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by William Easterly

  European medicine made a lot of progress against smallpox and sleeping sickness in the first half of the twentieth century. Colonial maternity clinics also contributed to a fall in infant mortality. The end result was that death rates fell and population rose in the twentieth century in colonial Africa.

  Colonizers had much more uneven performance on providing public education, for which there was a lot of demand by Africans eager to get ahead. In 1949–1950, 33 percent of children were in primary school in the Belgian Congo, 26 percent in Kenya, 16 percent in Nigeria, and only 6 percent in French West Africa. Secondary education was far worse, enrolling only 1 to 2 percent of young Africans in 1950.37

  Cocoa and coffee farms took hold under the British and French colonizers in Africa, bringing benefits to the locals. The colonizers’ railways (and later roads) facilitated the access of African cocoa and coffee farmers to the world market.38 Cocoa in Ghana fueled per capita growth somewhat more rapidly than in British India: 1.3 percent per annum from 1870 to 1913.39

  However, even with the best of motives, colonial officials suffered from all the same problems that characterize today’s White Man’s Burden: excessive self-confidence of bureaucrats, coercive top-down planning, desultory knowledge of local conditions, and little feedback from the locals on what worked. Under the theory that “whites know best,” colonialists forced development schemes on the locals rather than respecting their economic choices. A British colonial directive on Uganda in 1925 went: “Natives to be informed that three courses are open: cotton, labor for Government, labor for planters….[T]hey cannot be permitted to do nothing.” There were also forced cotton-growing schemes in Congo, Nyasaland, Tanganyika, and Upper Volta.

  Perhaps force was necessary because the natives were choosing to grow high-yield food crops such as millet while they were “doing nothing.” The obsession with cotton often displaced these high-return food crops.40

  The British pursued a similar policy in Sierra Leone, where they imposed a tax on huts to try to spur production of cash crops such as oil palm. One district commissioner said that the tax was necessary for the natives to “rouse them from their apathy and indolence and to bring them more in touch with civilizing influences.” When the natives resisted being taxed for their own good, British soldiers and native auxiliaries killed the resisters.41

  British colonial officials’ next bright idea in Sierra Leone was to introduce long-staple cotton to replace the short-staple cotton already grown by local farmers. The results were disastrous: heavy rain eroded long-staple fields. The peasants had not chosen their methods by accident: intercropping short-staple cotton with food crops controlled erosion, kept down plant pests, and preserved food security. The short-staple cotton was suitable for locally produced cloths.

  The local British officials also introduced irrigated rice in Sierra Leone, whose yields rapidly declined due to irrigation’s by-products of acidity and salinity. Local farmers were already getting high yields from rice grown in mangrove swamps. Not yet convinced of their own fallibility, the Brits introduced tractors into Sierra Leone in the 1950s. The tractors never paid for themselves, which was not surprising given the missing imperative to economize on abundant labor. Tractor farms produced 4 percent of Sierra Leone’s rice output, but took 80 percent of the colonial Department of Agriculture’s spending.

  In Malawi’s Shire Valley from 1940 to 1960, British officials tried to teach the peasants how to farm. They offered the standard solution of ridging to combat soil erosion, and were at a loss to understand why Malawian farmers resisted the tried-and-true technique of British farmers. Unfortunately, ridging in the sandy soils of the Shire Valley led to more erosion during the rainy season, while exposing the roots of the plants to attacks by white ants during the dry season.42

  A famous colonial project was the Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme of the 1940s. A subsidiary of Unilever, which manufactured soap from vegetable oils, suggested growing groundnuts (peanuts) in Tanzania during British shortages of cooking oil and other foods. However, the Unilever subsidiary didn’t think a private project could handle the ambitious scheme. The socialist food minister in postwar Britain, John Strachey, embraced the project. The government created a public corporation and appointed Major General Desmond Harrison to what they saw as a military operation. Major General Harrison set up headquarters at Kongwa, an area of marginal rainfall. Henry Stanley had described the area as “an interminable jungle of thornbushes.” Clearing the jungle required teams of two bulldozers linked by naval anchor chains (which were late in arriving because a British official back home thought the order for ship anchors for the middle of Tanzania was a joke). This Fitzcarraldo territory was home to bees so vicious that they put some bulldozer operators in the hospital. The bulldozers’ work still left the roots, which ate up the root-cutting equipment. Out of the original proposal of 3.25 million acres, the project cleared ten thousand acres.

  Still, the project continued. Plantable when moist, the ground turned into concrete by harvesting time in the dry season. Since groundnuts grow underground, this was a problem. The project had bought four thousand tons of peanuts for seed. After two seasons, the project produced two thousand tons of peanuts. Faced with a state enterprise that had turned four thousand tons of peanuts into two thousand tons, the British government finally cancelled the project.43

  Despite (or because of) these heroic efforts, African growth under the imperialists was modest: 0.6 percent per annum from 1870 to 1913 and then 0.9 percent per annum from 1913 to 1950.44 Looking at Africa, India, and other Asian colonies besides India together, we see that the gap between Europe and its colonies grew during the colonial period (figure 27). After independence, Africa continued to fall further behind Europe, while India and other Asian colonies kept up with European growth. It is hard to see any positive overall effect of colonial rule compared to independent states.45

  Fig. 27. Ratio of Europe’s Income to Colonies

  Benefits of Not Being Colonized

  It is also interesting that the notable East Asian success stories—China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand—were never completely colonized by Europeans. In contrast, East Asia’s main disappointment, the Philippines, was colonized by Spain and the United States.

  The few areas of the world that were not formally colonized by Europeans provide an interesting, although imperfect, counterfactual to what would have happened in the absence of the White Man’s Burden. They are imperfect as a test of colonialism because these areas were not chosen randomly—they wound up that way because of factors that influenced their social evolution. There was also some degree of European control in some of these territories, like the infamous European enclaves in China. Korea and Taiwan did spend some part of the twentieth century as colonies of Japan.

  I compare the non-colonies to European colonies that were not settled by Europeans. The colonies settled by Europeans are a special case, discussed in an earlier chapter. The non-settlement colonies are a more natural experiment of European intervention from afar. The non-colonies had more rapid increases in secondary education from 1960 to 2001. Growth per capita from 1950 to 2001 was 1.7 percentage points higher in the non-colonies than the non-settlement colonies, a huge difference for a fifty-one-year period. By 2001, income was 2.4 times higher in the non-colonies than in the former non-settlement colonies.

  Brown University economist Louis Putterman argues that having a long history of statehood (which was one thing that prevented colonization in many cases) was favorable for seizing economic opportunities in the postwar era, and that may be the reason for the different outcomes in the non-colonies compared with the colonies. Naturally formed states outperformed artificial colonial creations.

  The difference in per capita income in 2001 conceals very high variance of outcomes among the non-colonies. China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan had spectacular growth in income, Thailand and Turkey only slightly less impressive growth, and Iran and Saudi Arabia had a windfall gain i
n oil income. On the negative side, North Korea’s Stalinist development strategy gave a very different outcome than the development path of its former countrymen in South Korea. Afghanistan was a disaster of tribal strife, communism, and foreign intervention. Bhutan, Ethiopia, and Nepal were hardly poster children for the benefits of escaping European control, either. We will never know what would have happened to Tibet if China had not swallowed it in 1951. So absence of the White Man’s Burden did not ensure paradise. It just gave a better result on average than colonialism (and the better result is statistically distinguishable from colonies, despite the high variance of non-colonial outcomes).

  Fig. 28. Per Capita Income in Non-settlement Colonies Versus Non-colonies

  National self-help doesn’t always work—disasters can be homegrown as easily as miracles. Economic miracles are uncommon under any circumstances, but they seem to be more likely among non-colonies than colonies. Hence, the big success stories of the last four decades include a preponderance of places never colonized by Europeans, which tells us a little something about the benefits of escaping the White Man’s Burden.

  To illustrate some of the problems left behind by the colonialists and nation-builders, as well as how they meshed with later Western interventions, consider one case study.

  Abused the Most and the Longest

  In 1483, Diogo Cão, a Portuguese ship captain sailing off Central Africa, came upon a river. Asking the locals the name, they told him Nzere, the river that swallows all others. He Europeanized the name as Zaire, which Mobutu would later take as the “authentic” name of the unlucky country the Portuguese had found.

  Cão was more interested in profits than nomenclature. He established relations with the local king, Nzinga Mbemba, whom he dubbed Alfonso I, of the powerful Kongo kingdom. The Kongo people (also known as Bakongo) practiced ironworking, copperworking, weaving, pottery, and carving of wood and ivory. The Kongo also had slavery, which didn’t bother the Portuguese priests, although the Kongo polygamy did. Soon the Portuguese were trading guns and luxury manufactures for Bakongo slaves and ivory. The Portuguese demand for slaves was so insatiable that the Kongo raided neighboring peoples, who retaliated in kind. The warfare of slave raiding weakened the kingdom, but it managed to survive until the late nineteenth century, when the Belgians arrived.46 The Portuguese (later joined by Dutch, French, and British slavers) established slave-exporting ports at Boma, on the Zaire (aka Congo) River, and at Luanda, sending slaves (including many Bakongo) by the boatload to the sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean.

  Belgian King Leopold’s abuses of the Congo from 1877 to 1908 are well known (see the great book King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild). Belgian king Leopold said that his aim for the Congo Free State was “to bring civilization to the only part of this globe where it has not penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops entire populations…a crusade worthy of this age of progress.47 Impressed by his ideals, European powers awarded him the Congo at the Berlin Conference. The borders they established showed their usual arbitrariness. For example, they divided Tutsis between the Belgian Congo and German East Africa, an area that included what would become Rwanda and Burundi. This would have deadly consequences a century later.

  The Belgians exacerbated ethnic tensions. Every individual was given a tribal label that was written on his pass, hardening tribal identities that were previously fluid.48 Some ethnic groups resisted those perceived as Belgian favorites. The Kongo in Leopoldville formed an Alliance of the Bakongo People (ABAKO) to protect their interests against the Lingala-speaking migrants to Leopoldville from upriver.49

  The Belgians were not so good at preparing Congo for independence. They didn’t even consider independence until 1956, when Belgian law professor A.A.J. Van Bilsen published a “thirty-year plan” to turn Congo over to the Congolese.50 Not wanting to have the Belgians in town that long, ABAKO and its leader, Joseph Kasavubu, called for immediate independence in the same year. The Belgians finally allowed elections in 1957, but only at the local level—which meant that most political parties formed along ethnic and regional lines. ABAKO took 133 out of the 170 council seats in Leopoldville, while other ethnic parties won elsewhere.51

  On January 4, 1959, Belgian troops forcibly dispersed an ABAKO political rally. Riots broke out, with thousands of people breaking into European stores and looting. The Belgians panicked, hastily turning the Thirty-Year Plan into the Six-Month Plan. The Congo became independent on June 30, 1960.

  At indepedendence, qualified leaders were in short supply. Only seventeen Congolese in 1960 had a university degree. Joseph Kasavubu had a strong base in Leopoldville and the lower Congo River. The other main contender, Patrice Lumumba, was a high school dropout, former beer salesman and postal clerk, whose main qualification was his oratory.52

  Chaos ensued. Within days the Force Publique mutinied against their Belgian officers, who quickly headed for the next flight out. So did many Belgian civilians after mutineers beat and raped whites. The new government was an awkward coalition, with Kasavubu as president and Lumumba as prime minister. Seeking someone to fill the empty slots at the Force Publique, Lumumba reached far down the ranks to an obscure noncommissioned officer named Joseph Désirée Mobutu (who, like Lumumba, had not finished secondary school).53

  Desperate to keep the country together when the provinces of Kasai and Katanga announced secession, Lumumba cast about for global allies. Soviet and American agents in Leopoldville schemed to get the Congo in their camp.

  UN troops arrived, but had no brief to intervene in intra-Congolese conflicts. Not satisfied with what the United States and the UN were offering, Lumumba solicited Soviet support to fight the Katanga secession. Kasavubu and Mobutu were not happy, nor was the paranoid CIA. Kasavubu announced on the radio that he was firing Lumumba in September 1960, while Lumumba announced on another station that he was firing Kasavubu. Mobutu staged a brief coup and later flew Lumumba off to Katanga, with state agents beating him up on the plane and eventually assassinating him. CIA machinations allegedly had some role in these events.

  Further bizzarre twists occupied Congolese politics from 1961 to 1965. A Marxist revolt broke out in eastern Congo, the former home of Lumumba, intriguing the Marxist Internationale enough to earn a visit from Che Guevara. Che was disgusted at the poor military skills, womanizing, and drinking of one of the young Marxist leaders, named Laurent Kabila.54 By 1965, Congolese politics were deadlocked along ethnic and regional lines. Mobutu staged another coup, this time for keeps. Kabila retreated into a tiny Marxist mini-state west of Lake Tanganyika, financed by gold mining and ivory, and kidnapped for ransom four Western students from naturalist Jane Goodall’s primate research center in Tanzania.55

  Compensating for economic mismanagement, Mobutu came up with a name change for the country, Zaire, the old Portuguese mispronunciation of the Nzere (Congo) River. A lonely democratic opposition emerged, led by the courageous Étienne Tshisekedi, who endured at Mobutu’s hands multiple arrests, torture, and banishments over the next few decades.

  Little more needs to be said about Mobutu’s notorious looting of the Congo’s natural resources, and his ability to attract aid from Western donors, which enabled him to buy off potential opponents and finance villas on the Riviera. In the end, it took an armed rebellion instigated by Uganda and Rwanda to oust Mobutu in 1997. Rwanda sought to defeat the Interhamwe—the Hutu militia that carried out the genocide of eight hundred thousand Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994—who had taken refuge in the Congo. The Rwandans had local allies because there was a substantial population of Congolese Tutsis in eastern Congo.56

  Unfortunately for the Congolese, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni had gone to the University of Dar es Salaam with Laurent Kabila, the dissolute rebel who had last been active three decades earlier.57 Museveni and Rwandan president Paul Kagame (another friend of the glad-handing Kabila) decided to install Kabila as the new president, although he had little or no role in the rebellion that oust
ed Mobutu. Kabila turned out to be something less than the Congolese George Washington. His autocratic ways (he quickly banned the party of Étienne Tshisekedi) and his failure to control the Interhamwe alienated even his foreign backers. Uganda and Rwanda started a second rebellion that was eventually to involve six neighboring states backing and opposing the Kabila government. The foreign forces, as well as a medley of local military bands, further looted the Congo (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]) of minerals. From August 1998 to November 2002, an estimated 3.3 million Congolese died as a result of the war, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.58

  Unknown parties assassinated Laurent Kabila in 2001. His hastily installed successor was thirty-two-year-old Joseph Kabila, the son of the incompetent autocrat. Joseph didn’t prove to be any more democratic than his father (he also banned the party of Étienne Tshisekedi).59 but he was a lot better at relations with the international donors and foreign invaders. A peace deal brought together assorted rebels and warlords into a coalition government under Joseph Kabila, which the ever-hopeful international community deemed a Government of National Unity. The foreign aid spigot reopened, and UN troops arrived, starting a new quasi-colonial experience for the DRC. The World Bank strategy since 2001 was “to promote ‘early wins’ to build a track record for the then new Government.60 It didn’t explain why it wished on the Congolese people a government made up of political actors who had demonstrated only an exceptional ability to use violence.

  The income of the average Congolese today is the equivalent of twenty-nine cents a day. The World Bank has lent $1.5 billion to the Congolese “government” since 2001. It’s not clear what benefits the money brought to the Congolese people when channeled through the warlords and autocrats. As many as 3.4 million Congolese are still refugees.61 After five centuries of European intervention, the DRC is still today contesting the record for worst and longest misgovernment.