On Kaplan's coming anarchy

What makes Kaplan so special in this group of distinguished writers is that he is not an academic. He describes what he sees, or better, what he believes to see. Travelling journalists have a history of published bestsellers, be it adventure-fiction or semi-scientific articles. Kaplan did not write a top ten title yet, however, he has his audience.
On Kaplan, 1994 ‘The Coming Anarchy’
Kaplan is a travel journalist, who’s skills in filling pages with exciting phrases are well developed, and he serves his audience with what they would like to read. ‘The coming anarchy’ is the clearest example of an article written by someone who sees everything…but understands nothing.
His 400 miles journey through West-Africa has obviously been shocking to him. What appears to him as re-emerging anarchy, which threatens the ‘social fabric of our planet’, is just reflecting his expectations, and his misunderstanding of what he encounters.
What must appear to him in West Africa as anarchy, is in reality just another kind of order. An order which, surely, in our concept is highly illegitimate, and illegal. However, his examples of arbitrary taxing, bribing of police, and blackmailing at roadblocks, is to Africans what the restaurant tip is to the American waiter…in Cameroon it is the legitimate claim of the border guard, or soldier, because his boss does not pay him. Having a uniform means to be entitled to threaten and rob the travellers. The very act would only be understood as crime, if the soldier would not redistribute his booty to friends, and family. This is the order at every layer of society.
Kaplan’s discovery that African states would loose their power over their territories results from the wrong assumption that this control had been in existence in the first place. Actually this is not, nor was it, the case before, during, or after colonisation. The state in sub Saharan Africa is an empty shell, which is there in place to serve as postal address to collect development aid, and to give prisons the appearance of being part of a judicial system. The state’s frontier is there because ‘the smuggler is in need of a border’, as Olivier Roy has put it, it has no other practical meaning.
What Kaplan sees but not recognises is a very stable system of patrimonial relationships, which are the true foundation of political, and economic power.
The African state does not fade away because it never played an important role. “Unprovoked crime, refugee migrations, private armies, drug trade” all of Kaplan’s indicators of growing anarchy, are part of the game. They are not a new development, which would have gone out of hand. They are rather coming to the fore because their proportion on state’s revenues (means Big Man’s income) increased sharply after the end of the cold war. The African Big Man (president, chief, banker, general, governor) lost his patron, the distributor of wealth, and power. When either the SU or the US stopped paying freely, African elites had to diversify their sources of revenue.
There is no erosion of state power in West Africa. There are no governments ‘withering away’, and there is no tribal power where it did not exist since, or before independence. There is no coming anarchy: there is a stable, terribly unjust, and cruel order, obviously invisible to the foreigner.
It is fair that Kaplan reminds us that there were riots in Kosovo, when the Berlin wall was falling, but his remark is meant as a proof that even the best things which happen are not good enough to avoid the most terrible future. Writing on Africa he could have quoted the fact that 87 days after the fall of the wall, Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
By the way, the idea that “in the 21st century France will be withdrawing from West Africa” is ridiculous. Three more battalions are about to arrive in Gabon’s Camp De Gaulle soon…and they are going to stay.