disputed.
I recently posted on the web the following question: “Why have the Kikuyu been more economically successful than other Kenyans?” (In Kenya, the term “Kenyans” is still understood to mean black Kenyans.) Many Kenyans, including self-identified Kikuyus, Luos, and Kalenjin, responded. Here is a sampling of their comments.
W: The Kikuyu, of which I’m one, have become successful economically due to various reasons. One, civilization came early to our community when the colonial settlers settled in our land and introduced the start of the Kenyan economy. Second, the Kikuyus have a different attitude. They like to invest and try ventures, however small they are. They believe that being a small business owner is better than being a manager here or there. … In my family, there is no one who is an employee. We believe that the worst offense you can do to yourself is to remain an employee. Rightly so, wealth is created by those who engage in business.
K: IT IS OUT OF HARD WORK. HARD HARD WORK AND CONFIDENCE. THE SAME REASONS ALL OTHER PEOPLE BECOME STRONG ECONOMICALLY.
S [responding to K]: You are a sick puppy. If I remind you of Kamaliza [a Swahili name for “exterminator” and a nickname used by some Kenyans to refer to President Kenyatta], you will realize that your fathers and mothers had an unfair advantage vis-à-vis other Kenyans. During Kenyatta’s reign, he transferred all the “white settlers” land to Kikuyus. Please don’t give me that BS of I work hard and own my own business. If you don’t care to learn history then stop spouting ignorance. … You should at the very least stop corrupting this media with misinformation. Please acknowledge the sins of your ancestors, then propose solutions. Non-Kikuyus sat on the sidelines while Kamaliza and his Kikuyu henchmen raped the country, denying other Kenyans jobs and land. We are all hard working folks and don’t think for a moment that your likes have cornered the market on success, by virtue of being Kikuyu.
J: This is what you say to a stranger, with no idea about Kenya and how Kikuyus got wealthy! You say that Kikuyus were outright thieves?! Next time check your words!!! I insist, Kikuyus are not thieves. They were aided to their wealth, but nobody makes it to financial success without help. That is why banks offer loans. The difference is that Kikuyus appreciate the little they have and have a drive towards enterprising like no other tribe in Kenya. I was brought up by my aunt, she fed us by selling the local brew, and now she owns a restaurant!! Am I not allowed to be proud of that??? She was never a relation of a certain minister and neither did she finish her formal education!! … You being a Kenyan should have some sensitivity on what you write!!! The Kikuyu bashing has to stop!! I am tired of everyone picking on Kikuyus because we happen to be the first at the top!!!!!!
S: What I am trying to tell your kinsmen is that hard work is not a genetic trait of Kikuyus only. … You have to accept facts such as outright stealing favoring Kikuyus that was perpetrated by Kamaliza henchmen—like the series of Kikuyu Governors and department heads that were in charge of the Central Bank. Moi and his henchmen [who are Kalenjin] may be stealing now, but is he doing anything different from what Kamaliza did? You don’t have to defend Kamiliza because you are a Kikuyu.
P: Guys, calling each other names IS NOT going to resolve anything. I suggest you respect each others opinions or positions, and stick with ONLY THE FACTS.
M: It is as simple as having self-determination and being afraid of poverty. To be poor means being hopeless to a Kikuyu. You are not accorded respect by other men. They can even swindle your wife, they regard you like garbage. These are some of the reasons that make Kikuyus economically strong. It is like part of a culture of the people. But not anymore, not under Moi.
However contested the reasons, at least one basic fact is not: Among black Kenyans, deservedly or not, the Kikuyu have for generations been disproportionately wealthy. Even today under President Moi, who has openly pursued pro-Kalenjin policies, the Kikuyu continue to have an unusually solid business and middle class. Kikuyu elite remain the owners of large tracts of valuable land, much of it handed to them under Kenyatta. Of the few black members of the Muthaiga Club, almost all are Kikuyu, who are fighting tooth and nail to keep out the emerging new Kalenjin elite.
The Market-Dominant Ibo of Nigeria
The Kikuyu are by no means an exceptional case. Disproportionately successful African minorities can be found in virtually every corner of the African continent. The Ibo, known as the “Jews of Nigeria,” for example, are famous the world over for being an unusually driven and enterprising “trader” minority. Within Nigeria, Ibo subcommunities dominate key economic sectors. Ibo in Nnewi overwhelmingly control Nigeria’s auto parts industry. Ibo operating out of Aba specialize in shoes and textiles. Ibo in Onitsha have long operated the country’s long distance transportation sector. (The Onitsha Market is the largest open market in Africa, perhaps in the world. Dominated by Ibo, it has even inspired its own literature, the so-called Onitsha Market Literature: folk comedies, romances, poems, and plays, written by dozens of Nigerian writers living and working in Onitsha and published by printing houses in the marketplace.)16 Despite explicitly anti-Ibo economic policies in recent years, there is virtually no commercial sector in Nigeria without a strong Ibo contingent. “The Ibo are merchants,” a Nigerian lawyer explained to me. “They sell practically anything—electronics, clothing, tires, mattresses, you name it.”
As with the Kikuyu, there are different theories about the reasons for Ibo economic success. Non-Ibo groups in Nigeria will sometimes attribute Ibo success to corruption or crime. It is a fact that Ibos are disproportionately represented not only in legitimate trade but also in fraud and drug trafficking in Nigeria—although in part this might be because the Ibo have in recent years been shut out from legitimate economic sectors. (Ibos are thought to be at the center of the international advance-fee-fraud scams, more popularly known as 419, which bilk Americans out of about $100 million a year.) On the other hand, many Nigerians, especially Ibo, believe the explanation is genetic. Some have suggested that the Ibo are a lost tribe of Israel; this theory appears to have been discredited.
Other theories emphasize the unusually open and “achievement-oriented” character of Ibo society; similar arguments have been made for the Kikuyu.17 In addition, like the Chinese or Koreans, the Ibo have sophisticated social networks that are almost impenetrable by outsiders. Moreover, the Ibo are in a sense immigrants even in Nigeria, and according to some this experience has contributed to a stronger “work ethic.” Because of overpopulation and infertile soil in Iboland, which is located in the southeast, many Ibo migrated to the urban centers of northern and western Nigeria. Like the Chinese in Southeast Asia then, the Ibo effectively became landless migrants, arguably with a survivalist work ethic and higher “tolerance” levels for suffering.18 In any event, there is no denying the bottom line. The Ibo are a disproportionately dynamic, urban, and prosperous minority—not just in Nigeria, but everywhere they go. In West Africa it is often said that the banks in countries like Benin or Côte d’Ivoire would collapse if the Ibo withdrew their deposits. In the United States there are strikingly successful Ibo communities in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, and other major cities.
INDEED, NOT ONLY the Ibo but other Nigerian ethnic groups like the Hausa and the Yoruba have become the preeminent petty traders of West Africa. While the far more lucrative import-export business is dominated by Lebanese with ties to the global marketplace (to be discussed below), a stroll through the alleyways of any West African market makes clear that most goods bought and sold by the “mama benzes” and “marché mamas” aren’t exactly part of the technologized global marketplace. Rather they’re the products of West African, and particularly Nigerian, industry.
Nigeria is the economic powerhouse among the West African states, with a towering industrial leg up on the other countries in the region. In part because of this industrial head start, Nigerians dominate petty trading throughout the cities and villages of West Africa. It’s not unusual to find Ibo selling auto parts in the most remote village markets of Benin, Togo, or Burkina Faso. Ibo merchants travel with their goods, ferrying the products of the Nigerian auto parts industry across the West African bush because they have the contacts, know the terrain, and can do it most cheaply.
In the stalls of Marché Dantokpa in Cotonou, Benin, one is more likely to hear the merchants speaking Pidgin English, Ibo, or Yoruba (another Nigerian language) than French, the national language of Benin, or Fon, the language of the ethnic majority. The spillover from Nigerian industry ultimately ends up in markets like Dantokpa, not quite global but regional in reach, where the local equivalent of the Western-educated MBA is the Nigerian with family contacts on both sides of the border who uses her familiarity with the corrupt and often dangerous Nigerian highway to her advantage. At Dantokpa’s taxi station, cars leave regularly for Nigerian border towns, Lagos, and beyond. The Nigerians return burdened with cheap goods that eventually make their way, usually through Nigerian hands, to the smallest market towns in West Africa. Indeed, while West Africa has not yet undergone the homogenization (with an American face) caused elsewhere by global markets, it has seen a regional homogenization (with a Nigerian face): There may not be a McDonald’s on every corner, but in every West African market Nigerians sell the same goods from the same factories at the same prices. Hence, the ubiquitous plastic African sandals and house-wares decorated with the faces of former Nigerian strongmen.
The global marketplace has so far had minimal effects in West Africa, benefiting principally European and Lebanese expatriates and local political elites. But indigenous West Africans are connected in a vibrant regional marketplace, dominated by the Ibo and other ethnic groups from Nigeria. These groups have created ethnic enclaves in the region’s major cities that tend to be more ostentatious than the other neighborhoods, earning Nigerians a reputation as fierce hagglers and crafty traders. While wealth inequality is already stark in many cases, as globalization finally reaches African shores the disparities are likely to grow, enriching these groups that already know how to manipulate the markets.
The “Ibo of Cameroon” and Other Successful Indigenous African Minorities
In the same half-admiring, half-insulting way that the Ibo are called the “Jews of Nigeria,” the “aggressive and commercially vigorous” Bamiléké are known as the “Ibo of Cameroon.” Even before independence in 1960 the Bamiléké had come to dominate petty trading, retail, and transportation in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city and principal port. Today, the Bamiléké—the so-called “merchant tribe of Cameroon”—control most of the country’s commerce (except possibly in East Cameroon, where, historically, Ibo immigrants from Nigeria dominated). In addition to owning luxury hotels, breweries, clothing stores, and other large businesses in the major cities, small Bamiléké communities operate the local grocery stores and mom-and-pop businesses in almost every town. The Bamiléké are also the country’s financiers. Through a robust nationwide network of interest-bearing tontines, or local lending associations, the Bamiléké operate an informal capital market so efficient it constantly threatens to put government-owned banks out of business.19
There are many other disproportionately wealthy black minorities throughout Africa, each with a different, complex story—some with horrible endings. In tiny Rwanda, the Tutsi minority were historically not particularly “entrepreneurial,” but they were a cattle-raising elite who for four centuries (the last one under Belgian colonial rule) dominated economically and politically over the country’s 80 percent Hutu majority. Meanwhile, in neighboring Burundi, where they comprise roughly 14 percent of the population, the Tutsi still control approximately 70 percent of the country’s wealth. Burundi’s capital Bujumbura—the only city and the only pocket of wealth in the country—is known as Tutsi Tinsel Town.20
In Ethiopia, Eritreans long constituted a starkly successful merchant class, concentrated mainly in Addis Ababa. The examples get more obscure, but the pattern is the same. In Togo, the Ewe—fortuitous beneficiaries of a missionary education—were an economically advanced minority favored first by German and later by French colonialists. In Guinea, the 20 percent Susu are a disproportionately educated, economically (and at present politically) powerful tribe. In Uganda, the Baganda minority dominated economically over the rest of the country even before the British employed them to help rule the country. In Tanzania, the brown-toothed Chagga minority—the brown water they drink is staining—live on the fertile slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and are not only wealthy coffee farmers but flourishing businessmen and bureaucrats.21
With varying degrees of intensity, all of these African groups have been the objects of widespread resentment. In Uganda, for example, the politically dominant groups of the north have repeatedly subjected the economically powerful Baganda of the south to bloody purges. In Nigeria in 1966, tens of thousands of Ibo were slaughtered indiscriminately by furious mobs. In Ethiopia, the relatively prosperous Eritreans were recently expelled en masse. In Cameroon, “la Probleme Bamiléké” has been called “the most critical source of inter-ethnic tension” in the country today, with hostility seething among Cameroon’s two hundred other tribes and even priests lashing out against Bamiléké “exploitation” of “the weak and the poor.”22 Finally, in Rwanda, the genocidal massacre of the Tutsi minority is inextricably connected with their historic economic dominance.
The Indians of East Africa and the Lebanese of West Africa
Most of the disproportionately wealthy African minorities discussed above do not dominate their respective economies to anywhere near the extent that, say, the Chinese do in Southeast Asia or whites do in southern Africa. (The Bamiléké in Cameroon and the Tutsi in Burundi may be exceptions.) Indeed, their relative advantage vis-à-vis other indigenous groups often pales by comparison to the much starker market dominance of nonindigenous ethnic minorities—not only descendants of former European colonizers but also so-called entrepreneurial “pariah” minorities such as Indians and Lebanese.
In Kenya, for example, notwithstanding the disproportionate success of the Kikuyu, an overwhelming percentage of the country’s businesses—from car dealerships to the fish processing industry to the country’s largest corporations, hotels, and banks—are operated by Indians. (A notable exception is the small-scale manufacturing sector, which is dominated by black Kenyans.) “A tiny handful of Asians control the entire economy,” is the common, bitter view among black Kenyans. They “behave like colonizers,” and own “most of the companies, the big companies.” “The whole area is dominated by them. There is not one African. … They collude and make sure you go down.”23
These statements reverberate with prejudice, and most Americans would probably be tempted to dismiss them as groundless stereotyping. Unfortunately, they hold more than a grain of truth. Kenya’s roughly seventy thousand Indians, less than 2 percent of the population, are in fact dramatically more affluent as a group than the vastly more numerous black Kenyans around them. While Kikuyu run Kenya’s tea and coffee plantations, “Asians” (as they are known) comprise most of the country’s merchant class and, partly because of their international connections, benefit extremely disproportionately from globalization and market liberalization. They live, clustered and endogamous, in relatively upscale Nairobi neighborhoods like Westlands, where sari-clad women devouring the latest issue of India Today are driven around in Peugeots by black Kenyan chauffeurs. The Indian community has been a major source of funding for both the Kenyatta and Moi regimes. Most recently an unfortunate number of Indians have been willing to act as frontmen for Moi and his cronies. Moi currently co-owns extensive businesses with several Indian tycoons.24
It is often suggested—not only by Kenyans but also by Westerners—that Indian economic dominance in Kenya is due to their manipulation of the political process as opposed to any superior entrepreneurialism.25 There is no doubt that some Indian businessmen are thickly mired in the corrupt cronyism of the Moi regime. The infamous “Goldenberg case,” involving allegations that Indian tycoon Kamlesh Pattni siphoned off $400 million from Kenya’s Central Bank with the connivance of government officials, has been in litigation since 1994. Nevertheless, the suggestion that political cronyism is the sole or even principal explanation of Indian economic dominance in Kenya overstates the case.
Unlike Africa’s white settlers, who came over with guns and the might of Europe behind them, most of Kenya’s Indians descend from “coolie” laborers imported by the British in the late 1800s to build the Uganda-Kenya railway. The descendants of these laborers worked as struggling artisans, clerks, or traders. They rose from destitution not through political favoritism, but rather despite discriminatory restrictions by colonial whites on one side and intense animosity from native Africans on the other. As early as 1924 there were a surprising number of Indian doctors and lawyers, almost all self-made. Indeed, in the same year Indians already controlled a stunning 80 to 90 percent of Kenya’s commercial trade. Few of these early Indian businessmen had anything to do with politics.
Today in Kenya, not only Moi’s Indian cronies are successful. Indian merchants, famous for their extreme thriftiness and tiny profit margins, dominate commerce at every level of society. The same is true in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar in Tanzania, Uganda’s capital Kampala, and Rwanda’s capital Kigali.26
Throughout East Africa over the last two decades, the market reforms and globally oriented policies called for by the World Bank and IMF have starkly magnified the economic dominance of the region’s insular and entrepreneurial Indian minorities. In Tanzania, for example, the turn from socialism to markets in the 1980s led to the reemergence of the Indian minority as a powerful economic force. Majority fears that these “outsiders” would “overwhelm and take over everything” led to bitter anti-Indian brutality. Similarly, Zambia’s “very greedy” Indians, who were once accused of purchasing the body parts of mutilated African children, were targeted in bloody mass riots in the mid-1990s. In one furious participant’s words, “Indians are the ones getting the chances. They’ve got millions and millions.”27
In Kenya, after a failed military coup in 1982, the market-dominant Indian minority was confronted with the unleashed hatred of some of Kenya’s 16 million African majority. Looters and rioters targeted Indian shops and businesses, smashed what could not be taken, and raped at least twenty Indian women. Today, with Kenya’s Indian community prospering visibly from global markets—and several Indian billionaires in open cahoots with President Moi—anti-Indian hostility continues to grow, occasionally exploding in ethnic riots and mass violence. As African opposition leaders intensify their ethnic hatemongering—Kenneth Matiba has promised to expel the Asians from Kenya if he becomes president28—Kenya’s Indian minority finds itself uncomfortably dependent on the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian President Moi. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has for years been calling reflexively for more markets and more democracy, not just in Kenya but in all of Africa.
WHEREAS INDIANS ARE known as the “Jews of East Africa,” the Lebanese are the preeminent market-dominant minority in West Africa, a term that refers loosely to eleven countries along Africa’s Atlantic coast (Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) and three inland countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger).
Sierra Leone offers an example that is surprisingly parallel to the Angolan tragedy. Most Americans have some knowledge of the brutal rebel war in Sierra Leone, which has been called “the worst place on earth” and “the darkest corner in Africa.”29 A few may know that the rebels were chopping off children’s limbs principally to gain control of the country’s lucrative diamond fields. But who ran Sierra Leone’s diamond industry for years before the rebels took it over? A tiny handful of principally Lebanese dealers.
The extent of Lebanese market dominance in Sierra Leone—historically and at present—is astounding. The first Lebanese (then called “Syrians”) arrived in Sierra Leone around 1895, probably at the port city of Freetown, today the nation’s capital. Unlike the Europeans, who were unable or unwilling to penetrate the bush, the Lebanese headed straight for the interior of the country. Before long Lebanese traders could be found on every street corner peddling mirrors, beads, pomatum, iron pocketknives, jewelry, and cheap imported textiles to their African customers.
The Lebanese did not just sell. They also bought produce (particularly rice and palm products) from African farmers, which they held until prices rose and then transported and sold to European firms. With their profits from street trading, the Lebanese opened shops. Displacing rival indigenous traders (mostly so-called Creoles, from the coast) was easy. The Lebanese worked from dawn to dusk and had much lower overheads. They spent practically nothing on lodging, often sleeping on the same counter where meals were prepared and eaten. Moreover, because of their reputation for industriousness and commercial acumen, European firms were disposed to grant Lebanese long-term credit, an advantage they exploited to the hilt.30
By the 1920s, the Lebanese had established themselves as indispensable middlemen, linking European firms located in Freetown with African consumers and producers in the interior. By the 1930s, the Lebanese controlled the country’s road transport industry. By the late 1950s, when Sierra Leone was still an English protectorate (independence would come in 1961), Lebanese middlemen dominated the two most lucrative sectors of the economy: agriculture and diamond dealing.31
The perception of Lebanese economic dominance at this time was vividly captured in Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter, set in a “West African coastal town” that is almost certainly Freetown. (Greene worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone during World War II.) The place is described by one English character to a newcomer as follows:
“This is the original Tower of Babel,” Harris said. “West Indians, Africans, real Indians, Syrians, Englishmen, Scotsmen in the Office of Works, Irish priests, French priests, Alsatian priests.”
“What do the Syrians do?”
“Make money. They run all the stores up-country and most of the stores here. Run diamonds too.”
“I suppose there’s a lot of that.”
“The Germans pay a high price.”32
By the early 1990s, on the eve of civil war, the Lebanese—not even 1 percent of the population—dominated all the most productive sectors of the economy, including diamonds and gold, finance, retail, construction, and real estate. During the war, rebel forces—rumored to be funded by Liberia’s president Charles Taylor, who in turn is said to be funded by a Lebanese Liberian businessman—took over the diamond mines for two years, with disastrous economic effects.33 Although many Lebanese left during these years, the tiny, internationally connected Lebanese merchant community in Sierra Leone continues to be the country’s most dynamic economic force.
As the country struggles to recover, black Sierra Leoneans’ feelings toward the Lebanese are decidedly ambivalent. I had the good fortune recently of meeting with a group of five native Sierra Leoneans. The group’s leader, whom I’ll call Mr. Michaels, was a prominent Freetown lawyer and law professor. The other four were his adulating and exceptionally smart students. All were visiting New Haven as part of an exchange program sponsored by Yale Law School’s human rights clinic. We met in a student coffee bar.
Filled with ghastly visions of amputees, child armies, and villagers burned alive, I was struck by the optimism of the Sierra Leoneans I met in New Haven. Putting on a good face for the outside world was clearly a priority.
After discussing at length the latest cease-fire with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the ongoing U.N.-supervised truth and reconciliation process, I turned to the question of economics. “So, who’s rich in your country?” I asked.
“Anyone who works hard,” one student immediately answered. (English is the official language in Sierra Leone.)
“Not just corrupt people?”
“No, this is not Nigeria.” They all laughed—except for Mr. Michaels, who had a lot of gravitas for a thirty-six-year-old.
“How is Sierra Leone’s educational system?” I asked. According to the United Nations, nearly 70 percent of Sierra Leone’s population is illiterate.
“We used to be the Athens of West Africa,” they replied, almost collectively. “The best students from Kenya, Nigeria, everywhere in Africa came to study.” Fourah Bay College, they reminded me several times, was established in 1827. “Of course, education has taken a nosedive since the war. But we are on the way back up again.”
There was more optimism, on almost every issue. When I asked whether some groups in Sierra Leone prospered more than others, Mr. Michaels shook his head, almost as if he disapproved of my question. “Tribalism is not a serious problem in Sierra Leone,” he replied. “We are not like Kenya. We are all first Sierra Leoneans.” Also from Mr. Michaels: “Sierra Leoneans are a very open-minded, hospitable people. We treat foreign investors better than our own kinsmen.” He even said, although 75,000 Sierra Leoneans have been killed and 30,000 maimed in the civil war, “Our country is a land of opportunity. Our constitution bars any form of discrimination.”
When I specifically mentioned the Lebanese, however, a more complex picture emerged. “What is the status of the Lebanese today?” I asked.
“Oh, they dominate business. They are very rich,” was the uniform reply.
But the Lebanese no longer dominated the diamond industry?
No, the students explained. The diamond fields were now under the control of the United Nations. “Of course,” they added, “the Lebanese are still smuggling.”
Was there much resentment or discrimination against the Lebanese minority? I asked.
The students found this question exasperating. “You have it backwards,” they replied. (Mr. Michaels kept quiet.) “It is the Lebanese who are not equitable toward Sierra Leoneans. They feel they are better. Their community is closed. They attend private Lebanese schools. These schools are very expensive, and almost no Sierra Leoneans can afford them.”
But didn’t Sierra Leone still have laws discriminating against Lebanese? I asked them about section 27(4) of their constitution, which essentially authorizes discrimination against “non-native” citizens of Sierra Leone, including ethnic Lebanese who were born in Sierra Leone and whose families have lived there for four generations.
“It is the Lebanese who discriminate against Sierra Leoneans,” one of the students repeated while the others nodded. “For example, no Lebanese woman would ever marry a (black) Sierra Leonean man. I have never heard of a single case. Some Lebanese men do marry Sierra Leonean women, but those women are then treated as second-class citizens. Sometimes their children are even taken away from them!”
The same student then added: “But I like the Lebanese. I have many Lebanese friends, and I discuss these issues honestly with them.”
Compared to the reviled soldiers of the RUF, the Lebanese today are in most Sierra Leoneans’ relatively good graces; the psychotic brutality of the rebels in many ways unified the country. Nevertheless, in postwar Sierra Leone the Lebanese remain the country’s principal commercial group, controlling access to most international capital. Although not all Lebanese are prosperous, there are several highly visible Lebanese tycoons, and as a group they are starkly disproportionately wealthy. Meanwhile, despite the optimism of the Sierra Leoneans I met in New Haven, 80 percent of Sierra Leoneans continue to live in desperate, disease-ridden poverty. In 2001, the United Nations listed Sierra Leone as the country with the lowest human development index ranking in the world, behind Bangladesh and Rwanda.34
A similar dynamic holds throughout West Africa, which includes some of the world’s poorest countries. In The Gambia—which sits in the middle of Senegal—the tiny Lebanese community owns nearly all the stores and restaurants in the capital Banjul and controls the groundnut industry, the country’s predominant cash crop. The Gambia’s tourism industry is dominated by foreign investors, mainly from the United Kingdom (although Russians have recently come onto the scene). In relatively prosperous Côte d’Ivoire, the Lebanese (only 150,000 strong) and French multinationals jointly control the modern economy while 65 percent of the indigenous population of 14 million live in extreme rural poverty. Similarly, in Benin, Ghana, and Liberia, tiny numbers of Lebanese, along with a handful of European expatriates and foreign investors, dominate the most advanced, lucrative sectors of the private economy.
In many of these countries the Lebanese are often regarded as no different from the old colonialists. Living in isolated and heavily guarded villas, they zoom through the streets in fancy cars and glimmering motorcycles while most Africans drive second- and third-hand rusting mopeds. Outside of Sierra Leone many Lebanese businesses are of relatively recent vintage, owned by tycoons in Beirut who send their youngest children to cut their management teeth on the African investments. The youngsters play for a few years, indulging in various excesses, before returning to test their new skills in a business back home. Needless to say, none of this wins them much favor among the locals, even those who chauffeur and guard them.
Meanwhile, vast numbers of West Africans live so far outside the modern economy that privatization, trade liberalization, and foreign investment have virtually no effect on them whatsoever. Compared to the still largely traditional West African majorities around them, the Lebanese are far better educated (usually abroad or in private Lebanese schools) and have vastly superior access to capital and distribution networks. Sometimes collaborating with, sometimes competing against European investors, the market-dominant Lebanese are West Africa’s link to, and principal beneficiaries of, global capitalism.
Colonialism and Market-Dominant Minorities
It is especially appropriate in the context of Africa to add a note about colonialism. From the British in India to the Portuguese in Angola to the Spaniards in upper Peru, all the Western colonizers were essentially market-dominant minorities: prosperous, more advanced outsider groups surrounded by generally impoverished and exploited indigenous masses. Indeed, the colonial period, with its enormous cross-border, cross-ocean capital flows, was in many ways the first modern wave of globalization. Like today’s market-dominant minorities, the colonialists profited enormously and wildly disproportionately from international trade and what is sometimes misleadingly referred to as “colonial laissez-faire policies.”
The evils of colonialism are well documented, particularly the shameless exploitation of natural resources and native labor. The arguable benefits of colonization are also well documented: the establishment of infrastructure and in some selective cases, education for the colonized populations.
The only point I wish to highlight here is that there are important links between colonialism and the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities. Not only were the colonialists themselves market-dominant minorities, but colonial divide-and-conquer policies favored certain groups over others, exacerbating ethnic wealth imbalances and fomenting group tensions. Indeed, in some cases these policies may have created “ethnic identities” and “ethnic differences” where they previously did not exist. Today, moreover, most starkly in southern Africa but also in Latin America and elsewhere, many market-dominant minorities are the descendants of former colonizers. Thus, the pervasive existence of market-dominant minorities throughout the developing world is one of colonialism’s most overlooked and most destructive legacies.
Africa and Globalization
In the West, Africa is often seen as a vast continent of incomprehensible tribalism, endemic corruption, and almost intrinsic misery and violence. Cast in this way, Africa is irredeemable, its problems unique and uniquely insoluble.
But Africa fits solidly into a much larger global pattern; the same basic processes that are destabilizing Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Russia are operating in Africa, too. In Africa, as in virtually every other region of the non-Western world, market-dominant minorities control virtually all the most valuable and advanced sectors of the modern economy, monopolizing access to wealth and global markets, and producing seething, often unmobilized ethnic resentment and hatred among the indigenous African majorities around them.
To be sure, Africa also differs in important respects from other developing regions of the world. No other region is poorer or has Africa’s complexity of tribal, linguistic, ethnic, and subethnic divisions. Africa was the last region to be decolonized. Corruption and looting have occurred in Africa on a scale unknown to the rest of the world. Ethnic violence and civil warfare—certainly not all involving market-dominant minorities—occur more frequently and with more intensity, or at any rate with more primitive weapons, than elsewhere.
Nevertheless, taking a global perspective, it becomes clear that Africa is no more exceptional or hopeless than other regions of the non-Western world. On the contrary, like Southeast Asia or Latin America—but probably to a greater extent—Africa is plagued with the problem of market-dominant minorities. As a result, economic liberalization, free markets, and globalization are aggravating Africa’s extreme ethnic concentrations of wealth, provoking the same dangerous combination of frustration, envy, insecurity, and suppressed anger that can also be seen among the impoverished indigenous majorities of Indonesia, Russia, Guatemala, or Sri Lanka. What happens when democratization—or more accurately, immediate elections with universal suffrage—is added to this volatile mixture is the sobering subject of Part Two.