Christopher Clapham and Alex de Waal, two erudite scholars on the Horn of Africa, have written insightful books on, respectively, ‘state formation and decay’ and the ‘political economy’ of the Horn of Africa. Yet neither of them envisioned the substance and velocity of transformations engulfing the Horn of Africa – namely Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, four countries boldly defined by Clapham as constituting the Horn of Africa – since 2 April 2018, when the 42-year-old Dr Abiy Ahmed assumed power as the third Ethiopian prime minister since the critical year 1991, surprising the world by his readiness to accept the Algiers Agreement and its rulings regarding the ‘border conflict’ with Eritrea.
As Alex de Waal’s relentless exposure of the cynicism and corruption of the region’s ruling elites trenchantly demonstrates, there is little reason to envisage enlightened political leadership as a potential solution to the problems of bad government and consequent instability. (Clapham 2017, 181)
Clapham contends that state formation and decay in the Horn of Africa have a unique trajectory, in that the countries of the region attempted to absorb colonialism into their own old structures in contrast to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, which seemingly accepted the sacrosanctity of the colonial boundaries as stipulated by the African Union (then the Organisation of African Unity) in its founding conference in 1963 in Addis Ababa. Seemingly, because as Geldenhuys states in his article ‘The African Union, responsible sovereignty and contested states’ (2014, 352), since 1960 Africa has witnessed the birth of nine contested states and the subsequent death of seven of them. Furthermore the ‘non-colonial’ concept of the highland core1 that Clapham defines as ‘exceptionally positive’ is experienced as colonial by the peripheries, satellite countries and even parts of the highland core such as the Somalilanders, the Eritreans, the Tigrayans and the non-Amharanised2 Oromos (Clapham 2017, 179; Prunier and Ficquet 2015, 424). Clapham expands the centre-periphery perspective of Markakis within Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia and Eritrea together) (2011, 1–7, 131) and applies this in his above definition of the Horn of Africa. According to the author, Ethiopia and Somalia can both benefit – Ethiopia from its non-colonial self-identification, Somalia from its cultural homogeneity, and both from their ethnic self-identity – to resolve conflicts using indigenous conflict management approaches that are not available to multi-ethnic post-colonial states (Ibid. 6). The praxis is however that these indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms have been disturbed by successive state elites that rely on force and foreign alliances to suppress conflicts undemocratically; here is where de Waal’s book complements that of Clapham on the region.
Once again history is in the making in the Horn of Africa by those state elites from the ‘highland core’, while the people from the ‘highland periphery’ and the ‘lowland periphery’ still find themselves in their old role of mere spectators and pawns of the highland core, which consists of mainly the Habeshas (Abyssinians), the Tigrinya/Tigrayans, the Amharas and the Oromos, especially those consanguineous to the Amharas – such as the late emperor Haile Selassie (Clapham 2017, 13, see also note 2) and the current prime minister, Dr Abiy Ahmed, whose father is a Muslim-Oromo but whose mother and wife are Christian Amharas). This justifies Clapham’s assertion that the ‘highland core’ at the heart of Ethiopia has been the centripetal force impacting the internal and regional dynamics of the Horn and beyond. After Ethiopia signed the Asmara Peace and Friendship Agreement with Eritrea on 9 July 2018, Somalia and Djibouti followed suit. If one wants to understand the Horn of Africa, states Clapham in his first chapter, then it is crucial to start from the power of the landscape:
If you want to understand this region, this [the power of the landscape] is where you have to start. The element of discrimination that unquestionably exists is built into the structure of the Horn, not merely derived from the prejudice of this or any other author. (Clapham 2017, 9)
State formation and decay in the Horn of Africa have been in the hands of those who live in the highland core: this relatively fertile area enabled them to become settlers, which is a prerequisite for state formation, while their compatriots in the peripheries – the nomads and pastoralists in respectively lowland and highland peripheries – were rendered dependent on the dynamics of the core. This somewhat Darwinian approach to landscape and state formation and decay does not seem to give the same weight to religion in shaping the state in the highland core. The Tewahdo Ethiopian/Eritrean Orthodox Church doctrine has been the driving force and defender of the Habesha (Abyssinian) states in Ethiopia and Eritrea: very explicit up till the demise of the Ethiopian monarch in 1974, and implicitly still a power to be reckoned with, despite the fact that Ethiopia has had a secular constitution for almost half a century. The Ethiopian patriarch Abune Mathias presented the new Ethiopian prime minister Abiy with the award of the ‘Golden Gospel’ and gold embroidered cloaks, in recognition of his role in the reconciliation of the Holy Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the peace with Eritrea, and the reawakening of Ethiopian patriotism.
Clapham’s Chapter 2 addresses the ‘Histories of state creation and collapse’ with, again, Ethiopia as the focal point, ‘the prism through which outside powers have viewed the region’ (188). Chapters 3, 4 and 5 analyse synoptically the state formation, stagnation and utter failure in respectively Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Somali states. His final chapter, Chapter 6, is about the interaction between regional structures of hegemony, foreign intervention and contestation.
For de Waal, the Horn of Africa – ‘a laboratory of conflicts’ (2015, 37) – comprises Clapham’s Horn of Africa plus the two Sudans (Ibid. 35). To understand the ‘real politics’ of the region, de Waal attempts to develop an audacious conceptual framework analysis called ‘the political marketplace’.
The political marketplace is a materialist, instrumental framework that provides little space for ideals and norms. Its values are monetary. It is hierarchical and elitist: politics is the business of a relatively small number of individuals, almost all men, who have money and guns. The logic of political markets reduces people to commodities and interpersonal relations to bargaining over material reward, and it evens out local societal and cultural factors in favour of the common currencies of the dollar and the Kalashnikov. It relegates public debate to the background noise: what matters is the business transacted among political elites, usually in secret. The information that counts is the political-market data: who, whom and how much. (de Waal 2015, 196, see also 16)
This system flourishes where a) political finance is in the hands of the few, b) there is a dispersion and contestation of the monopoly of violence, c) institutional rules and procedures are absent to resolve political disputes and d) such countries are integrated in the global political and economic order subordinately. These and other key concepts of the book are delineated in Chapter 2.
De Waal presents the historical trajectory of the Horn as a ‘subcontinental war in three acts’: the scramble for Africa is analysed in Chapter 3. Act I is the cold war period with the USA and Soviet Union as the main funders of the state elites, up till they lost interest at the end of 1980s. Act II is the ‘inter-rentier’ period: by 1990, cold war security rents were at their lowest and the new rents to counter the War on Terror had yet to begin. This period between 1991 and 1998 was characterised by two competing ideological projects in the Horn: on the one hand, political Islam under the guardianship of Sudanese leaders, and on the other, yesteryear’s Marxist-Leninist and Maoist liberation fronts that brought change in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda, who were embraced by the West as the new leaders of Africa. Act III started when the former comrades in arms Meles Zenawi and Isaias Afwerki clashed for hegemony like their comrades in the Great Lakes region. This came at the same time as the events of 9/11 in the United States, the start of the ‘new rentierism’, as funds flowed through the region for counter-terrorism activities. Chapter 4 is reserved for Darfur, and should be read in combination with the introduction of the book, which starts with the small northern Darfurian town of Kumruk; this part of the book in particular is a page-turner with a lot of personal accounts and detailed information; in total there are more than 17 pages on Darfur, 22 on Sudan (Chapter 5) and 18 pages on South Sudan (Chapter 6). It is questionable whether the template of de Waal’s ‘political marketplace’, heavily influenced by his Darfur experience and Zenawi’s thinking, fits the whole Horn of Africa, especially the highland core of Ethiopia and Eritrea: their as yet unsuccessful attempt to build a developmental state actually began during the armed liberation struggle of both the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
In State formation and decay, Clapham states that ‘Though the EPLF was indeed a state, it was not the nation in quite the same way’ (114). This is also true for the TPLF. To understand why they have failed to form the promising ‘democratic developmental state’ for all their people, where power is transformed into authority that fears the people, deserves a thorough study that combines the history, psychology, tradition, culture and religion of the actors. The EPLF and the TPLF did not start the struggle to end up as rent-seeking, profit-maximising warlords. Chapters 11 and 12 of The real politics of the Horn of Africa, ‘Transnational patronage and dollarization’ and ‘Towards a more perfect marketplace?’ are interesting pages that could have been combined into one concise chapter. The current traders in ‘peace and loyalty for money’ seem to be Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who had already started to use Eritrean ports in their war against Yemen in 2017 in violation of the UN Security Council sanctions at that time against Eritrea. Ethiopian and Eritrean willingness to make peace and keep the Horn of Africa out of the influence of Iran and China has already started to pay off:
The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are prosecuting their own conflict against Houthi rebels, Shi’a Muslims backed by Iran, in Yemen. Eritrea’s coastline provides the coalition’s forces with the havens they need to fight in Yemen.
Allowing the Red Sea to be choked off between Eritrea and Yemen is inconceivable. So the UAE wants bases – and will pay for them – in Eritrea.
The UAE has invested heavily in Eritrea and is promising to pay for an oil pipeline to link it to Ethiopia.
On top of that, Ethiopia has received, or will get, a $1 billion deposit into its central bank and $2 billion in additional investments from the UAE, Ethiopian officials have said. (CNN Wire 2018)
I can’t resist the temptation to question de Waal’s proximity to power when I see and read him intermingling as an advisor and an activist in various situations. De Waal was one of the mediators in the Darfur peace negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria in May 2006. One of the Darfurian rebel leaders, Abdel Wahid al Nur, was demanding US$100 million dollars to sign the peace agreement, rejecting the US$30 million offered to him. De Waal recounts a confrontation between the then Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo and Abdel Wahid, who received US$1 million dollars from the Nigerian president (de Waal 2015, 5).
Chapter 10 of The real politics of the Horn of Africa questions rightly whether state-building is still possible in Ethiopia, devoting nine and a half pages to this. De Waal’s book is dedicated to Zenawi, whom he praises as a visionary ‘ruthless state-builder’. Some authors have criticised Alex’s proximity to power and his strong admiration of Zenawi (Lefort 2013). De Waal himself writes:
Twenty years after my first meeting with Meles Zenawi, I was a member of a group that regularly convened small seminars in his office in Addis Ababa, to debate his theory of the ‘democratic developmental state’ and issue of peace and security in the Horn. (De Waal 2015, 12)
Both of these books by Clapham and de Waal have more in common than how they define the geographical location of the Horn of Africa – what Clapham boldly calls ‘non-colonial Africa’: they both step back to view how history, geographical location, money and outside intervention in the form of states and non-governmental organisations (to which Alex de Waal belonged for part of his career) and how the state elites within their ‘political marketplace’ have shaped the region and continue to impact future generations.