From Bloomberg:

Energy companies operating in Senegal will drill three offshore wells next year as the West African nation vies to join a growing group of regional crude producers, according to the state-owned oil company,Petrosen.

Senegalese officials held talks with more than 10 oil companies this year in attempts to lure investors to its energy industry, said Joseph Medou, Petrosen’s geologist, in an interview in Dakar Aug. 25.

“If we make comparisons to what is happening in Ghana and Ivory Coast, to Sierra Leone, we think we have the same kind of plays,” he said.

Read here.

On the current political situation in Senegal, see this Project Syndicate column from Sanou Mbaye.

The three doctoral candidates will work on the following research subjects:

1. Historical relations between demography and land use in West Africa

2. Decision‐making within rural households in West Africa

3. The politics of adaptation to climate change in West Africa

Expectation:
The candidate will be expected to participate in the interdisciplinary and disciplinary
courses of the ZEF Doctoral Studies Program from 1st October 2011 ‐ February 2012.
He/she will develop an individual research proposal until February 2012. For data
collection, 10‐12 months of field research in West Africa will be required. During the
writing‐up period of the dissertation, the candidate will be based at ZEF in Bonn.
Duration of the doctoral studies:
Three years starting from August 2011 under conditional acceptance of the confirmation
by the funding agency. A scholarship awarded will cover living, research as well as travel
cost.

Requirements for the applicants:
• very good degree (Diploma, Master or Magister) in social anthropology, social
geography, political sciences or development sociology
• very good writing skills in English are required for the dissertation
• very good knowledge of French are required for research in a francophone
country
• good knowledge of field research methods is required
• experience in research is of advantage
• work experience in West Africa is of advantage

African candidates are highly encouraged to apply.

Applications:
The eligible candidates are invited to send their application including
• a letter of motivation
• a concept note that addresses the research topic, problem statement, research
objectives and question, suggested methodology (2‐3 pages)
• Curriculum Vitae
• copies of academic certificates
• a letter of reference.

Please, send the hard copy of the application to:
Center for Development Research
Dr. Irit Eguavoen (ZEFa)
Walter‐Flex‐Str. 3
D‐ 53113 Bonn
Germany

Closing date for the application is the 20th June 2011. Short–listed candidates will be
contacted for an interview.
The scholarships start in August 2011. The calls for application are published on the project websites:

Weiterführende Links:
www.wascal.org, www.zef.de

 

This is a guest post by Keith Hart (cross-posted). It is partly in response to Benson Eluma’s piece here on Achebe and Hart. You can leave your comments here or at Hart’s blog.

Benson’s post refers to my previous one, Africa’s hope, which in turn took off from Chinua Achebe’s NYT oped piece. I will not tackle Benson’s critique point for point. What follows is only indirectly triggered by what he wrote. It matters more to me to make a positive case than to refute his or for that matter Chinua Achebe’s.

I should begin by clarifying my use of history. For me the point is to realise some version of what is possible while starting from the actual present of our moment in history. That vision of possibility should be grounded in what we know of the past, but such historical knowledge is always selective and relative to the forward-looking project. We can pitch rival stories into competition with each other, suggesting that A is not B. I did that for polemical purposes with Achebe’s historical vision and Benson does it with me; but in practice most stories are not mutually exclusive and it is usually futile to treat them as such.

At the end of Talking World War III Blues, Bob sings:

Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all the people can’t be all right all the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,”
I said that.

West Africans have been waiting a long time for political emancipation and this is closely tied to slavery, colonialism and recent aspirations to economic development. Each century, as we go back, reveals further layers of the problem and, to come to grips with the sources of the region’s economic backwardness probably requires us to take in the whole of the previous thousand years. I believe that Chinua Achebe’s version of that history was tired, if not lazy. Depending on what we have in mind, the historical significance of all the key terms needs to be interrogated.

Slavery is endemic to West Africa. I have a post on it here. The slave trade was a partnership between Europeans and Africans. It took most of the 19th century to be officially abolished and it has persisted in places until now. Domestic slavery can only be understood in relation to kinship and that too has not been abolished. It is contemporary in one form or another. The abolition of slavery in the West, especially as a result of the American civil war, generated much turbulence in West Africa during the latter decades of the 19th century, a situation exploited by the colonial scramble for Africa. Slavery is living history in Nigeria (as Achebe’s novels pointed out), not just something to be pinned on Europeans and Americans long ago.

Colonialism too needs to be thought about outside the box. As John Peel has demonstrated, many Yoruba intellectuals embraced Christianity, western education and the British empire as a way of taking their nation into the modern world. Ghana had an economy larger than Indonesia’s at the time of independence and per capita income on a par with South Korea. The political and economic failures of the last half-century have cast doubt on how the transition to post-colonial states should be viewed. It is not obvious when in the period from the 1940s to the 70s various colonial regimes started to pull out or how independent the successor regimes often were. What is clear is that political recipes for emancipation lacked an effective understanding of conditions in the world at large and over-estimated local powers of self-determination. The result in the early 21st century is that West Africans, especially Nigerians, are still waiting for political forms adequate to their needs and aspirations as world citizens.

What economic system might underwrite these political aspirations? Rather than invoke “capitalism” as a way of avoiding economic analysis, we need to interrogate this term more than any other. I use it in a way similar to Marx to mean a social complex of people, machines and money that over the last two centuries has driven population growth, urbanization and higher energy use in a very uneven way. It takes many concrete forms and is always combined with other economic forms. Capitalism’s mission is to break down the insularity of traditional communities and bring cheap commodities to the masses. It is not the just society humanity deserves, but a temporary bridge to that society. It is of course highly moot where different parts of the world have reached in this process, where they might want to go next and how.

The present moment is specific in that, for the first time, global capitalism has been diversified beyond its North Atlantic origins. In a book published three decades ago, I argued that modern states were being erected in West Africa on the basis of backward agriculture and that, unless significant progress towards machine industry (in the broadest sense) were made soon, these states would devolve to a level congruent with their economic backwardness. I intend to revisit this argument in the present book.

Once again, I have covered a lot of ground in a very telegraphic way which lends itself to polemical distortion. But what can you do in a blog post? I think the triad — pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial — is a weird periodization of West African history and one that will not serve attempts to improve the region’s political economy well now. Rather than insist on my own highly selective account, I would like to discuss the key relevant terms in an open-ended way. But more than that, I believe there are substantial grounds for hope of significant African development at this time. The politicians and the intellectuals (at home and abroad) will probably be the last to find out about it.

As donations, pieces of clothing bear imprints of the aspirations of their donors, and as purchased commodities, they are invested with the desires of their consumers. This article describes a particular configuration of the international trade in secondhand clothing. The trade links Western homes with West Africans families in an intricate web; its history also shows a relationship between West Africans who claim to be of Jewish descent and Jewish secondhand clothing merchants.

“The Jews of Africa”
One of the most remarkable things about the West African secondhand clothing trade is that it is controlled, almost in its entirety, by Igbo traders. The Igbo are a Nigerian ethnic group whose members sometimes claim to be of Jewish descent. There is probably no better person to guide one through this tradition of Igbo origin than one of the most prolific and respected Igbo historians, Adiele Afigbo, who writes[i]:

‘The claim to Hebrew origin is the one of which we have the earliest mention, and that in the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo ex-slave who wrote in 1789. Early in this century [twentieth century] the Rev. G.T. Basden saw a very close resemblance between Igbo culture and Jewish culture without quite saying the Igbo were of Jewish descent. But such was his form of words that the hasty would draw that conclusion. Then later, probably in the 1950s, one Ike Akwelumo asserted in his pamphlet The Origin of the Ibos that the Igbo were a branch of the Jews. According to him the name “Ibo,” used for the people during the colonial period, was a contraction of the word “Hebrew.” At some intermediate stage, he says, the word had been contracted to Heebo.’

Although not many Igbo historians take this too seriously – Adiele Afigbo himself seriously contests this story – it sometimes comes up in daily conversations. For instance, it is not uncommon for one to hear, during a normal conversation with everyday Igbo people, that they are the Jews of Africa because they are very famous as migrants, and because they are successful businessmen. This is particularly interesting in the case of secondhand clothing because the trade combines migration with business success; and their first regular suppliers were Jewish merchants.

Jews and secondhand clothing
In many parts of Europe, from the late Middle Ages, the trade in secondhand clothing was one of the very few economic activities in which Jews were engaged. This was primarily because then, trade and craft were tightly regulated by guilds, and owing to pervasive religious prejudice against Jews, they were excluded from guild membership. Only few marginal commercial activities were open to them. One of them was pawnbroking; the other was the trade in secondhand goods (including clothing)[ii].

In England, between the seventeenth and early nineteenth century, the trade was known as a Jewish trade. In the mornings, Jewish clothes traders would walk through the streets of middle-class and aristocratic areas of London, shouting “Old Clothes”, to attract the attention of servants who had their masters’ cast-offs to sell. After a successful morning, they would go back to a part of the city called Rag Fair, where they would sell to other Jewish secondhand clothing dealers who would repair the garments for resale in their shops. Some contemporary writers claim that in the mid-eighteenth century, there were as many as two thousand Jewish Old Clothes men in London alone[iii].

In the nineteenth century New York, immigrant Jews of Eastern European origin would walk through the streets shouting “Rags, Bones, Bottles![iv]” Some of them later introduced the trade to other parts of the United States. By the twentieth century, second generation migrants still operated some of the family businesses that were founded then. Some of these were the first regular suppliers of secondhand clothing to Igbo importers in West Africa.

The Igbo and secondhand clothing
The Igbo first became involved in the secondhand clothing trade in the 1940s, when they bought Army surplus stock during and after the Second World War. The clothing was obtained from ships that were berthed in Port Harcourt, part of the now infamous Niger Delta region. By the 1950s, many of the traders started importing secondhand clothing directly from the New York-based Jewish merchants. They would get unsorted, bundled, shipments of secondhand clothing – the finesse that now characterizes the packaging was to come later. From the importers, fellow Igbo retailers would buy collections of secondhand clothing, which they would retail in other parts of Nigeria. Later, in the early 1960s, Igbo traders started re-exporting secondhand clothing from Nigeria to other parts of West Africa. Destination countries included Benin, Togo, Ghana and Cameroon.

Today, the main secondhand clothing markets in Cotonou and Lome, the capitals of Benin Republic and Togo respectively, are dominated and controlled by Igbo traders. Some of them are importers, who have established and maintained trading connections with European and American secondhand clothing firms; others are retailers, who sell bales of secondhand clothing to other Igbo traders who would then retail pieces of secondhand clothing.  In the case of Benin Republic, which borders Nigeria, most of their customers cross the border from Nigeria into Benin. Since the 1970s, the importation of secondhand clothing has been banned in Nigeria. Therefore, almost all the pieces of secondhand clothing one would find in Nigeria is smuggled from Benin.

Western cast-offs meet West African desires
A normal day of cloth shopping for many Lagos families involves a trip to the Yaba market, one of the numerous secondhand clothing markets in the city. Stalls made of wood and corrugated iron sheets house rows and bundles of secondhand clothing. Many of the items of clothing are carefully laundered and hung on racks; others are piled on the floor of the stalls. In front of the stalls stand young men and women, with pieces of secondhand clothing hangers in hand, calling on potential customers to come and patronize their wares. Nearby, in another section of the market, there are stalls where rucksacks, small purses and all sorts of bags are sold. In still another section, shoes of varying life stages are either paired up in neat rows or are stacked together. Like the clothing, the ones that are neatly set in rows are usually of better quality than the ones in stacks. In many cases, they are designer labels: this market is one place where one can pick up a Hugo Boss shirt – ‘original’, as one is often reminded by the vendors – for less than a fraction of what it would cost in a shop in a European city. But more often than not, they are simply imported Western cast-offs.

In most cases, the pieces of clothing found in the market in Lagos start their journey in the homes of European and American families. In Germany, items of clothing that are no longer wanted by their owners are packed into bags that are then deposited into roadside boxes. From there, they are taken to warehouses where they will be cleaned and sorted. Some of them are sold in the secondhand clothing shops that dot the streets of many German cities; but a large percentage are baled and exported to developing countries.

In Britain, the competition for its trade is fierce. Quite a number of charity organizations make a lot of their running cost from donations of secondhand clothing. Some rely on walk-ins – whereby donors of secondhand clothing take their pieces of clothing into a charity store. Needless to say, not all of the clothing that is taken into a charity shop is sold there. A large percentage end up being sold off to those who are described in the textile recycling industry as “commercial textile recyclers”. These are commercial organizations that collect, sort, bale and export secondhand clothing.

Some charities actually give franchise to “charity fundraisers”. These organizations collect secondhand clothing on behalf of charities, and pay the charities a certain percentage of the value of the collection. The most sophisticated charities make collections by themselves and have their own sorting and exporting firms. They sell some of their collections – usually a relatively small quantity – in their shops. The rest is sent to their processing factories, where the pieces of clothing are packed together and baled for exportation. Commercial textile recyclers, who buy clothing that charities that do not have their own sorting firms cannot sell in their shops, also make collections at areas where English municipalities designate as recycling areas. Bales of secondhand clothing are exported to East European, South Asian and African countries.

The international trade in secondhand clothing connects Western families with their counterparts in developing countries in an intricate web of desire and aspiration. Most of the time, on the part of the Westerner, this takes the form of the desire to help people who are less fortunate. Some assume that these less fortunate people are poor people in the country of the donors. Others assume that the less fortunate people are citizens in the developing world. Most people do not know that there is an active international trade in secondhand clothing. In my view, this is a more sustainable and fruitful relationship than one of pure donation, where the consumers simple receive the clothing for free.

As it is at the moment, there is a wide network of traders that is built around donated secondhand clothing. This network includes different actors, ranging from family-owned commercial textile recycling firms to small secondhand clothing importing companies, and extending to individually-owned secondhand clothing stalls. The industry provides a livelihood for them, one that would not exist if the clothing were given for free. Besides, it is definitely more dignified to purchase what one needs than to receive it as handout.

The clothing also satisfies the clothing desires of consumers. The reasons for this are not limited to affordability. To be sure, there are a lot of people who consume secondhand clothing because they cannot afford to buy new clothing. There are however others who go to shop for secondhand clothing because they believe that this is where they can find ‘original’ designers label. In a country like Nigeria, where most of the ready-made clothing is imported from China, a lot of what is available in the market are cheap Chinese knock-offs. Many people therefore prefer to buy designer labels from secondhand clothing shops because they can be sure that what they obtain there are original and good quality clothing. One could call them slaves of fashion, in search of authenticity – much like Americans and Europeans who go to secondhand clothing stores to buy vintage clothing.

---

[i] A.E. Afigbo, ‘Traditions of Igbo Origins: A Comment’, History in Africa, 10 (1983), 1-11.

[ii] Werner J. Cahnman, ‘Socio-Economic Causes of Antisemitism’, Social Problems, 5 (1957), 21-29.

[iii] Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (University of Michigan Press, 1999).

[iv] Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi, Secondhand (Pepe) Documentary, 2007.

This article was originally written for the journal of the Jewish Museum in Berlin

From NEXT:

A study by the USAID on the West Africa Trade Hub has revealed that the region’s transport costs is the highest in the world and remains so because the trucking market in the region is highly regulated.

“The regulationof the industry deter competition that would go a long way toward reducing transport costs” stated the transport advisor at the USAID Trade Hub and co-author of the study; Andy Cook with another internationally recognized transport expert; Sadok Zerelli. “The study confirms what many have suspected about the West African trucking market” the reported affirmed, noting that reducing costs of transport is key to ensuring regional food security.

… is the title of a recently published book by Kate Meagher of LSE’s Department of International Development, my friend and fellow student of African trade networks and informal economy.

Nicolas van de Walle writes in Foreign Policy about the book:

Within development circles, conventional wisdom has it that successful manufacturing sectors often develop in low-income countries thanks to identity-based social networks made up of producers working together. These networks are said to generate the social capital that can be used to overcome many of the shortcomings of underdevelopment. Meagher’s careful study of two such networks in southwestern Nigeria — of small, undercapitalized garment and shoe manufacturers — suggests that the advantages for producers within the networks are being undermined by an increasingly dysfunctional state. Meagher shows that these networks, whose roots go back to the colonial era, bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and export their goods to states throughout West Africa. But in recent years, they have proved vulnerable to Asian imports and have largely failed to develop economies of scale, invest in new machinery, or generate new lines of production; these networks, it turns out, stifle innovation and consolidation, even as they protect their members. Informed by theory as well as sustained fieldwork, Meagher’s study is a useful antidote to the purveyors of magic-bullet solutions for African development. It should be read by anyone interested in Africa’s industrialization.

Amazon page.

If we need anything now, it is more nuanced views of African political economy. That is what the book provides, in a very methodical way.

Examining data from China – the biggest internal migration experience in human history – this column finds that migrants from the same village tend to cluster at the same destination for the same occupation. This pattern is driven by social networks within villages that reduce the moving costs for future migrants, such as the risk of not finding a job.

The whole column.

One of my colleagues, Anja Peleikis, found out the same thing about Lebanese migrants in West Africa. See this article [pdf]. It is also somewhat similar to the case of the Igbo traders that I work with. One finds that the trade in a particular product is dominated by people from the same village, either within or outside the country.

The region, an established transit point for Latin American cocaine to big Western markets, has also become a drug processing site amid rising addiction rates, and drug-related violence will follow, they told a drug summit over the weekend.

“A flourishing illicit trade in the hands of organised crime is obviously a threat to the rule of law, governance and, as a result, human rights,” said Alexandre Schmidt, West African head for the U.N. Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

“But we must no longer hide the indirect consequences with regard to the increase in problems linked to drug abuse.” Some 20 tonnes of cocaine passed through West Africa in 2008, worth about $1 billion, the United Nations says.

———

Although concrete figures are hard to come by, experts said there was clear evidence of a rise in local use of cocaine and crack. Citing research in Cape Verde, the region’s initial drug hot-spot, Margarete Molnar, a health specialist at UNODC, said drug use was entrenched.

“This shows that being on the route of trafficking is a disaster,” she said. “(Law enforcement) may protect West Africa and Europe but I can tell you that in this region there are people who are hard drug users who need to be rehabilitated.”

A NEXT news report.

For an academic article on the history of the drugs trade in West Africa see this article (gated) by Stephen Ellis of the African Studies Centre, Leiden. Here is the ungated version (pdf).

In a group interview in September, 18 disgruntled truck drivers in Cotonou, Benin, vented their frustrations to two Trade Hub consultants: driving freely from Cotonou to Ouagadougou was impossible without harassment, they said. They sometimes spend three days at borders where customs officials hold up paper work when they refuse to pay bribes; meanwhile, their clients in importing countries wait impatiently to receive the goods.
At the borders and checkpoints where unofficial fees were demanded, they do not receive receipts to prove payment later to their clients. Like many other transport companies in the region, they bear costs and lose income due to unpredictable expenses on West African roads and borders.

“Even when you have all the paperwork, it is not always taken into account,” one said. “There is not a lot of documentation required really, but there are too many unnecessary delays.

“Laws are different from country to country and the fees are exceptionally high. There is really no free movement across West Africa.”

But in the agreements made between ECOWAS countries, that is not supposed to be so.

What is described in the article is the official side – which means that it concerns goods that would normally be allowed to enter into countries, either because they originate 100% from a country within the Community (mostly agricultural produce, livestock, etc) or because some form of value (officially, it should be at least 30% of the value of the product) is added in one of the countries.

Then there is the informal type. Nigeria, for instance, imposes bans on, well, almost everything that is of interest to someone of power in Nigeria. But that does not stop the importation of those things. Importers simply divert the trade to Benin and then smuggle them from Benin to Nigeria. Rice is a particular case in point. In 2007, for instance, a Nigerian newspaper reports that the total import duty on rice in Nigeria came to about 100%, while in Benin it was 38%. In the same year, it was estimated that about 2,000 tonnes of rice was re-exported (smuggled) from Benin into Nigeria per day. If you are a smart importer you simply divert your rice to Benin, pay the import duty – and those guys are pretty well organised so you WILL pay the duty - and then smuggle it into Nigeria. While I was researching these issues in Cotonou in 2008, someone mentioned that she could almost believe that the Beninese government bribes Nigeria to prohibit the importation of some goods into the country so that Benin can make some money off it.

The long and short of the story is: as long as there are these kinds of trade policy disparities within the region, regional integration is going to be something they periodically pay lip service to.

Back to the West Africa Trade Hub article:

“Making regional integration a reality requires harmonization of trade policies and practices to eliminate uncertainty for traders and customs officials at borders,” said Trade Hub Business Environment Advisor Lori Brock. “There is a price to pay when a region fails to come together following agreements, regardless of language or currency barriers.”

H/T to Osize

BBC has a report on the West African soldiers who fought with the British forces in Burma during the second world war:

Nigerians made up more than half of the total force of 90,000 West African soldiers deployed to South East Asia after 1943 as part of the British Army’s 81st and 82nd (West Africa) Divisions.

And:

Although they were paid off for their service, some claim they were promised allowances which were never paid, despite their repeated efforts over the years.

And it is not only the money – some veterans are still bitter over what they see as a lack of recognition.

“We were supposed to get Long Service and British Empire Medals” says Dangombe.

“But up until now – nothing.”.

See the whole story here.

Also check out Biyi Bandele’s novel, Burma Boy, a novel about a Nigerian who fought in Burma during the war. Here is a review of the book.