It is often taken for granted that "the West's image of Africa" is a dark and savage jungle, the "white man's grave" which formed the backdrop for Joseph Conrad's hyper-canonical Heart of Darkness. In the wake of decolonization and independence, African writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o provided alternate accounts of the continent, at a moment when doing so was rightly seen to be "The Empire Writes Back." Yet in the years since then, "going beyond the clichés" has itself become a kind of cliché. In the last decade in particular, the global investment class has taken up the appeal to "Re-brand Africa" with a vengeance. Providing positive images of Africa is not necessarily a radical critique of empire's enduring legacies, in other words; it can also be an effort to brand and market "Africa" as a product for capital speculation.

In White Men's Country: The Image of Africa in the American Century, I describe how American literary investments in Africa grew, alongside the slow decline of European cultural imperialism. If European writers and artists worked to legitimize violent conquest by represent the continent as "darkest Africa," the informal American empire of capital created an American counter-narrative, showing Africa to be a brilliant frontier of unbounded future possibility. When this self-consciously American tradition pictured "Africa," I argue, they turned their gaze away from the equatorial rain forests of West and Central Africa that Joseph Conrad had made famous and instead focused on the Great Rift Valley of present day Kenya and Tanzania. There, they looked for and found a renewed vision of the closing American frontier, a "brightest Africa" of rebirth, redemption, and recovery.

My first chapter locates the beginning of this tradition in the United States' emergence from the Civil War, and in Henry Morton Stanley's world famous 1872 exploration narrative, How I Found Livingstone. Stanley was born a Welsh orphan--and in his later years, he returned to this identity as a British gentleman--but when he "found" Livingstone, he was pretending to be an American and his narrative pictures Africa by explicit analogy to the American Southwest. Stanley employs the same narratives and images he had used to describe General Hancock's war on the plains Indians, when he first made his name as a journalist. By omitting the American chapter in Stanley's career, historians have allowed the British author of Through the Dark Continent and In Darkest Africa to represent the entirety of the Anglo-American exploration tradition. In this chapter, by contrast, I recover how Stanley's most famous and influential text explored and exploited the fracture between British and American, asserting the imperial destiny of the rising American state as it symbolically rescued the ailing and elderly British.

In my second and third chapters, I show how Theodore Roosevelt invented himself, on the American frontier, and then repeated the gesture in Africa, popularizing (if not inventing) inventing the big game safari. Before his 1910 bestseller African Game Trails, the word "safari" had signified the dependence of European explorers on their Arab-African guides and interpreters, but Roosevelt introduced the word into global English by transforming the safari into a globally comprehensible practice of seeing, as well as popularizing the sense of Africa which it presumes: an "Africa" which is open and available to be seen and shot. By focusing on the tourist's power to see and comprehend, he made the visibility of skin-color the epistemological dividing line between those who actively see and shoot and those who are passively seen and shot. And by adapting the frontier persona he had created in his "Western" memoirs--Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, and The Wilderness Hunter--he made Africa a site where Americans could still experience the pleasures of the now-closed Western frontier.

In the 1930's, the safari tradition was divided between the campy fantasy of the Tarzan cinematic franchise--which sought to domesticate, rehabilitate, or render invisible the racialized violence of the Rooseveltian safari--and Ernest Hemingway's nostalgic "realism," which sought to mourn the impossibility of Roosevelt in the modern era. In my final chapter, I stage Tarzan against Hemingway as two sides of the same coin, the fantasy which could not find grounding in fact and the reality which had no room for romance. For both, the problem was the non-existence of what Roosevelt took to be his primary aesthetic problem: transforming racialized violence into paternalistic (and patriarchal) love.

This dissertation is a study of British theater, publishing, and broadcasting in East and West Africa from the 1930s to the 1970s. Although traditional histories of the British Empire stop in the 1960s I argue that a cultural version of empire gained momentum during colonial independence and persisted for decades after. While historians of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East have studied the reinvention of empire after 1919 through international mandates and development regimes, they have ignored the cultural project that was vital in giving new forms of legitimacy to British imperialism. During the 1930s Britain introduced broadcasting services, publication bureaus, and film units into its African colonies under the rubric of colonial development. Over the following decades an increasing number of British organizations became involved in projecting Britain’s influence and the English language through theater, radio, and mass-produced print. The organizations ranged from official institutions, such as the Colonial Office and the British Council, to non-state forms of overseas representation, such as the BBC and Oxford University Press. As the colonies moved closer to independence, British interventions in theater, publishing, and broadcasting collided with anti-colonial pressures abroad and at home; yet, these particular forms of British representation persisted beyond independence into the postcolonial period.

In short, Britain used the domain of culture to maintain its imperial influence after the end of formal political control. My study looks at the cultural work of a variety of forms of mass media, and I use Africa – a central locale of the decolonizing British Empire and the late Cold War – to examine its role. Africa’s postcolonial public sphere was shaped by the cultural project of late empire not least because it engaged a variety of African agents and agencies who in turn sought to make cultural imperialism history. My larger project, therefore, leads to thinking about the cultural politics of the contemporary world and how the West continues to reach global audiences today.

ABSTRACT

Imperial Ark? The Politics of Wildlife in East and South-Central Africa, 1920-1992

by

Jeffrey Schauer

Doctor of Philosophy in History

University of California, Berkeley

Professor James Vernon, Chair

The dissertation examines the "politics of wildlife" in British colonies in East and South-Central Africa during the colonial era and after independence. By conceptualizing that "politics" around the institutions, individuals, and interests that took an interest in wildlife matters, the dissertation attends to the emergence of and changes in wildlife policy as they were shaped by the characteristics of colonial rule and a broader set of regional, imperial, and global developments, including decolonization and post-Second World War internationalism. It also attends to the influence of Africans on shaping colonial wildlife policy, whether as farmers, nationalists, or local officials. The central discovery of this dissertation is that wildlife policy moved from being the preserve of an imperial lobby to a policy sphere governed by the concerns of various sectors of local colonial society. After the Second World War, security concerns combined with a strengthened international preservationist movement to effectively internationalise Africa's wildlife. This occurred alongside Africanization, a policy pursued by newly-independent governments in order to shore up their own control over policymaking, and the arrival of international scientists, who sought to introduce their own priorities to the wildlife sector. In this seven-decade contest between those interests which were local, colonial, or national on the one hand, and those which were imperial, international, or global on the other, a surprising array of interests sought to capture East and South-Central Africa's wildlife sector for ambitions related to economic development, anti-colonial campaigning, preservationist advocacy, scientific inquiry, administrative supremacy, and colonial and national security. Over time, struggles for the control of this sector reflected broader trends at the global and local levels, marking the ascendancy and eclipse of colonial empires, and the rise of a neo-colonial order.

The steady growth of Chinese migrants to South Africa in the past decade provides an opportunity to use Amartya Sen's (2001) capabilities approach in the field of immigration. This theoretical framing along with qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews and participant observation in three South African cities, Johannesburg, Durban, and Bloemfontein, reveals that the Chinese employ, what I call, a small pond migration strategy--utilizing mobility to maximize their social, economic, and human capital. I argue that mainland Chinese migrants move to South Africa because of a desire to adventure out of China and pursue freedoms associated with being one's own boss. Once in South Africa, they choose to stay because of comfortable weather and a slower pace of life, despite losing freedoms associated with high crime in Johannesburg. As a contrast to these mainland Chinese migrants, Chinese migrants from the province of Fujian embrace a hyper-small pond migration strategy where they move year to year searching out the best places to make money. This is because rather than valuing long-term development and quality of life concerns, Fujianese migrants value short-term money-making above all. These findings suggest alternative ways of understanding factors of migration, a way to utilize Sen's capabilities framework in immigration studies, a model that explains migration from more developed countries to less developed ones, and a potentially predictive model of what may happen throughout the African continent as China invests more in Africa.

This dissertation consists of two essays on agricultural trade in sub-Saharan Africa. The 42 countries of continental sub-Saharan Africa include 21 of the 24 poorest countries in the world. Unlike industrialized countries where structural transformation and income growth have led to declines in the share of agriculture in overall output and consumption, nearly two-thirds of the labor force in sub-Saharan Africa still works in agriculture and nearly half of consumer expenditure is on food. Agricultural products are produced by tens of millions of farmers and consumed by hundreds of millions of consumers across Africa. In this dissertation, I show that the costs of trade between producers and consumers in different locations are very high, I explore the consequences of these high trade costs, and I evaluate the effects of a type of trade policy that has been used to insulate markets in particular countries from high and volatile prices elsewhere. My findings can be used to improve the design and understand the impact of infrastructure investment, trade liberalization, agricultural technology adoption, and price stabilization initiatives in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.

In the first chapter, I estimate and solve a dynamic model of agricultural storage and trade in sub-Saharan Africa using a new intra-national dataset of monthly prices and production of the 6 major staple grains from 2003 to 2013 and a new approach to identify cost parameters when trade and storage are unobserved. The model includes monthly storage in each of 230 large hub markets in all 42 countries of continental sub-Saharan Africa, monthly trade between them, as well as monthly trade with the world market through 30 ports. I find median intra-national trade costs over 5 times higher than elsewhere in the world along with significant extra costs for trade across borders and with the world market. I then simulate a counterfactual in which trade costs for staple grains are lowered to match an international benchmark. Lowering trade costs results in a 46% drop in the average food price index, a 42% loss of net agricultural revenues, and a welfare gain equivalent to 2.2% of GDP. I show that 86% of this welfare gain can be achieved by lowering trade costs through ports and along key links representing just 18% of the trade network, supporting a corridor-based approach for infrastructure investment and trade policy. In an extension, I find that the effects of agricultural technology adoption depend crucially on trade costs, with technology adoption increasing farmer incomes only when trade costs are low. Compared to my dynamic monthly model with storage, a static annual model of agricultural trade underestimates trade costs by 23% and welfare effects by 33% by failing to correctly identify when trade occurs.

In the second chapter, I investigate the empirical effects of temporary export restrictions, which have been widely used by many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in recent years in an attempt to stabilize domestic prices of staple grains. I use monthly, market-level price data from a 10-year period during which 13 short-term export bans on maize were implemented by 5 countries in East and Southern Africa. I find no statistically significant effect of export bans on the price gaps between pairs of affected cross-border markets. My results for price gaps match those from a simulation of the model developed in the first chapter in which export bans are not implemented. However, prices and price volatility in the implementing country are significantly higher during export ban periods in the data than in the model simulation with no bans. Export bans in the region are imperfectly enforced, divert trade into the informal sector, and appear to destabilize domestic markets rather than stabilizing them.

This dissertation explores the mutual imbrication of race and animality in Kenyan and Tanzanian politics and performance from the 1910s through to the 1990s. It is a cultural history of the non-human under conditions of colonial governmentality and its afterlives. I argue that animal bodies, both actual and figural, were central to the cultural and political project of British colonialism in Africa – and in particular eastern Africa, which continues to be imagined in many circles as both “safari country” and the “cradle of humankind.” I build on extensive archival research to suggest that artistic and scientific activity in colonial Kenya, from the amateur and professional theatre to the natural-historical research conducted at the Coryndon Memorial Museum, helped to define a category of sub-political being that I call “the animal subaltern.” The animal subaltern is a concatenation of all forms of animal life lived below the horizon of “the human.” During the colonial period, this included the wildlife of eastern Africa, the pre-human hominids whose fossilized remains paleoanthropologists like Louis Leakey unearthed, and “natives,” whose political subjectivity the colonial state was determined to suppress. I argue that the forced contiguity of these variously inflected forms of life had a pervasive, if uneven, racializing effect: all of these beings became black. In the post- Second World War struggle for political, cultural and economic independence in eastern Africa, members of the animal subaltern contested their exclusion from the category of the human. I read the work of the Kenyan writer and intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Tanzanian playwright Ebrahim Hussein as important interventions into this unfolding struggle and its implications for the postcolonial future of their communities. Finally, I consider the environmental activism of Kenya’s “Rhino Man,” Michael Werikhe, whose performative blurring of the distinction between human and animal in the 1980s and 1990s helped to inaugurate a new model of interspecies solidarity that continues to play itself out to this day.

Economic factors affect nearly every human decision, even those we consider most personal. This body of work demonstrates the presence of economic reasoning in the unexpected realms of sexuality and reproduction. Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, where financial concerns are often pressing, I show evidence for the influence of economics on child-rearing, sexual behavior, and reproduction, respectively.

On child-rearing, I model the parents' decision regarding investments in their children, in particular, investments in child health. The question of interest is how a child's cohort within the household affects the amount and type of investment she receives. Partitioning investments into private goods and club goods for children reveals that the size and gender composition of one's cohort affect these types of investments in opposite ways. I use data from Senegal to test the prediction that, ceteris paribus, children with larger (and more male) cohorts will receive more club investments. Employing a new method to deal with the endogeneity of siblings in this type of analysis, I exploit a unique characteristic of this data. The predominance of multi-family, cooperative households in this setting offers the existence of non-sibling cohorts that can instrument for a child's full cohort within the household. Using a 2SLS within-household estimation, I find that club investments are increasing in cohort size and male composition. This finding is particularly relevant to child health in Africa, where club investments such as water purification, bed nets, and immunizations could prevent sixty percent of child death.

In addition, this work builds on existing theories regarding sexual behavior responses to low-income shocks. Social scientists have suggested that African women use transactional sex for both income smoothing and insurance. In an environment of epidemic HIV, increases in casual partnerships, or increases in risks taken within partnerships can increase HIV-risk to a woman and her community. This work shows evidence of this dynamic. I employ individual serostatus data and overlay it with historical, village-level weather data across 19 countries in Africa. I find that when droughts cause economic hardship in rural Africa, women are significantly more likely to become infected with HIV. Concentration of this effect among women of little means, and the presence of a counterpart effect in men of great means, suggest a behavioral pathway. These findings indicate that crop insurance and social safety nets could significantly stem the spread of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This work also highlights the impact that economic policies can have on reproductive decisions, even taken at a great distance. Several times in the past quarter-century, the US has employed an economic policy to achieve a social objective: reduce the use of abortion abroad. By withholding funding to certain foreign NGOs, the policy rather had the effect of reducing the availability of contraceptives in poor countries. I estimate the impact of the policy on the use of abortion in Ghana, creating a woman-by-month panel over 25 years and exploiting the off-on-off-on history of the policy. Findings suggest that the policy did not reduce the use of abortion. Further, the reduced contraceptive availability resulted in increased pregnancy rates for rural women &mdash the explaining factor for why the policy increased use of abortion among these women. In Ghana alone, the policy resulted in nearly 100,000 additional abortions and up to 500,000 additional unplanned births.

Concerns about the sustainability of wildlife hunting, particularly in Central Africa, have dominated the scientific literature on wildlife utilization. Only more recently have researchers began considering the human dependence on wildlife for both nutritional needs as well as sources of livelihoods. I begin with a systematic literature review of the wildlife harvesting literature, examining in detail the type of sustainability indicators predominating in the literature and their strengths and weaknesses. We find that indicator type, continent of study, species body mass, taxonomic group, and socioeconomic status of study site are important predictors of the probability of reported sustainability. Indicators relying on population-specific biological data are most often used in North America and Europe, while cruder estimates are more often used in Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. Our results highlight both the uncertainty and lack of uniformity in sustainability science. This presents a major gap in our ability to monitor wildlife and its use, since the importance of wildlife for human consumption is at its greatest precisely in the places where indicators used are the weakest. We point to future directions in the field.

Subsequent field work was conducted in the humid forest zone of southeastern Cameroon in Central Africa. Cameroon is one of the six Congo Basin countries, and there has traditionally been great concern on the part of environmental conservation organizations over the level of wildlife hunting in the country. The first part of my field work was a pilot study to compare field methodologies for wildlife consumption by rural peoples. For wildlife surveys, I used distance sampling on wildlife transects to determine presence/absence and abundance of wildlife species in four different village sites that represent a gradient of human impact and environmental intactness. To evaluate human use of wildlife relative to economic status, I used household surveys with heads of households to ascertain relative wealth status and other household demographic and economic parameters as they relate to wildlife use and consumption. Finally, I tested methodologies for enumerating hunter activity and catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) as a potentially useful tool for monitoring the status of hunting sustainability. Results indicate that transect surveys do in fact detect increasing wildlife species in more rural, intact village sites, although sample sizes were too small to enumerate actual wildlife densities. Further, more rural households tend to both hunt and consume more wildlife; wildlife use in rural areas thus forms a more important source of total livelihood than for more urban households.

Although humans have hunted wildlife for millennia, and it remains an important source of animal protein, there is increasing concern that `bushmeat' hunting, particularly in central Africa, is unsustainable. We explore the role that wildlife and alternative meat sources play in the food security of human populations in southeastern Cameroon. We conducted a large, cross-sectional study in 24 village and town sites in southeastern Cameroon to evaluate the role of wildlife in human food security in a gradient from urban to rural households. Rural households are significantly more likely to rely on wildlife for animal protein, whereas urban households rely on significantly more domestic meat. Using generalized linear mixed modeling, we found significant associations between bushmeat hunting and consumption and positive effects on food security, highlighting the importance of wildlife to human security in the Congo Basin. We asked interviewees about most consumed and most preferred wildlife species; interestingly, there is a potential synergy between taste preferences and the more resilient species that are hunted.

These results indicate that wildlife consumption plays an important role in human food security in the humid forest zone of southeastern Cameroon. Disappearance of wildlife would negatively impact the food security situation in the region, particularly in the forms of protein-energy malnutrition and iron deficiency. At present, there is little ability to maintain small animal husbandry due to the poor veterinary services throughout the region. I evaluate the cost-effectiveness of a `Heifer International' model extended to two of the ten provinces in Cameroon that make up the region where wildlife hunting is currently the most important form of animal protein, consisting of the Southern and Eastern provinces ("Regions"), which together have a population of about 1 million people. The Heifer International model would replace the animal protein traditionally taken from wildlife sources with a revolving "micro-loan" of livestock, that must be eventually passed on to neighbors. At a population density of around 8 people/km2, wildlife hunting is believed to be at least four times above maximum sustainable wildlife hunting rates, and therefore supplementary forms of animal protein need to come from elsewhere. Assuming administrative and training costs are included in the prices of the animals as estimated, a `Heifer International' model of small animal husbandry would be a cost-effective way to address protein-energy malnutrition and iron deficiency, as well as wildlife conservation concerns in this part of the world.

This dissertation develops an economic theory of founding party dominance and validates its main implications via an in-depth analysis of South Africa under the ANC. At its core, the theory explains how a founding party like the ANC maintains the credibility of its economic promises in the longer term while generally failing to deliver on them in the shorter term. Ultimately, the credibility of these promises is determined by citizens' beliefs about the party, which they update by observing economic outcomes. In order to maintain favorable beliefs among the citizenry, the party strategically allocates state resources and economic propaganda across its broad coalition of voters.

Just as the theory predicts, ANC governments have shown a clear resource bias toward their higher-information supporters, who are better able to observe the state of the economy and the extent of government corruption. The country's post-apartheid economic policies starkly favor the more urban, better-informed elements in the ANC's coalition. Moreover, we demonstrate that the stronger is the economy, the more state resources are allocated to higher-information provinces as compared to their lower-information counterparts. In the same vein, we show that instances of official corruption--particularly the maladministration of social services--are far more prevalent in lower-information provinces, exacerbating the relative deprivation of citizens living in these environments. The theory also implies that founding party rulers like the ANC will allocate a greater share of state resources to its less partisan supporters, in line with the "swing voter" school of distributional politics. While the overall evidence is mixed, we do find that the ANC directs more resources to provinces in which its support among Africans has lagged the most (or increased the least) between elections.

Even more interestingly, our theory's unconventional prediction about the ANC's use of economic propaganda--namely, that the incumbent will strategically downplay the state of the economy in order justify the low provision of state resources--is borne out by the data. Particularly in period surrounding elections, the South African government systematically underestimates the country's rate of economic growth, only to revise those estimates upward at a later date. We also show that state-owned television outlets downplay the state of the South African economy in their coverage--and that they do so more than privately owned newspapers. Indeed, the stronger the economy, the more negative/less positive is the economic reporting by the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). What's more, SABC broadcasts in African languages are even more negative in tone than equivalent reporting in European languages, while a newspaper outlet widely regarded as pro-government is less likely to report positively during "good times" than more neutral publications. All of this evidence indicates that the ANC is targeting economic propaganda at African citizens with middling access to information, the precise group predicted by our theory.

Given these facts and conditions, we should not be surprised that the ANC--despite its widespread failure to deliver on its material promises--continues to so thoroughly dominate South African politics nearly 20 years after the advent of majority rule. Nor should we be surprised that provinces where the ANC enjoys the most electoral support are also those where the average (African) citizen is most likely to believe that her personal economic conditions reflect those of the broader national economy, as revealed in Chapter 5. Finally, we should be encouraged by an explanation of ANC dominance that goes beyond the traditional emphasis on race, not only because race is a `red herring' explanation that obscures a raft of political and economic dynamics, but also because it allows us to place South Africa's founding party dominance in a larger scholastic and historical context. As such, we speculate on how this study helps explain other examples political dominance, as well as what those examples suggest for the future of South African politics.

This study examined conceptions of the right to literacy in children, adolescents, and young adults living in rural Zulu villages in the mountains of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, as one instantiation of the development of conceptions of human rights in a developing world setting. Of human rights, literacy was chosen because of its familiarity to children and adolescents and because of its recognized importance to the promotion of well-being and equality in the developing world; the setting was chosen as representative of a traditional non-Western group living in relative geographical isolation. The participants (N = 72), in three groups, 10-11, 15-16, and 18-21 years old, equally divided by sex, were posed questions about the right to literacy, its properties in the abstract, and about hypothetical scenarios presenting conflicts between the right to literacy and cultural preservation, parental authority, and gender roles. Participants were asked to justify their responses to each question. Findings showed that participants endorsed the right to literacy in the abstract assessments (93% - 100%) and conflict assessments (61% - 100%), using, in the majority of instances, rationales of agency - capacities and resources promoting self-determination and well-being - and morality. This understanding of human rights, as it was isomorphic with `Western' conceptions of human rights as determined by previous North American studies and by philosophical treatments of human rights, provided evidence for commonalities in moral development processes between Western and traditional `non-Western' settings. The conflict assessments provided evidence for how children coordinate this right in the context of their families and communities and their evaluations of the relative importance of rights in comparison to other social values.