World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [65]
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