Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [41]
The next day, I visited the ramshackle provincial administrative offices. A dismal old clerk asked if I would pay $200 for the extra accreditation. I suggested $50. He agreed, but then each day brought more delays. I drifted around the city, befriended a man with a pet monkey named Johnny, drank beer at a bar owned by an Italian timber merchant, and sat on the steps of the church, looking out on the river Congo. There was no traffic on the water for lack of rain—the Intertropical Convergence Zone’s problems extend to central Africa. Drought has made the Congo’s water levels drop, and now it is full of dangerous shoals.
Finally, on the third day of waiting, I told the old clerk at the provincial offices that I would leave without the new authorization. That of course would mean he and his boss might go without the $50 “fee” they required. The clerk looked concerned. Suddenly, the document was ready. It was handwritten on old, brown paper but stamped and signed. On the verso was a different, older document: a typed travel authorization for someone else who was on a veterinary mission, also to Isangi. It read, “Congo Belge, District de Stanleyville‚ Secrétariat . . . 7 février 1957.”
Anatomy of the Ruins
That document encapsulates how states fall apart and failed states, or semi-failed states, are important because they are so vulnerable to climate change. In failed states social breakdown is the norm; yet, governance and administration are never totally absent. They exist, but in spectral form. It is as if the failed state has reverted to older, tributary methods of domination and reciprocity. Because state failure is relative, in most so-called failed states government is a semifunctional ruin—the state as improvised afterlife. The “travel document” that the clerk in Kisangani gave me is a ludicrous, yet concrete example of this: a handwritten note on the backside of a fifty-year-old colonial document. One finds this type of bureaucracy amidst collapse in most failed states, where underpaid civil servants toy officiously with the components of a defunct colonial police apparatus, not for the sake of law and order but simply to extract survival-level bribes.
Most failed or semifailed states are like that—they have hollowed out governments. Each has a flag, a currency, and a seat at the United Nations, but there is little or no law and order or functioning infrastructure. Failed states are not always apocalyptic war zones of Somalia-style mayhem. Though racked by spasms of violence, everyday life in failed states is more typically defined by the type of kleptocratic jumble found in the DRC.
In places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Guinea-Bissau, and Ivory Coast, the state is a ghost: it appears and then disappears. You can see its outline and feel its presence, but it’s not really there. For example, in Kinshasa, capital city of the DRC, there is no real law enforcement, no publicsafety program, but there is a strict, North Korean–style prohibition against taking photographs, and the police enforce it vigorously. I was once detained for two hours because I took a photograph of a huge, futuristic Space Needle–like tower that soars above the slums, a broken relic of Mobutu Sese Seko’s architectural megalomania. During my detention, I slowly negotiated the “fine” down from $500 to $150.
So it is in failed states, among the ruins of modernity past, the institutions of sovereignty rot and fade like old documents and the colonial offices that house them. On these political