A Warning to Swedes from a Former Social Democracy

The United States was once one of the world’s social democracies, although the term itself has never been used much there. “Progressive,” “liberal,” and lately thanks to Bernie Sanders, “democratic socialism,” have been words that in at least some of the periods of their usage have described social democrat politics. Social democracy is the political version of having your cake and eating it. More specifically, of demonstrating that it is possible for a government to promote economic wellbeing and social security on the one hand, and to guarantee civil and political liberties on the other.

The form of communism that emerged in places like the Soviet Union, and traditional liberalism as it flourished in places ranging from nineteenth-century Britain to the twenty-first century U.S. claimed that there was an incompatibility between these goals. Social democracy suggests otherwise.

Today, social democracy is most associated with western Europe, although variants have existed and continue to exist in places ranging from Latin America to East Asia, from southern Africa to the Pacific. Perhaps particularly in western Europe, publics today are likely to see the U.S. as home to a crude and cruel form of capitalism that pushes its citizens into astonishing precarity in the name of a curious form of freedom.

But social democracy in the U.S. was vibrant if imperfect between the 1930s and 1970s. It was most obviously encapsulated in the widely proclaimed legislative programs of successive Democratic presidents—the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society. And it transformed—sometimes fleetingly, sometimes in lasting ways—everyday life in areas of health, economic security, education, employment, organized labor, energy, agriculture and, significantly, people’s conception of what a government could be asked to do in their name.

If many people around the world today have forgotten that the U.S. was a home to social democracy, no one could have ignored the fact in its heyday. American social democratic thinkers and practitioners in government collaborated with revolutionaries in Mexico, sought to understand the strength but also the limitations of Soviet experimentation, and dispatched both advisors and onlookers to emerging social democracies in western Europe. During the Cold War, the U.S. government sought to export social democracy, partly out of conviction that it was delivering unprecedented gains at home that should also be enjoyed abroad, and partly, connected to this, from the belief that the export of social democracy was a key component of the conflict against communism, depriving the Soviet Union of its charge that capitalism was deaf to the economic and social tribulations of the people in the states where it reigned. The U.S. sought to write social democratic principles into some—but not all—of the international institutions it sought to create after the Second World War and into the principles behind the aid it exported.

Like other ideologies, social democracy was and is everywhere inflected with national characteristics. In the U.S. two of these illustrated its limitations. Particularly during the early years of the U.S. social democratic era, its design and more often its implementation was disfigured by southern segregationists. And the tensions between federal and state governments always meant that social democracy in the U.S. was less well entrenched than in more centralized systems of government.

Today, those characteristics (dog whistle politics from the right and state-federal issues, along with ideological opposition) remain a barrier to President Joe Biden’s attempts—though you would never catch him using the words—to reconfigure a social democratic framework for the U.S. in a way none of his predecessors for decades have dared to do, or even believed was desirable.

This is a somewhat roundabout way to come to Sweden’s election, taking place in just a couple of days, where two versions of the political right—one ethno-nationalist, and the other more classically liberal—appear prepared to make common cause in a way they have not previously proven able to do. Such a coalition, should it govern what is often regarded as one of the world’s most comprehensively social democratic nations, would chip away at two principles of social democracy: the principle of universality, and the notion of directed public policy, substituting a vulnerable piecemeal approach, and sub-contracting policy to the fantasy of the market, the idea that millions of aggregate combined transactions and interactions can somehow make efficient and purposeful policy. This would be a troubled coalition to be sure—a less raucous and less lopsided version of the conflicting wings of the U.S. Republican Party—but it could re-shape Sweden dramatically. And it is here that the U.S. example is instructive.

The social democratic version of the United States did not vanish overnight. And Americans—contrary to some of the condescending narratives that one hears when some Europeans discuss U.S. politics and history—did not vote at one fell swoop for the dismantling of their social democracy. There was no moment when a politician in the U.S. stood up and said, “Let’s flush this system that has brought comparative economic and social wellbeing to so many down the toilet!”, to public acclaim.

The arguments were subtler than that. They were about tradeoffs. They were about efficiencies. They were about market reforms. They were about liberalization. They were about more choice. All of which, carefully articulated, can sound like thoroughly good things. And they did not end social democracy in the U.S., even with its somewhat shallow roots and limits imposed by the federal-state divide, in one electoral cycle. I suggest that if you had asked U.S. voters in the late-1960s or even the early -1980s if they wanted to live in today’s social and economic system in the U.S.—and then described the results of the changes that have made the U.S. so unequal since then—they would not have accepted those changes. It would have seemed entirely irrational.

But because the changes occurred slowly, in piecemeal fashion, much as social democracy is often built to begin with, it was difficult for people to understand how the big picture was changing, or who or what was responsible for it changing. I suspect that something like this is at work in Sweden today—and that it has been for some time. Electoral gridlock, and the rise of ethnic nationalist parties hitherto excluded from governance, means that the Social Democratic-led governments of the last eight years have governed as minority governments, sometimes subjected to agreements that read like the playbook of the very conservatives who dismantled social democracy in the U.S.

Since the 1990s, when many thinkers in the U.S. and elsewhere proclaimed the triumph of free market liberalism and capitalism as having permanently conquered political alternatives, social democratic parties have almost universally faced crises of confidence (and sometimes comparative loss of political power) from which most continue to struggle to extricate themselves.

These factors have muddied the waters, as people place significant blame on the center left for a period during which it reigned but did not rule, or presided but did not govern, or at least reigned and governed in a highly limited manner.  And, as is typical with parties under pressure, the Social Democrats offer a sometimes-muddled message, trying to articulate core principles while appeasing what they believe voters for the right wish to hear, to occasionally incomprehensible effect.

I had quite a few conversations about politics at a playground with other parents for a two-week period—mostly people in their late-20s or 30s, living comfortable lives in affluent but expensive Stockholm, in a reasonably diverse neighbourhood, many of them enjoying the final days of their half of extraordinarily generous parental leave. Swedish political discourse seems much more careful and technocratic than is the case in the U.S., making it easy to disguise quite dramatic proposals in distinctly bland language. And I was interested in the distinction that people made between social democracy and the parties in which it is housed, and the welfare state. And yes, it is argued that key elements of the welfare state have become rooted in a political consensus that includes those from beyond the parties on the left of the political spectrum. But the rhetoric of consensus and civility masks very deep differences.

This seemed to point to a complacency when people discussed their thinking, how they would vote, and what they wanted to see happen as a result of that vote, that the key components of the welfare state aren’t tethered to any ideology, or that Swedish parties of the right are not ideological. It pointed to people’s belief that the welfare state—built on social democratic principles whether they wanted to acknowledge it or not—is an inevitable feature of Swedish life, and that the most anyone’s political labors could amount to is a kind of tinkering around the edges, improving its efficiency or affordability. But a welfare state without social democracy won’t survive long as a national project.

Much attention in the media is focused on the ethnic nationalist Swedish Democrats, who appear to be in second place in polls following a two-decade whine that wouldn’t be out of place in the nastiest corners of U.S. far-right politics. But it is in the Liberal, Moderate, and Christian Democratic Parties that I most recognize the policies and language that dismantled security and a path toward the good life in the U.S. A bit of de-regulation here, a bit of choice there, a dab of privatization here, and an ounce of means testing there might not a revolution make. But taken together, and pushed over a period of decades, even after limited, intermittent electoral victories, they point toward the further erosion of Sweden’s social democracy. Not, perhaps, for everyone, or even anyone, voting in Sweden’s election on Sunday, just as the older generations in particular who voted in successive elections for the erosion of social democracy in the U.S. most often without fully appreciating what was being unraveled, experienced comparatively few of the consequences. But certainly for future generations.

It is with a kind of morbid fascination that Swedes recount or ask about the cruelties, precarities, injustices, inequalities, bureaucracies, battles, absurdities, and inefficiencies that they hear about shaping the lives of many Americans. But Americans did not vote for those things as a package deal. They voted, episodically and with mixed convictions and only partial attention, for polite sounding reforms that are very much on the menu from which Swedes will choose on Sunday.

Living the Pyrocene

I just finished reading Stephen J. Pyne’s book The Pyrocene: How we created an age of fire, and what happens next (UC Press, 2021). Pyne is a retired historian who worked at Arizona State University, and has spent his life studying fire across several continents. Pyne’s title is a spin-off of the term “Anthropocene,” which was coined to argue that humans’ impacts on the planet, its surface, and its climate are such that we have entered a new geological age in which humans, rather than natural earth systems, will be responsible for shaping Earth.

Many people, from different vantage points, have critiqued the term “Anthropocene.” Some note that by placing “blame” for anthropogenic climate change and other damage to the planet and its ecosystems at the feet of “humanity” writ large, the term obscures how not all people—either those living today, or those who have lived across vast spans of time—have been equally culpable. Particular lifeways associated with particular models of politics and economics, and particular forms of consumption and energy use, are most responsible. Some have suggested the term “Capitalocene,” to pin the blame on an economic and political system that has encouraged systematic exploitation of people and planet alike. Others suggest “Thermocene,” to highlight the significance of different forms of energy use as determining our current state. In other words, counter-terms abound, and the idea behind them is less to dethrone the “Anthropocene,” than to argue that precision in understanding the origins of our planetary crisis will lead to precision in responding.

“Pyrocene,” in Pyne’s own words, “proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. It renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire” (3-4). Pyne documents how changing human ideas about fire and its usefulness, and a changing sense of its compatibility with human-dominated landscapes, has ruptured our relationship with this source of life and destruction on our planet. “In unprecedented ways,” Pyne writes, “the Earth [now] had too much bad fire, too little good fire, and too much combustion overall” (5). Pyne’s book is short, elegantly written, and thought-provoking. I won’t write too much about it here, other than to suggest that you read it.

But I will write a little bit—self-indulgently—about some of the ways it made me think back to the way in which fire loomed over my life as I grew up in rural northern California. As Pyne notes, fire is nothing new. What is new, is the frequency and ferocity of fire. The corner of California where I grew up has long been a fire-scape. However, according to Pyne the state’s “historical pattern had been one of a big fire or fire bust followed by a quiet period of perhaps 5 to a dozen years.” “Conflagrations were not unusual; serial fire sieges were,” and this is precisely what has unfolded the last several years in the state (113-114). This was a result of “ a perturbed climate…the legacy of land use that had scrubbed away small fires and left only big ones…a disbelief that urban fires could move from the exurban fringe to (or over) the urban core, and…a misplaced confidence that more engines and air tankers could hold the line” (114).

When I was a kid, fire had a season. And on the hot, dry summer winds that wafted through pine crowns, came a little bit of anxiety. I remember this always being worse if there was a summer lightning storm. There were different ways of knowing if a fire had started in the county. Sometimes a neighbor would call, as a part of an informal kind of phone tree, to pass on word that they had got from someone they knew. Sometimes it would come over the radio—we had no television. Sometimes it was the drone of a helicopter, surveying the forest from above. And sometimes it was the smell of smoke.

These are things I didn’t think about much at the time, but the role olfactory and auditory senses is interesting to consider. I remember my father explaining the difference between the sound of the spotter helicopters and the occasional police chopper or air ambulance that would roar overhead. For big swathes of the year, smoke was nothing to remark on. We had longer, colder winters then, and wetter springs that pushed deeper into the year. Most people where I grew up had wood stoves, and so depending on the wind, as isolated as we were, smoke drifting across crisp winter air was normal. So too was smoke in a wet autumn or spring; fire safety meant raking and burning leaves and brush, and ranches or agencies would run controlled burns. We had to check whether it was a “burn day” before starting a fire.

I had a bad stutter when I was younger, and positively loathed talking on the phone. But calling the “Burn day” number for my dad was safe, because it was automated. Our landline—a rotary phone—sat inside a little cupboard by the front door, and the number was pinned on a piece of paper to the inside of the door. There was no need to get anxious about forcing out a tortured “h-h-hello”; I just dialed the number and got the ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ from a soothingly disembodied voice. [I’m not sure my dad actually need this number written down; he drove the school bus for the elementary school, and this left him in charge of determining “snow days,” a duty he was never willing to abuse, much to my dismay. On snow days, he was responsible for calling all of the families in the district to tell them school was out of session, and he could just about dial all of those numbers from memory as they mapped along his bus route.]

But in summer, smoke was a smell out of place, and it meant instant tension and alert. One of my parents would head to the phone to call a neighbor who might know more, the other would turn on the radio. The worst was if smoke came drifting through screen windows in the night. Then I would squint out the window up the ridge in back of the house, always imagining that I could almost see the flicker of some threatening flame. I would run over scenarios in my mind about what to grab if we had to leave quickly, and imagined having to walk in the dark down the middle of the creek if we were cut off from the road. Navigating the creek—with its quiet pools, small waterfalls, and hidden boulders—in summer when it was relatively low was a favorite activity, and so I knew the places where in my imagination we could submerge ourselves to avoid flames. This sounds, I think, more traumatic than it actually was. I always went back to sleep, and I didn’t spend my days full of anxiety. Fire, and the threat it posed, was intermittent and forgettable then in a way it isn’t now.

My mom is a worrier, and I suspect she hid very well from us her fears on those days when the smoke was out of place, and when the spotter craft passed by, usually out of sight over the ridge. These days, with the fire “season” stretched to most of the year, she worries more, and more openly. If my parents—retired—travel during the summer, they often pack boxes of important things and leave them with family in the Bay Area.

Pynes notes some of the consequences of the brutal 2018 Paradise fire in California, and those that broke out around it. Eighty-five people died, 18,661 structures were destroyed. “Insurance claims,” he recounts, “strained particularly small companies. Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility whose grid had failed, faced claims for damages as high as $30 billion, and filed for bankruptcy protection while CEOs faced charges for criminal negligence. To avoid repeats, utilities began turning off power during red flag days; this affected millions of customers. Insurance companies raised rates punitively…The knock-on effects will continue for many years” (113).

My parents’ rates have gone up dramatically in the past years. The are assiduous about clearing around the house, and chunks of their property. But they are adjacent to massive properties owned by logging companies, over which they and their neighbors have no control. People poach, fish, hike, ride ATVs, shoot, cut wood, and grow weed in these big, often-untended zones, and hearing a dirt bike along these roads in the summer also creates anxiety, because a spark from the exhaust can start a fire.

The worst phone calls weren’t from neighbors with warnings about a fire of so-many acres having started in such-and-such a place. They were the automated calls ordering an evacuation. I remember two of these. For my parents these must have been terrifying. I remember worrying. But it was also a bit like a holiday. We went and stayed with an elderly family friend down in flatter, more open country. She had a VCR, which was a treat, and a thick carpet which made sleeping on the floor pretty comfortable. And huge oak trees, and a sprawling gravel driveway and lawn filled with last season’s acorns. And across the footbridge was a slough where I could never quite see the beavers.

Not everyone followed the evacuation orders. I remember us driving home to check on things in the midst of our evacuation and stopping at a defiant neighbor’s house. In the end, the fire didn’t make it terribly close, but the detailed accounts of some of the recent fires that have scoured northern California make clear the peril of staying in place. Not everyone had Helen Bowen’s house to retreat to, either. Some families came and stayed at the tiny rural school—that was closed for summer. My dad—janitor as well as bus driver—went and turned on the water, and moved around furniture to make space for people to camp out in the small cafeteria and classrooms.

The local fire hall was the center of the social scene in the community. The Christmas bazaar was held there—it was cold because the doors were kept open—and the volunteer team was a presence at Chili cookouts. The small library was located just behind the hall. The members were ordinary-looking enough, but in my mind they transformed themselves in fire season, donning their equipment and boarding their trucks.

I remember once, when vague news about a nearby fire spread faster than any concrete information, my dad and I drove up the mile-long dirt road and down the paved road to a turnout where a number of other people had gathered to share what they knew. We waved to the fire engines that rumbled by, not so different from the inhabitants of some ancient city who stood by the gates to bid godspeed to an army that marched out to confront an invading force. Some people had brought cold sodas and water, and jogged alongside the engines to hand them up to firefighters.

If the spotter planes meant anxiety, the sound of the bombers—as we called the air tankers—meant hope. This was the aerial equivalent of the cavalry arriving. Pyne, however reminds us, of the limits of these technological defenses. “California,” after all, “ had a fire protection infrastructure unrivaled in the world; it had the five largest fire departments in the country and a century of aggressive suppression experience. [But] by 2020 it could no longer pretend that a fire agency could stand between California’s firescape and a preferred way of life that chose to ignore fire” (114).

One of the points Pyne hits home is that fire suppression—the hallmark of fire management in Europe and North America for the past century and a half—is failing. Too few “good fires” creates ecological conditions ripe for too many “bad” ones, something captured by this short video created by the management team of Lassen Volcanic National Park in the wake of a brutal fire year. This speaks to the connections between historical knowledge and management. California before white settlement was not, after all, a virgin landscape, but one managed by Indigenous communities that wielded what Pyne calls the concept of a “firestick” with care (62-3).

I was on a skype call with my parents the other day. At the start of the call they mentioned that they had recently received news of a fire somewhere nearby. They weren’t sure where or how large, but they were relatively sanguine; there wasn’t much wind at least. Mid-skype call, their phone rang and they got the equivalent of an “all clear” from a neighbor. The fire was much more distant than they had first thought, and seemed to be contained. But the ‘season,’ such as we can talk about one any longer, has begun.

Remembering Kenneth Kaunda

Zambia’s former president Kenneth Kaunda has died. He led the southern African nation from 1964 until 1991. A teacher, activist, and anti-colonial leader, Kaunda assumed the presidency of Zambia at the age of forty as the country transitioned from British colonial rule as Northern Rhodesia to a nation that Kaunda sought to define through his philosophy of Zambian humanism and the slogan “One Zambia, One Nation.”





I started my academic career as an environmental historian of the British Empire in eastern Africa, but find myself currently working on political history of eastern and southern Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, meaning that Kaunda looms over much of what I think about on a daily basis.

Across Africa, Kaunda, who headed the United National Independence Party (UNIP) is understandably best remembered for his opposition to apartheid South Africa and settler Rhodesia. While most of Africa experienced decolonization between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, the political terrain looked very different in southern Africa. Apartheid South Africa was joined by white settlers’ rogue decolonization in Rhodesia. Two recalcitrant Portuguese colonies in what became Mozambique and Angola, along with a South African colony in present-day Namibia rounded out the region. Most African states were critical of these violently segregated societies, but Zambia shared a border with Rhodesia, lay within easy reach of South Africa’s powerful military, and was bound by economic orientation and transit infrastructure to both states. This meant that Kaunda’s rejection of their models as a threat to African decolonization writ large, and the material actions that his government took, carried real weight.

Kaunda declared his country willing to bear any sacrifice so that international sanctions could force Rhodesia toward a democratic decolonization. He hosted South African and Rhodesian liberation movements in Zambia, despite the dangers that large, well-armed communities of fighters posed, despite the commando and bombing raids these invited from the South African Defence Force, and in spite of the way this committed Zambia to intensive and costly diplomatic entanglements. Lusaka became the headquarters of the ANC’s External Mission which, by the 1980s, was treated by most of the world’s nations as a government in waiting.

What Kaunda’s hospitality did for the ANC--led in exile by Oliver Tambo, and dependent on the symbolic power of imprisoned figures like Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu--is hard to quantify. A daughter of ANC exiles recalls how in Kaunda’s Lusaka, ANC and other exile figures became “a new breed of Africans...determined that they would shine and shine and shine. They were possessed of the secret of freedom, a sort of inner spirit that propelled them forward and made them look--to my wide eyes at least--as though they were soaring” (Msimang, Always Another Country, 35). Kaunda, that daughter of exiles recalled, “was a dreamer...who said that independent Africa had a responsibility towards the parts of Africa that were still in chains.” The significance of Kaunda’s stance became clear when exiles travelled elsewhere in Africa. In Zambia, they were privileged refugees in a country “whose entire foreign policy was built around our protection and emancipation.” Elsewhere, they were mere sojourners (Msimang, Always Another Country, 35, 80).

Life in exile for some became corroded by rivalries, insecurities, and fatigue. But South Africans were grateful, and among Mandela’s first acts on release from prison was to travel to Lusaka to pay homage to Kaunda.

In British archives documenting this period, Kaunda comes across as a figure who deeply frustrated his British interlocutors in the government, diplomatic service, and intelligence world. Kaunda embraced a kind of dependency on Britain that his government believed would ultimately yield more benefits than costs. But Kaunda also positioned Zambia more broadly in the world through his outsized presence in the Commonwealth and roles in the Non-Aligned Movement. The RAF and British trucking firms supported the Zambian economy during the early months of Rhodesia’s rogue independence, British military training teams entered the country to build its British-commanded armed forces, and Kaunda sent young Zambian soldiers to British military academies for military education. He also committed the country to purchasing British-manufactured weapons that young officers believed locked the country into indefensible dependence on the former colonial power.

But through these actions, and the way in which they temporarily ceded Zambian freedom of movement on the Rhodesian issue, Kaunda secured substantial British security guarantees at a moment when the Zambian government lived in real fear of being drawn into an unwinnable war with the Rhodesian military that had armed itself during the colonial era in part through acquiring the wealth of Zambia’s copper mines through an aborted British experiment in imperial federation that temporarily bound Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

By the early 1970s Kaunda sent British training teams packing, replacing them with Italians. He cut off arms contracts with Britain, signing new ones with Yugoslavia. Zambian soldiers still went to train at Mons and Sandhurst, but still more went to India’s military academies. And Tanzania’s defence forces provided political education to Zambia’s military. Just a few years earlier the British government was convinced that it could continue to dominate Zambia’s military, intelligence, and national security apparatus for years to come, but suddenly found themselves powerless. And Zambia gained a rail outlet to the Indian Ocean due to its cooperation with Tanzania and China.

Kaunda’s commitment to liberation in southern Africa translated into a series of lasting images: Kaunda meeting with South African Prime Minister John Vorster in a railway carriage on the Victoria Falls Bridge; Kaunda squiring Olof Palme to the Rhodesian frontier, which the Swedish prime minister described as “the border of human decency” before unleashing massive funds for the ANC and other liberation movements; Kaunda dancing with Margaret Thatcher as part of a Commonwealth diplomatic offensive to bring down the rogue Rhodesians.

The British were intensely frustrated by what they saw as the two faces of Kaunda: his willingness to publicly flay them for their inability and unwillingness to successfully confront Rhodesia and South Africa; and his private willingness to compromise. The former saw him threaten by turns to leave the Commonwealth or to move to evict Britain from the organization that it regarded as an extension of its empire. The latter saw him broker deals in Angola with the South African government and its clients there that put him opposite more radical African liberation movements and their Cuban supporters.

Kaunda’s constant moralizing, however much it infuriated the British and others, was successful both in shifting global opinion, and in constructing a lasting image of Kaunda as a flawed but upright statesman. When he condemned South Africa in a widely distributed Commonwealth pamphlet on the regional costs of apartheid, he wrote that he wore several hats: “as president of one of the victim states; as the Chairman of the six Frontline States for which this report is about; as a member of the Commonwealth or simply as an ordinary mortal appalled” by what apartheid had wrought. “The ideology of apartheid,” he declared, was “hitting its neigbhours back into the stone age” (Apartheid Terrorism: the Destabilization Report, 1989, xi-xii). In a comparison designed to stir the global conscience, Kaunda compared the physical and structural violence of apartheid, and its relentless plundering of its neighbors, to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Best known for his stance against Rhodesia and South Africa, Kaunda also admitted South Asian refugees from eastern Africa at a time when other African nations were closing their doors to these stateless families. Kaunda cast a wide net with his diplomacy, and used the spectacular national parks his government helped to create as a backdrop for diplomacy, one day hosting Indira Gandhi, another brokering South African diplomatic deals, at a government lodge in the South Luangwa National Park.

On the home front, Kaunda sought to construct a developmental state that conveyed benefits to Zambians long denied by the uneven structures of colonial rule. Building a national economy to replace the extractive one that preceded it required dealing with a white-dominated mining sector, the managers of which resisted Africanization. Nationalization and planning were key tools of Kaunda’s early governments, and as the “One Zambia, One Nation” slogan demonstrated, Kaunda was deeply concerned with bridging the gaps that separated Zambians.

Some of these gaps were racial or tribal--legacies of colonial rule, competing nationalisms, and the diversity of the vast territory that Zambia contained. In western Zambia, the Lozi kingdom chafed when promised autonomy failed to materialize. Europeans on the Copperbelt--the powerhouse of the Zambian economy--not only dragged their feet when it came to training and promoting African employees, but publicly impugned Africans’ abilities, indicting not just their employees, but Kaunda and his cabinet. At least as much as these divisions, the ones between urban and rural Zambians preoccupied Kaunda, who worried that Zambians inhabited two worlds.

His squishy philosophy of Zambian humanism--and the symbols of industry and agriculture, tradition and modernity, on the national seal where it resided--sought to bridge these worlds. Like Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa, humanism sought to rehabilitate an African past and to graft it onto the promise of socialism. Less ideological than Nyerere, Kaunda’s humanism was more malleable. But far from this fact rendering it inconsequential, it gave it a different, potentially demotic kind of power. Letters from Zambians to their government officials on a host of policy issues during the 1960s and 1970s invoked Kaunda’s humanism--subtly or otherwise. The power they recognized these invocations as giving their claims is a testament to the multiple, unpredictable lives of Kaunda’s political thought.

Kaunda’s Zambia, it should be said, was not all brotherly love. A new generation of historians has moved beyond the uncritically sympathetic portrayals of earlier generations, and is exploring more complex dynamics of Kaunda’s legacy. Kaunda and his government were distinctly intolerant of rival forms and sources of authority in Zambia, or of challenges to their rule and governing prerogatives.

UNIP had joined the rival ANC liberation party in encouraging Africans to poach in late colonial Northern Rhodesia as an expression of their discontent with the injustices of colonial rule, which extended to restricting Africans’ access to wildlife resources. But when UNIP assumed power, Kaunda was unforgiving in his persecution of poachers, and baffled by the chiefs who sought to protect them. Members of Alice Lenshina’s Lumpa Church were killed in their scores for challenging state authority, and dissenting members of Kaunda’s government were dealt with harshly, some of them experiencing a kind of permanent internal exile. Kaunda ultimately engineered the creation of a one-party state. He argued, in common with figures like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, that multi-party democracy left young African nations vulnerable to predatory superpowers and their clients in the context of the Cold War, and that partisan divisions could too neatly map onto the ethno-linguistic divisions produced by the country’s diversity. This was true, but also self-serving.

In government, Kaunda was a micromanager. His nation confronted by massive economic and social challenges, and enormous foreign policy conundrums, Kaunda nonetheless found time to send dozens of missives to central and local government officials on the distinctly tangential topic of wildlife conservation. Did lechwe--a species of antelope--need a special preserve, Kaunda wondered? Could fertilizer be deployed in the game-rich Luangwa Valley without harming the fauna there? Could ideas he scratched out on the back of an envelope for translocating dangerous animals be successfully implemented by the wildlife department?

Zambia’s robust economy and growth, powered by development plans’ harnessing of wealth from the mining sector, plummeted during the 1970s as sudden global trends echoed through the country’s political economy. The strengths and pitfalls of Zambia’s economic management since the 1960s is receiving far more serious scholarly attention the past decade, but its dependence on the mining sector, and that sector’s dependence on the global economy, exposed its vulnerabilities during the 1970s and created a cycle of debt that frustrated the long-term goals of its development plans.

In the early 1990s, Kaunda’s lustre was gone. His compromises in Angola and with South Africa more broadly seemed out of step with more aggressive diplomacy and armed struggle. Facing considerable popular pressure in Zambia, Kaunda altered Zambia’s constitution to allow for multi-party elections. Voters gave Kaunda and his party a comprehensive thumping at the polls, and in the years that followed his departure, the new Zambian government introduced constitutional changes designed to bar his return to office.

Kaunda’s years as elder statesman saw his rehabilitation. And his moving speech at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in 2013 provided amusement and nostalgia--the sight of Kaunda taking frail steps from his seat, and then sprinting to the podium to the roar of the audience, and his typically staccato rebuke of “young man” in his fifties or sixties who sought to end his praise of Madiba and condemnation of the “Boers”, made him a figure who commanded respect without demanding absurd adoration.

But Kaunda became more than a figure of nostalgia and fun. For people uncomfortable with Nelson Mandela’s dance with De Klerk at the end of apartheid in South Africa, Kaunda could be celebrated for his publicly-uncompromising stance against that regime. For Zambians concerned about the destruction that ethnic divisions seemed to threaten in the nation, Kaunda could be admired for his Zambian humanism. For those frustrated with Robert Mugabe’s brutal suppression of his political opponents, Kaunda could be admired for taking his cues from Zambian voters in 1991--although that required a certain amount of forgetting. For those frustrated by the neoliberalism underpinning the structural adjustment regimes and the damage they wrought on Africa, Kaunda’s national development plans and aspiration to build Zambia anew after colonialism could provide inspiration.

Historians and Zambians writ large will continue to debate Kenneth Kaunda’s presidency and political legacy--in some regards this process has only seriously begun recently--but his passing is more than an occasion for mourning in Zambia. It is an occasion for revising debates about how to fashion a good, just political economy. It is a moment for considering solidarity across borders in the face of profound racism. It is a reminder of the vitality of debates about how countries should make their way in the world. And it will hopefully spark new frameworks for thinking about the contributions and legacies of a figure who jovially and impatiently loomed over Zambia and Africa.

Book Review--We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire

“We’re here because you were there,” the words of a migrant in Britain explaining their presence in the heart of a declining empire in the mid-twentieth century, represent perhaps the most obvious and least interesting insight of Ian Sanjay Patel’s compelling account of Britain’s attempts to define citizenship and belonging in the nation amidst decolonisation. By those words, of course, the migrant meant that the presence of people from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa in Britain was the result of British imperialism.

In We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Verso, 2021), Ian Sanjay Patel tells not just a story of migrants arriving to Britain in the twentieth century, sometimes fleeing crises of British making in new nations, but the manner in which decolonization sparked British attempts to define for nearly the first time the meaning of citizenship. Patel’s brilliant book is still more than these things, and serves as a fresh narrative for the trajectory of the British Empire after the Second World War.

Before the 1960s, British citizenship included many people in Britain’s colonies, even if in those colonies people were vulnerable to the extraordinary violence of the British colonial state. As Patel puts it, “the 1948 [British Nationality] Act turned out to be an explosive piece of legislation. The number of non-white people aroudn the world who had a right to migrate to Britain in the 1950s far outstripped the number of white British people already resident in Britain” (6). This was the moment when Britons were finally compelled to confront the rhetoric that had long served as a justification for empire-building: that they were created a global British family. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the physical and structural violence that defined daily life in that empire, much of it underpinned by deep racism, this “homecoming” of the rhetoric of empire was an unhappy one.

Of interest to a growing body of scholarship on settler colonialism, Patel documents how the innovations that led to British attempts to define citizenship in increasingly exclusive terms, came originally not from the British government in London, but from Britain’s settler colonies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Through race-based immigration quotas, and through mechanisms like apartheid in South Africa, these settler colonies began the process of defining membership in the political community in racial terms. And it was to their example that the British government itself turned from the 1940s onward. Originally its attempts to delimit Britishness so narrowly were frustrated or limited, but the pressures of decolonization, the ascendance of immigration as a political issue, and disenchantment with a Commonwealth that was less pliant than British elites had hoped, led to successes.

Patel rightly observes that Britain’s 1948 legislation “went against the trend of the post-1945 world towards national citizenship models in which membership was defined in more bounded ways (ethnicity, territory) around an imagined nation-state” (58). And so defining Britishness anew in response to populism and racism called for a retreat to the standard model of citizenship, using “immigration law rather than nationality law” to define belonging (79).

In developing this history, Patel explodes the widely popular and frequently cited myth that population, or the needs of the economy, rather than racism, were the driving forces behind the manner in which Britain sought to regulate immigration in the 1960s and beyond. His broad, analytical narrative of decolonization is matched by careful use of the archival record, which clearly demonstrates how British elites by turns responded to and stoked demands for the dramatic changes in the meaning of British citizenship (168-185, 193, 197, 204).

In the final chapters of the book, Patel focuses in particular on the fates of South Asians in Kenya and Uganda, where the trajectory of national-era politics rendered those communities vulnerable, respectively in 1968 and 1972. These “crises” exposed the fragility of British narratives about empire. Firstly, because the mechanisms national governments in Kenya and Uganda used to expel Asians were those bequeathed to them by colonial rule: so much for representative democracy and the treasured Westminster model being the primary governmental legacies of a supposedly benevolent British rule. And secondly because many of those being pushed from their homes laid claim to the British citizenship they had retained at independence. 

The agonizing frustrations of people rendered stateless, or illegally blocked from entry to Britain, and their convoluted paths across Europe or through the Commonwealth, which only sometimes ended with their settlement in a crueler, harsher Britain than that of their imaginations, are moving to hear recounted, and are one of many strengths of Patel’s book. I can easily imagine assigning this text when I next teach a course on the British Empire. We’re Here Because You Were There is a careful, compelling, and urgent book. Not least because the simplest of truths embodied in its title remains one about which a considerable number of Britons inhabit a state of denial today.

Book Review--The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

Compared to a country like the United States, where federal and state lands to which citizens can lay substantial if still fraught claim, the overwhelming majority of land in Britain is private. Even “national” parks in England and Wales comprise a patchwork of lands under different ownership regimes, to which people have overlapping, highly litigated claims, those of private landowners often retaining real force. The significance of this fact, the forms that it takes, and the background to the privatization of this land form the background to Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (Bloomsbury, 2020). In a book that blends nature writing, history, social commentary, and advocacy, and supplemented by beautiful black and white illustrations, Hayes takes readers along as he trespasses on a series of properties across England.

Each chapter in Hayes’ book is devoted to an account of a trespass he committed on a particular English property. Some of the trespasses are brazen, but Hayes goes to great lengths to demonstrate how the legal meanings of this term have been dramatically expanded, with implications not just for roamers and ramblers, but for political expression and dissent. Each episode is rich in its description of landscapes, its faunal and floral inhabitants, and the social dynamics that structure access. Readers can almost imbibe the smells of grassy fields and river embankments in summer, or feel leaves beneath their feet.

But more powerful than the descriptions of spaces from which the public are excluded are the accounts of how these properties and their borders, and the legal regimes which define them, came to be. From the fortunes gathered from the slave trade (Hayes delves into UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery project), to the marriages that cemented estates to the portfolios of current Members of Parliament, to the means--historic and current--that landowners deploy to defend their properties, Hayes leaves readers with much to consider.

Hayes reminds readers that there is nothing natural about England’s strict demarcation of property borders and intolerance of trespass. The earlier great era of enclosure--the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--with all the social strife they generated were followed by a second selling off of the public estate during the 1980s and 1990s. These dramatic processes, Hayes argues, remain under-considered when thinking about the meanings of space and democracy in England today.

Alternatives to England’s draconian laws of trespass (and it is important to emphasise that the property regime in question is an English and Welsh one) abound. Scotland’s public rights to lands, emerging from the devolution project of the late-1990s, are far more generous than those south of the border. If the creation of a massive federal estate--like that which exists in the United States--is geographically and legally impractical, Scandinavian nations that offer the public substantial rights of access to private property offer an alternative model.The Book of Trespass is written for a wide audience, and Hayes is as expert and gentle a guide through the legal and historical thicket of trespass in England as down the footpaths and over the fences of the nation’s countryside. I knew a bit of this history--both from studying British history and from having hiked quite a bit in the British Isles--but after reading Hayes’ powerful, amusing, and deeply thought-provoking book I will not view the British countryside in the same way.

Book Review--Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean

I generally post an end of year summary of some of the enjoyable things I’ve read during the year, but thought I would try writing short reviews here on the blog of some of the historical works (and maybe some fiction) as I finish them up.

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In recent decades, historians of the Americas, Western Europe, and West Africa have begun to study what they call the “Atlantic World.” This term stems from a recognition of how interconnected different places bordering the Atlantic became from the 1500s onward, and of how studying phenomena like slavery, migration, trade, ecological transformation, and the flow of political ideas requires scholars to step over the national borders that often make up the historian’s “unit” of analysis, and instead examine how these things played out across the Atlantic. It is also an approach that recognizes how oceans and bodies of water more generally are highways for people, products, and ideas.

Long before the Atlantic became this kind of interconnected space, the Indian Ocean functioned in a similar way for states and people in eastern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeastern, and East Asia. Although some scholars have long agitated for this kind of approach to be applied to the Indian Ocean, there has been a particularly interesting boom in historical scholarship in the past years, and Thomas McDow’s Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2018) is a book that is perhaps among the best examples of it that I have seen.

McDow studies nineteenth century movements between Oman and East Africa, while also observing how these interconnected regions also depended on wealth, expertise, and migrants from South Asia, other parts of the Middle East, and inner African states. To document the actions of Omani rulers (who also came to rule Zanzibar, and moved their capital to the island to firm up their interests along the East African coast), traders from Nyamwezi (the area south of Lake Victoria in present day Tanzania), and more “ordinary” migrants from Oman, and everyone in between, McDow studied legal contracts from archives in Zanzibar, and mapped out the connections they revealed.

His focus on these legal and economic transactions also reveals the power of kinship networks in facilitating people’s social and economic and physical mobility, their financial successes (or failures). I studied anthropology as an undergraduate and got some exposure to that discipline’s way of looking at kinship, which tended to be more rigid, and almost mathematical in calculating how structures of kin relations affected social and cultural life. Kinship as McDow brings it to life in the Indian Ocean was something altogether different. People were moving across this oceanic world at a time of tremendous social change--this was also the era when the British made their presence felt in the Indian Ocean, through anti-slavery campaigns, through their interest in the movement of Indian colonial subjects, and through their own colonialism in eastern Africa. The dynamism of the place and the period meant that kinship relations, as well as the identities associated with them (what did it mean to be Swahili? Or Zanzibari?) were fluid, complex, and unpredictable.

The book shifts scales very effectively, sometimes discussing large scale migration; sometimes focusing on Indian Ocean geopolitics; and also offering fascinatingly detailed portraits of historical actors. McDow also draws on some environmental history methodologies by documenting how environmental change and fluctuation in Oman was responsible for prompting some of the migration of people from coastal and interior Oman to coastal and interior eastern Africa.

This was a very complex but also rewarding piece of scholarship well worth a read for anyone interested in eastern Africa or the Indian Ocean world. As well as the contracts in Zanzibar’s archives that McDow mined to tell this elaborate story, and the complex peopling of the region, this period of history left behind material remains. Among the structures on Zanzibar that testify to the significance of this era was one of the Omani ruler’s palaces--Beit Al Ajaib. Sadly, after years of neglect and some apparent corruption amidst a refurbishment, this structure collapsed in December. It is telling, however, that from a recognition of its history in the region, the government of Oman has pledged funds to reconstruct the tower of the palace.

Uganda's election and crisis of democracy

Today, Ugandans have been voting in their country’s general elections, in which they will choose a president and elect parliamentarians. Incumbent president Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, is pulling out all the stops to ensure his victory, with catastrophically violent results. The Ugandan security services have brutally targeted the campaign of Bob Wine, a charismatic, politically-minded musician who is Museveni’s most formidable rival for the presidency. Museveni’s deployment of violence is nothing new, but this year he has the convenient excuse of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has given the state the thin cover it needs to terrorize Wine’s supporters as they rally around the country. Wine has been harassed, arrested, and injured, and his supporters and security have been killed. The Ugandan government has now blocked access to Facebook in the final 24-hour stretch.


I experienced, in a small way and from a comparatively safe distance, the violence of Museveni’s security state in 2012. I was living in Old Kampala, dividing my days between research at Makerere University, the National Library, the Uganda Wildlife Authority, and the Ugandan Parliament. In the shadow of what was then known as the Gaddafi National Mosque rival politico-religious factions engaged raucously in the street. Concerned less by any threat to the state, and more to establish its primacy in enforcing order, the security state showed up.

In the hostel where I was then the sole resident, I was sitting and reading in a spartan courtyard surrounded by dormitories and private rooms. I first heard tear gas being used, and the hostel manager careened from the front of the building into a refuge in the back. Tear gas canisters meant for demonstrators out on the road ricocheted around the courtyard, and within seconds my eyes felt afire. I hadn’t dealt with tear gas before, but I plunged my face under a faucet in the yard. The military police switched to live rounds, and my eyes took a back seat as I sprinted to my room and dove beneath the bed. It was all over in a few minutes, and the Daily Monitor issued a lugubrious report the following day on the violence by authorities and the handful of deaths that resulted.

Such has become politics in Museveni’s Uganda, a particular irony since the president was feted in the late-1980s as the figure to bring a decisive end to the chaos engendered by Idi Amin’s leadership and the violence that followed his deposition by Tanzanian armed forces after he pushed the otherwise-peaceful Julius Nyerere too far.

It is tempting to say that in other times Museveni’s violence might have drawn the ire of the U.S. government, curbing his ability to lash his opponent and his citizens with such impunity. But Museveni is on his sixth--perhaps soon seventh--U.S. president, and as Helen Epstein illustrates in her book Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror, the Ugandan president is skilled at wrapping American presidents around his little finger. Museveni’s “genius,” according to Epstein, was to “capitalize on Western ambivalence about Africa’s capacity for democracy and self-determination,” using “generous foreign aid to turn Uganda into a military dictatorship dressed up to look like a democracy” (22).

During the Cold War many African states manipulated U.S. and European governments by casting themselves as allies in the fight against Communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with a wave of democratization across the continent, in part due to long-running pro-democracy campaigners finally making headway, and in part due to the U.S. withdrawing its support from many authoritarian figures who were newly seen as an embarrassment rather than an anti-communist bulwark.

Museveni was among the first would-be authoritarians to realize that the “War on Terror” provided a golden opportunity for him to play a similar role. Ugandan soldiers fighting far afield against enemies of the U.S. have bought him extraordinary indulgence, and Museveni’s credentials as an elder statesman, political revolutionary, and ambitions for closer regional integration ensured that he maintains the respect of his political peers in East Africa and beyond.

Museveni manipulated the Bush administration with ease, given the zeal with which it sought to export raw American power. Obama and his officials discussed the so-called War on Terror less crudely, but prosecuted it with a similarly ruthless and frequently lawless vigor. The Trump administration didn’t even pretend to care about the preservation of global democracies in its conduct of foreign policy. And already Museveni is turning his eye toward the new dispensation.

Not for Museveni the fence-sitting of many of the other world’s authoritarians after Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. Just a few days after the election, Museveni took to Twitter to congratulate Biden, emphasize the bonds that Christianity and the African American community forged with Uganda, and make a pitch to renew the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. Biden is likely to be less interventionist in his foreign policy. But that could work in Museveni’s favor, should he be re-elected. Doing the dirty work of the U.S. in regional conflicts, and sending Ugandan soldiers where Americans wish to go but fear to tread, could earn him gratitude and a blind eye toward authoritarianism at home. During the Obama administration Biden was a voice of caution--partly about foreign intervention, but also about parting ways with America’s long-time “friends,” however viciously unsavoury those friends might be. Today in the world, the U.S. has fewer long-term security partners with boots on the ground on behalf of U.S. supposed security interests than Museveni and the Uganda People’s Defence Force.

Kenya’s Daily Nation has been reporting that voting materials have arrived late in some areas known to lean toward the opposition. The newspaper also outlined a host of technical glitches and personnel failures at polling stations around the country. This does not bode well for voters concerned about jobs, corruption, infrastructure, and healthcare, being able to change the country’s political course. If no candidate receives 50% of the vote, the top candidates continue to a second round. Museveni has never come close to having to compete in a second round. 

Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka observed the sad irony that threats to democracy in the U.S. are diverting media and governments’ attention, such as it ever was, from the ongoing crisis of Ugandan democracy.

Some memorable reads from 2020

Although my family has been healthy and more fortunate than most through 2020, this was a year that deprived many not only of their health, wellbeing, jobs, or even their lives, but also of many of the pleasures of life. Of travel. Of meeting--outside of zoom--with friends. Of enjoying public spaces. This past year did not do wonders for my ‘productivity’ on most counts. But it did not take away my reading material, or my ability to enjoy reading at great length. I read plenty of lousy things along with the great things, but below are some of the highlights of my reading year and, as always, I’m keen for recommendations from anyone out there.
 

My “work” and “pleasure” books often overlap. This was particularly the case for a whole group of things I’ve read since March with environmental themes.

Most recently, I read Chris Otter’s Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology. Otter studies the way that foodstuffs--meat, sugar, and what--and human bodies--their metabolism and wellbeing--were altered as industrializing Britain’s habits and patterns of consumption took it far beyond its boundaries in a quest for food and the things to sustain food. Whole ecosystems--in South America, the Canadian Prairies, India, Australia--were altered to feed Britons, whose changing diets, and the technologies necessary to sustain those diets, literally altered the planet. Otter’s book not only makes a huge intervention about the relationship between food and ecology, but links this relationship to social inequality.

Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District, takes readers to an ostensibly more bucolic environment. I’ve spent a great deal of time in England’s Lake District, and enjoyed this take on attempts to build community and find meaning out of a discomfort with the sweeping global changes that Otter described in Diet for a Large Planet. The book brings together histories of families, social networks, movements, and environments.

Even more enjoyable was Patrick Barham’s Badgerlands: The Twilight World of Britain’s Most Enigmatic Animal. Barkham takes readers through a bit of the history of human’s interactions with badgers--spoiler: they have not always been regarded as cute, cuddly, and worthy of protection. But most fascinatingly, he describes his travels around Britain meeting individuals who have become fascinated by and invested in the wellbeing of these animals. Finally, the book offers a snapshot of the intense debates in Britain over the past decades about whether badgers need protecting or destroying, because of their contested role in spreading bovine tuberculosis.

Thomas Lekan studies a very different ecosystem and set of issues in Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti. Lekan examines the involvement of German zookeeper and conservationist Bernhard Grzimek in redefining for Germans and the world the value of the Serengeti ecosystem in Tanzania. Grzimek’s advocacy created a history of Western investment in Tanzania’s protected areas and wildlife that endures to the present, but steamrolled other historical uses of the Serengeti’s landscape and human-scape, and represented real hubris, informed, Lekan tells us, both by West Germans’ post-World War II history, and East Africa’s history of colonialism.

One of my grad school advisors, Tabitha Kanogo, published a short biography of Wangari Maathai in Ohio University Press’ Short Histories of Africa series. Maathai was a Nobel Prize-winning Kenyan conservationist, and Kanogo puts her environmentalism and feminism center stage. The book is not only a great account of Maathai’s life, but also takes readers through some of the most important developments in Kenya’s history over the past century.

Grad school colleague, Bathsheba Demuth, wrote Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. I hugely enjoyed this incredibly well-written and very moving history of the people, animals, and relationships that cross over national boundaries past and present in the Arctic. I’m excited to re-read this book in the spring, when students in my environmental history class read it as a case study.

The last of the environmental-themed books that numbered among this year’s favorites was James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Scott draws on the last couple of decades of scholarship of early peoples and states to get at issues that anthropologists and others have previously raised about the origins of human settlement, hierarchy, and state-formation. Scott suggests that agriculture might have bound people less because of the bounty it represented, than because of the power it--and grains in particular--gave the powerful to consolidate their authority. This very thought-provoking read, both because and in spite of Scott’s anarchist vantage point, is another one I’m having students read in the spring.

I had a hard time keeping my “favourites” among the African history books I read the past year this short, but here’s my attempt.

In my many visits to Kenya, I’ve ridden, dodged, and watched the ubiquitous matatus (minivans that serve as mass transit). Kenda Mutongi’s Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi is a phenomenal history of the rise of the matatu, and charts public transit in Nairobi from the segregation-stained days at the end of British rule through entrepreneurial attempts by matatu owners to occupy or create markets for mass movement. The book documents strikes, organizational leadership, commuter experiences, and much more.

Paul Lovejoy uses his book Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions to argue that West African jihads on the Sahel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should take their place alongside the French and American and Haitian Revolutions of the same period for their world history significance. Lovejoy argues that many jihads or their leadership were at least partly responding to the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and played a role in contesting--at least for people regarded as a part of the words of places like the Sokoto Caliphate--the endurance of that system. He also documents the role of enslaved people from areas affected by the jihads in leading anti-slavery risings in the Americas. I include this book although I think the topic and argument was somewhat let down by the editing, writing style, and density in some places. Its claims are definitely deserving of a broad audience.

Jacob Dlamini’s The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police was an intriguing meditation on memory, violence, and the logic of South Africa’s apartheid government, as it compiled details--sometimes exhaustive, sometimes contradictory--on the lives of its critics and opponents. Dlamini launches his investigation through, as his title suggests, a document or set of documents known as the Terrorist Album.

Historian Wendy Laura Belcher translated The Life of Walatta-Petros, a seventeenth century text about Walatta-Petros, an Ethiopian saint from the same era. I had previously read the full-length version, with extensive annotations and beautiful illustrations, but my students and I read the concise edition. The Life is a spectacular window into Christianity in seventeenth century Ethiopia, the lives of women, and the political dynamics of the African kingdom.

Many non-historians might be familiar with the history of the Congo during the nineteenth and early twentieth century through Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Africanist Robert Harms approaches the history of the Congo basin and its surroundings from a different direction in Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa. Harms’ magnificent book explores the final few decades of the nineteenth century through the interactions of traders, explorers, and political powerbrokers. This book also moves more from east to west, charting connections with the East African coast and Indian Ocean world. Like King Leopold’s Ghost, this is designed to be accessible to a wider audience.

A few other non-fiction things stood out this year.

With students, I read Stuart Hall’s memoir, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Hall was a British cultural theorist, and his moving memoir is a window not just into the intellectual circles in which he moved and that he helped to shape, but into a life lived, as the title suggests, between the Caribbean and Britain.

But my favourite memoir of the year was Sisonke Msimang’s beautiful Always Another Country. Msimang grew up in the community of South African exiles living in Lusaka, her father part of the African National Congress’ External Mission. Her memoir is a child’s and young woman’s perspective of the last decades of apartheid--seen from Lusaka, Nairobi, Canada, and the U.S.--and the first decades of South Africa that emerged from it. It was beautifully written and moving.

Also related to South Africa was a memoir/history from Larry Writer, Pitched Battle: in the Frontline of the 1971 Springbok Tour of Australia. Writer documents how the Australian anti-apartheid movement targeted the South African rugby team’s 1971 tour. For anyone still stubborn enough to think that sports and politics first became unnaturally entwined by Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, this should be an eye opener, particularly because the determined methods of the anti-apartheid protesters and the brutal response of authorities resemble the politics of our own era.

Distant from most of my reading about Africa and European history was Amy Offner’s Sorting out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas. This elegant book focused on Colombia, and how disillusioned New Dealers took their expertise in development abroad on a quest for privatization in Latin America. American internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s is usually associated with attempts to export social democracy, but Offner shows how this was not always the case. Colombia became a proving ground for the privatization, austerity, and hostility toward social democracy that neoliberals later enshrined in the U.S.

I particularly enjoy historical scholarship on areas and periods I know less about when historians master the ability to capture a place and a time in its various dimensions. Gyan Prakash accomplishes this in Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point. The turning point in question is India’s “Emergency,” and what it meant for Indian democracy, but Prakash interweaves details of the country’s universities, automobile manufactures, sterilization campaigns, and more to create a lasting impression of the circumstances in which Indira Gandhi left her fateful marker on India’s historical trajectory.

I read three very different California-themed books. The first was Jim Newton’s Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown. Regular readers of this blog--I assume one or two might exist--will know that if he knew I existed, I would be Jerry Brown’s nemesis. This biography is nonetheless far better than others that have been produced about California’s four-term governor in recent years. While still on balance fairly uncritical in its approach, it does a really nice job of situating Brown’s life and career against the backdrop of California’s twentieth century history. In addition to learning much about Brown, readers will gain insights into cultural, economic, political, and other trends in California.

My colleague William Bauer takes a very different approach to California’s past in California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History. Using oral history projects from the New Deal era, Bauer writes a history of California that upends the usual benchmarks of time and place and source material by letting the Indigenous participants in the oral history projects, their memories, their myths, their names, and their paths guide us through the state we thought we knew. I particularly enjoyed this because many of the places Bauer and his narrators explain are ones in the northern half of the state that have played some role in my life.

The final read was also “personal,” in that northern California has been badly ravaged by wildfires in the past years. These fires are bigger, hotter, and less seasonal versions of the ones that forced my family’s evacuation on multiple occasions as a child. We thankfully had a home in the woods to return to on each occasion, unlike the residents of Paradise, California. Alistair Gee and Dani Anguiano shed light on the havoc the Camp Fire wreaked on many of the town’s residents in Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy. The book profiles a tragedy, but also the lives of people in rural and suburban northern California.

My fiction reads for the year ranged from some really superb things below, to lousy fiction I used to while away the tedium of quarantine.

Tade Thompson’s Rosewater was a sci-fi piece set in Nigeria around a team of government agents and scientists dealing with the presence of an alien biodome that has embedded itself in Nigeria’s soil. I don’t read a ton of sci-fi these days, and so I’m not sure how this measures up to other things in the genre, but I enjoyed the characters and the premise, and hope to get to the second two installments of the trilogy it inaugurates during 2021.

I enjoyed Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze when it came out some years back. The Shadow King is, if anything, better. Along with The Dragonfly Sea, this was probably the most elegantly written of the fiction I read this year. The novel focuses on Ethiopian women involved in resisting the Italian invasion in 1935. Memory, photography, and the weight of histories, personal and political alike, that different women from across Ethiopian society carried with them into the tumult of the ‘30s make the book an intense read.

Words like “lyrical,” “beautiful,” and “poetic” get overused to the point of meaninglessness by reviewers. But Yvonne Adhiambo Ouwor’s The Dragonfly Sea was all of those things, and the best novel I read this year. I don’t generally dog-ear novels the way I do books I’m using for research, but did so with this one, finding passages that elegantly captured a perspective, a fictional embodiment of some historical or contemporary event, or were just simply too perfect not to revisit. Set on Pate, and island off the coast of Kenya, the novel follows a young woman beyond the far reaches of the Indian Ocean, where she serves as the embodiment of a China-Africa relationship that slumbered for centuries. Her island community disrupted by Kenya’s participation in the War on Terror, studenthood in China, and the oceanic voyages all make for a magnificent novel.

Water is also at the heart of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. Set in a dystopian future (maybe 2021 at the rate we’re going) in which water is a commodity worth killing for in the arid American west, the novel imagines the power that state water agencies would wield, the black market trade around the natural resource and its unnatural uses, and the havoc this would inflict on its characters. From a literary standpoint the book doesn’t have the virtues of some of those above, but it’s a good read.

My book club chose Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for one of the year’s reads. This poetic novel-that-reads-like-and-sort-of-is-a-memoir dealt with coming of age, migration, generation, and sexuality, in a way that made the author’s previous work as a poet entirely unsurprising. Well worth it.

At a job talk in the English department, someone mentioned Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. The short, powerful novel satirizes the self-help genre, while taking readers through in a moving way through its protagonist’s life story, and the paths taken and not taken.

Peace Adzo Medie’s His Only Wife explored the dynamics of family, social class, marital expectations, and womanhood in contemporary Ghana. In many ways unremarkable in its plot, this was nonetheless a fast-paced read that created a strong sense of pace and both a good central character and supporting “cast.”

I wanted to like Jonathan Coe’s Middle England more than I actually did. I can’t decide if it was the book that didn’t do as much for me as the earlier two installments in Coe’s fictional postwar Britain--The Rotter’s Club and The Closed Circle--or if I just didn’t like the characters as they had aged. The book was also billed as the novel to capture Brexit era Britain, and that didn’t feel quite right either. So it’s on here partly out of nostalgia for a return to characters who’ve been sitting unremembered on the shelf for a decade and a half, but also because some of the moments of absurdity Coe writes into his characters frequently bumbling lives make the book enjoyable, even if not the thing to sum up Britain’s 2020 zeitgeist.

There were a few books this year that I was particularly anticipating. One of them was Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi. In this epic, Ngugi retold the Gikuyu founding narrative in grand style. There were places where I felt things fell a little flat, or were a bit anachronistic, but even so The Perfect Nine was fantastic in capturing the energy of a world and society being made anew against a Kenyan ecoscape smoldering with magic and myth and history and human presence.

Determined to have students in my spring class read a novel, I decided on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, widely heralded as a novel that captures the dynamics of the Anthropocene. It certainly did a marvelous job of capturing a world of people on the move, willingly and otherwise. That same world is undergoing rapid environmental change, and Ghosh takes readers right to the places where these things meet.

In some ways, however, I enjoyed even more Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, set in the Sundarbans on the Indian coast. Also a candidate for class assignment, it felt a little too long and a little less on the nose, but it actually introduces some of the characters--better fleshed out--who make appearances in Gun Island. The book revolves around homecomings of various sorts, scientific study of an ecosystem in flux, and the power of the environment--amplified by human meddling--to wash away whole worlds.

The year isn’t over, and I’m currently alternating between Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age and a volume edited by three historians, Global White Nationalism: From apartheid to Trump, both of which are very promising. But in the meantime, any and all recommendations for 2021 are welcome!

Northern California voters should call time on deadbeat Doug LaMalfa and his dead-end denial

I haven’t lived in northern California for quite a few years, but I’ve been back visiting my parents this autumn. We hiked in Lassen Volcanic National Park and logging roads in Oak Run, picnicked on and kayaked from the beach at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, and sat beside the waters of Clover Creek as they ran past my parents’ house.



But alongside the beauty of the north state were signs of the toll that ecological change is taking on the region. I teach environmental history next door in Nevada. Often when I teach about the origins, trajectory, and consequences of anthropogenic--man-made--climate change, the factors and trends seem massive, impersonal, and even abstract: industrialization, agricultural revolutions, energy transitions, ecological imperialism, the nature-culture rupture.

But the emerging effects of climate change are written across the landscape of the north state, more visible here, perhaps, because these are still the places I know best. These effects of anthropogenic climate change were visible in the dry meadows and bare peaks in Lassen, and in the charred hills to the east of the park and the scorched shores of Whiskeytown Lake west of Redding. They were visible in the too-dry, dusty logging trails through the hills, and in the dead stands of pines, made vulnerable to bark beetles by declining precipitation. They will become more visible when winters come, because the long-term trends in this part of California--as distinct from changes in weather from one year to the next--mean that winters are considerably warmer and drier, and bring far less snow, than when I was a child.

The fires that burn hotter and faster and further, over a season that now extends over half of the year, destroy landscapes essential to timber and tourism, essential in turn to the north state’s economy. They also consume forests that, if left standing and cared for, serve as carbon sinks, playing a role in mitigating some consequences of climate change. The shrinking snowpack on California’s ranges will have serious impacts on water, and the various forms of life, and economic and social potential that flow from it in the state.

The scale of these problems for California as a whole, and the north state in particular, demand leadership on a similar scale. Sadly, the north state’s political leaders have been found seriously wanting. Congressman, former state senator, and former state assemblyman Doug LaMalfa is the figure who most clearly represents the inadequacy of the north state’s representation in Sacramento and Washington. LaMalfa is known for his large stature, but when measured by the scale of his imagination, intellect, and ability to deliver for the north state, he is a pint-sized poster child for the deadbeat, dead-end politics of denial.

His campaign signs have littered the north state’s highways and byways for nearly two decades, featuring a cowboy hat and his signature “He’s one of us!” slogan. The identity of the “us” is never made quite explicit, but it’s likely a jab at the diversity and supposed decadence associated with the southern two-thirds of the state. It’s certainly not the case that most of the “us” in the north state are wealthy farmers who receive massive government subsidies while railing at forms of public expenditure that benefit the majority.

LaMalfa’s slogan is a repackaging of a dog whistle in the form of an argument about the exceptionalism of the north state, and a claim that the work that other representatives seek to undertake in Sacramento and D.C.--to address economic inequality, to combat climate change, to democratize institutions, and to ensure Americans have access to healthcare and education--has no bearing on the lives of northern Californians.

In reality, of course, rural communities in the north state are buffeted by the same ills that afflict our society at large. In the small town where I grew up, there were exceptionally strong bonds, and community pride--something that can be equally true in the urban neighborhoods of other regions. However, there was also strife within households, and between neighbors. Some of that strife was violent. Families were affected by drug abuse and addiction, job losses, poor access to healthcare, and dated physical and institutional infrastructure. Law enforcement was conspicuous primarily by its indifference. In LaMalfa’s telling, these problems are urban phenomena, with no bearing on the north state. But there is no shame in recognizing that these ills--with their wider, structural causes--affect the north state as well as other parts of the state and country, and there is no shame in demanding representatives who propose to do something about this.

For all the complaints on the political right about the supposed “political correctness” and “cancel culture” of the left, it is representatives like LaMalfa who have perfected the politics of grievance-mongering and the impotent whine. He and other north state representatives are not wrong to claim that this region of the state is frequently neglected or marginalized in the course of big conversations about the state’s future, trajectory, and needs. But their politics, and the lengthy careers they have made out of impotent whining, have done more than anything else to ensure that nothing about the north state’s relationship with California as a whole changes.

LaMalfa and his brethren--the Dahles, Jim Nielsen, and in earlier times, Wally Herger, Sam Aanestad, and Ted Gaines--make careers serving as yes-men and -women for Republican leadership in Washington and Sacramento, and No votes for anything important to California’s long-term future. They sign oaths and pledges that tie their hands when it comes to raising revenue and combating climate change, forswearing the use of their thinking skills and denying themselves the opportunity to respond to events.

And they deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change. As the Carr and Camp Fires tore across his district, LaMalfa gibbered that he “didn’t buy” human-made climate change. Over the short and long term alike, climate change will mean more of these fires that devour communities, timber resources, and tourism infrastructure. This will translate--absent intervention--into relocations, job loss, and the disintegration of whole industries. Over the long term the consequences are scarier still, and extend to transformations in temperature, rainfall, and landscapes on such a scale that the viability of whole modes of rural production will be called into question.

Rural economies dependent on resource extraction or production are particularly dependent on whatever forms of ecological equilibrium allow the maintenance of conditions essential to the continuity of those resources. In fifty years, the regions where LaMalfa grows rice might no longer be prime agricultural land. The same changes that might make his rice farms a thing of the past will affect every other industry in northern California that depends on the land. The disappearance or migration of whole ecological zones--and with them the modes of production they are capable of sustaining--should be a truly terrifying prospect. They could portend genuine economic and social upheaval of a sort people in this country have not previously been forced to consider.

But LaMalfa lashes out at his critics for peddling a "climate change agenda." What he and the deadbeats, dead-enders, and deniers miss, is that climate change is not an agenda: it is a reality. And failure to confront this reality is dangerous indeed. For all the talk among the dead-enders and deniers about scientists cooking the books in some implausibly global conspiracy, most of the climate scientists' predictions from decades past are unfolding on schedule.

LaMalfa may occasionally shake the can in D.C. for relief for fire victims. But if his politics remain the gold standard for the north state, the numbers of those victims will mount, while the threat from fires and drought will grow. You can't be a part of developing solutions to a massive, planetary problem, with particular local ramifications, if you aren't prepared to understand the causes of the problem, which in this case are forms and scales of consumption, production, and emission that are unsustainable if unreformed.

Another significant example of the dead-enders' intransigence revolves around the ongoing, and so-far futile quest to see a University of California campus situated in the north state. A UC campus is as big as it gets when it comes to public investment in a region. It brings jobs as well as visitors. It forges industry and institutional connections that stand to benefit the host region with other places and people. It cultivates and empowers local talent, and gives that talent a reason to stay. It diversifies economies that, particularly given the ecological change we face, are particularly vulnerable.

When community members revived the idea of a north state UC about five years ago, they emphasized the potential importance of degrees in life sciences, technology, and environmental studies for a campus situated in the north state. Such a proposal could see not just the creation of a region-altering campus in northern California, but one which would be well situated to ensure that its researchers and students were on the frontlines of seeking ways to combat climate change and its negative consequences, ensuring that the studies, solutions, and people involved were rooted in the north state.

However, this kind of massive and beneficial investment from the state remains unlikely when the region's representatives, whether in Sacramento or Congress, staunchly oppose the renewal of public funding for universities (funding relative to the student population has collapsed over the past decades thanks to Republican 'no' votes in Sacramento, particularly). Securing this kind of investment for the north state would require political leadership that was less interested in whining and denying, and more interested in the collective effort of governing California. Federal funding is hugely important to research on UC campuses, and it would take a better advocate than anyone who has represented the north state in many decades to unlock more of that potential.

The behavior over decades by LaMalfa and his Republican colleagues--starving California's most important public institutions that serve the children of Republican families as well as Democratic families, and benefit the whole state through the research they support--has ensured that the north state's representatives are marginal and impotent when it comes to influencing investment and development in the state and in Congress.

Republican voters in the north state may not agree with everything that the Democrats running in this election represent, but Audrey Denney (challenging LaMalfa) and Elizabeth Betancourt (challenging Meghan Dahle) would give the north state a seat at the table, and voices that take seriously the challenges the region faces. Legislative Democrats--who dominate Sacramento and are poised to exert even more power in Congress--would be more likely to heed the calls for investment if they come from legislators like Denney and Betancourt who are prepared to participate in the shared project of governance, than they currently do the dead-ender whining, hypocrisy, and denial that are the only tunes LaMalfa, Dahle, and Co seem to know.

I'm no longer a north state resident. But at some level, this region will always be home. And I hope, as I continue to return here in the years to come, that it will remain recognizable as such. But more important still are the living in and growing up in the region today. These are the people whose futures are most imperiled by ecological catastrophe, social and economic inequality, and the absence of collective investment. North state votes have excellent candidates in Denney and Betancourt, and I hope they turn the page on a dismal political chapter for the region.