Transcript
Speaker: Today we welcome my good friend and political scientist, Vladimir Chluba, or I say Dr. Vladimir Chluba, professor at the University of Richmond, Jefferson School of Leadership.
Speaker: Born after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the Czech Republic, Vlad's journey took him across US, Germany, Denmark and Namibia.
Speaker: where he met his wife and found his passion for pursuing a career in the studies of political order in weak states, in particularly South African countries.
Speaker: Today we will touch upon some very contentious and even controversial subjects, but I think we'll have a lot of fun.
Speaker: So pass the ball to you Vlad.
Speaker: Could you tell us in your own words what's your research and perhaps why should people care about it?
Speaker: Off to you.
Speaker: Well, thank you very much for having me.
Speaker: I've had a chance to listen to your past episodes and I'm super honored to be able to be here.
Speaker: So as you said, I am a political scientist by training and I study politics in Africa, specifically in Southern Africa.
Speaker: And the unique niche that brought me to the University of Richmond and the School of Leadership is that I focus on traditional leadership.
Speaker: So traditional leaders are leaders that are not elected,
Speaker: but they are still very much influential, especially in local governance in Southern Africa.
Speaker: And I personally think that the topic is fascinating because you wouldn't expect in 2024 to see unelected leaders still so influential at the local level.
Speaker: And so one of my goals in my research is to explain why it is that they still remain so respected and so influential.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: What has been your most surprising or significant discovery so far?
Speaker: Well, there has been a couple.
Speaker: It's hard to think of the most exciting one, but I would say that the one that surprised me when I first got into studying traditional leadership and African politics is that you would genuinely expect that as African countries develop economically and politically, traditional leadership would be on its way out.
Speaker: But I think what we've seen in the last couple of decades is almost the opposite, right?
Speaker: Traditional leaders coming back and assuming perhaps even more power than they once had.
Speaker: And whenever you see something like that as a political scientist, you know there's my dissertation.
Speaker: I need to explain why that is.
Speaker: And just to give a little contact, I think, Vlad, you're working on a book, right, on this exact subject matter.
Speaker: And I think we'll come back to this a bit later.
Speaker: But to set the scene for those who are not familiar, could you give us a little overview of
Speaker: the history of African as a continent.
Speaker: I know it's a very vast continent with very different cultures and ethnicities at play, but just for those who are unfamiliar, tell us what happened from perhaps a pre-colonial era to a colonization period under the European power to the era of independence, because it's a very kind of, I think, undercovered subject, even outside of academia.
Speaker: How many hours do you have?
Speaker: This is a topic that we could definitely spend a lot of hours on, but I think what I will say, and I think that is what a lot of people will not be familiar with, is that the pre-colonial history of Africa is, I think, still today a lot more important
Speaker: than a lot of people realize.
Speaker: A lot of people sort of focus on the colonial era, assume that the European influence, as destructive as it was, is really the main driver of what we see in African societies today.
Speaker: But what I've discovered in my own work is that actually there's a lot of pre-colonial aspects in African politics that are still very much at play.
Speaker: And so to answer your question, I don't want to digress too much.
Speaker: The key thing to realize is that before colonialism, so let's say roughly before 1880,
Speaker: there were a lot of different polities in Africa, right?
Speaker: Some were very decentralized communities where you couldn't really find any specific leader who would command the respect of anyone else necessarily.
Speaker: But then you also had very centralized states that in some cases would trade with faraway places such as China.
Speaker: And so there's just a lot of diversity that, you know, it's impossible for me to summarize it.
Speaker: And that indeed it is the case that once the colonial
Speaker: powers arrived roughly 1885 and later, that was a major critical juncture in the history of Africa.
Speaker: But again, different places were affected to a different extent, right?
Speaker: Some were affected to a massive degree through violence, through war, through disruption.
Speaker: Some were not affected as much.
Speaker: So I can think of cases where the colonial powers kind of enlisted the local chiefs to in fact help them govern.
Speaker: And so I'm happy to expand on any of those topics, but, you know, it is a really broad topic and it's hard to summarize it quickly.
Speaker: Yeah, that's for sure.
Speaker: Perhaps I give you a little too broad of the beginning, but we'll drill down into some of these periods as we go along.
Speaker: So I had the fortune of taking an African history class in my college.
Speaker: Shout out to Professor Dr. Sandra Green if she'll ever watch this.
Speaker: But what I learned was during the pre-colonial period, there was already an existing base layer of traditional institutions that had very strong, in some cases weaker, but strong control over its communities.
Speaker: So it wasn't the case that
Speaker: nothing was happening before colonial European power took over.
Speaker: So that was the misconception I want to tell everyone here.
Speaker: However, the reason why we will focus on the later period is because I think it's just so defining for the years to come.
Speaker: And I think it's important to make a note here that the pre-colonial period matters and it still shapes the course of African history today to some extent.
Speaker: Okay, so perhaps now we can dive a little deeper to the colonial period, which is, I think, a topic of more academic interests and more relevant today.
Speaker: So what happened?
Speaker: I guess colonialism was quite a widespread
Speaker: event globally for a couple hundred of years and it spread to Africa relatively later.
Speaker: America got independent from British in the 1700s.
Speaker: So could you explain to us why the colonizers found Africa a bit later and then what happened exactly?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think the key thing to realize is that Africa was colonized much later than all the other continents.
Speaker: So specifically in 1884, there was a conference in Berlin when Germany, as the rising power, decided to organize a conference where the European powers could sort of talk.
Speaker: about how they want to divide the continent without potentially going to war.
Speaker: You might ask, why was it so late?
Speaker: Well, there's a couple of reasons.
Speaker: One of them is that Africa ultimately doesn't have so many rivers.
Speaker: It has a couple of big rivers, but it's pretty difficult to cross across some of these really inhospitable places like the Sahara.
Speaker: And so the Europeans didn't know a lot about Africa, right?
Speaker: So they kind of knew a lot about the coast, but not so much what's going on inside.
Speaker: And then as these newer powers such as Germany kind of entered the arena, there was essentially a scramble for Africa where there was a sense that if the powers don't move fast enough, then they will be too late.
Speaker: And so in 1884, that's when it all happened.
Speaker: And it was unique in how it was in some sense for the Europeans, at least not very violent because they managed to agree on these rules about how Africa would be divided.
Speaker: And so within a couple of decades, essentially, the whole continent was carved up between the different European powers.
Speaker: And they used different ways to govern these colonies.
Speaker: That's probably something we can touch on later, because not everybody used the same strategy.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So why don't we just talk about it a little bit here?
Speaker: I understand there are the settler colonies and the other more extracted colonies.
Speaker: What are the differences, the different strategies they employed?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think there's at least two different ways in which we could look at it, right?
Speaker: So the first distinction is the one that you pointed to, which is the distinction between settler and non-settler colonies.
Speaker: So a settler colony would be a colony that was designed pretty much from the beginning to receive large numbers of European settlers who would then
Speaker: live there and recreate essentially European society.
Speaker: So Namibia, which is where we're sitting today, is a great example of a settler colony where the Germans aimed to bring as many settlers over as possible and they wanted to stay here for the long term.
Speaker: The non-settler colonies,
Speaker: There's plenty of examples of those.
Speaker: We can mention, let's say, Benin in West Africa or Ghana in West Africa.
Speaker: Those were designed to essentially provide resources for their colonizers.
Speaker: So maybe the colonizers would set up a couple of bases on the coast, but they never really intended to set up the kind of bureaucratic structure that they would if they wanted to settle.
Speaker: So that's one distinction.
Speaker: Another distinction is a distinction between direct and indirect form of colonial rule, where a direct form of colonial rule, which would typically go hand in hand with civil colonialism, would be about setting up these direct structures of governance, removing all the pre-colonial structures and putting in place new structures.
Speaker: Indirect rule in turn meant that
Speaker: If there was, for example, a precolonial state, that precolonial state would be used by the colonizers to govern.
Speaker: And so those choices had some long-term consequences that, again, we can explore.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So before we delve even deeper, I just want to take a step back at Europe's first contact with Africa happened a lot earlier than the scramble for Africa you just described.
Speaker: The Dutch set up the trading post in South Africa way earlier back then.
Speaker: and the more well-known, the cross-Atlantic slave trade, where you bring the West African slaves to work on plantations in the West Indies, that's also ahead of the period.
Speaker: So I guess what you touched on one point is important, the geography.
Speaker: That was the reason why the settlers wasn't able to conquer much of the land until the Berlin Conference.
Speaker: Yeah, I would touch on a couple of reasons.
Speaker: Some of them are not from my own head.
Speaker: In fact, most of them are someone else's ideas.
Speaker: But if we think about Jared Diamond's famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, what he highlights is that Africa has a north-south orientation, right?
Speaker: And so if you're trying to cross from the north all the way to the south, you will have to cross deserts, you will have to cross some very disease areas.
Speaker: uh ridden if you will areas and so it'll be very difficult for a colonizer to start in the north and make their way all the way to the south the absence of large rivers a similar problem you cannot just get on a river and and easily uh kind of sail inside inside africa right and so the initial contacts that you're mentioning typically happened along the coast right where
Speaker: the Portuguese, the Spanish, they were able to establish trading posts.
Speaker: The Dutch, as you said, set up certain settler colonies in today's South Africa, already in the 17th century, but those were all fairly coastal areas.
Speaker: And so the middle of Africa was in some ways untouched until really the early 1900s or even later.
Speaker: So what was the political structure?
Speaker: What did the state look like before the European powers come in?
Speaker: Were they comparable to the traditional leaders you even research on today?
Speaker: How modernized were they, if I may, back then before the colonizers came?
Speaker: So there was a lot of diversity, right?
Speaker: So in 1940, a pretty important book came out, written by two anthropologists, Fortes and Evans Pritchard, and they essentially distinguished between two types of precolonial polities, right?
Speaker: Polities that they called
Speaker: polities without any kind of state-like structure, so decentralized, and then polities that had some kind of state, centralized.
Speaker: Now, I would say what I've discovered through my own work is that there's a lot of intermediate types, that it's not quite as simple as had a state, did not have a state.
Speaker: But I do think that for the sake of a simpler discussion, that's a useful distinction.
Speaker: And so you can really run the gamut from communities that would have 30, 40 members and didn't really have any
Speaker: governance structure to large states, which in some case, I'm thinking about, for example, the kingdom of Uganda in today's Uganda, which controlled thousands and thousands of people
Speaker: conquered essentially the whole area around Lake Victoria, developed even some advanced military tactics like war canoes that they then used on Lake Victoria.
Speaker: And so it's really very diverse.
Speaker: It's impossible to summarize.
Speaker: whole history in just a couple of sentences but diversity i think is the main uh word that i would want to highlight right diversity and also the fact that uh before the colonizers came tribal warfare uh conflicts and battle for power has been going on within the continent for many many decades or centuries right and the and the tribes uh
Speaker: that survived or flourished as this long process of evolution are the ones that are faced by the European powers when they first came.
Speaker: So the power dynamics was not completely where you have this, perhaps some people think a very modern culture versus a backward culture, but it's more of a
Speaker: the the if i may the german germanies and the british of the continent are facing the actual germans the british that came from europe so both were let's say the the the winners of their own communities and geographies so that was the kind of the contact where the period of colonization happened right
Speaker: Yeah, you're exactly right.
Speaker: And I think different polities reacted to colonization differently.
Speaker: You had examples where the polity quickly understood that the European influence was going to be decisive, and so they tried to make a deal, they tried to coexist.
Speaker: I think Buganda in Uganda again will be a good example where the British too understood, you know, why would we remove all this powerful Bugandan state from power?
Speaker: Instead we can make an alliance.
Speaker: And so the British first helped the Bugandan ruler to kind of control, dominate his area, but then they also wanted a cooperation in return or even dominance in return.
Speaker: But you saw policies that sort of modernized as a form of defense, right?
Speaker: So they understood the Europeans are coming and they made some quick strides in terms of modernization, military tactics and so on.
Speaker: One thing we could touch upon in our conversation is what happened here in Namibia, where you did have a lot of contact between the indigenous communities and the Cape Colony.
Speaker: And so they acquired, for example, weapons, rifles, fairly modern European weapons,
Speaker: uh before the germans even came and so when the germans came the first 10-15 years they were pretty weak and so they had to make alliances with the local communities and the local communities saw them to some extent as just another actor that they could ally with and maybe defeat their rivals of course eventually it
Speaker: Turned out that the Germans wanted a lot more than just create an alliance, but it was too late.
Speaker: And that's something we can talk about as well.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: If we may shift a bit to the point of view of the European powers,
Speaker: What were their incentives and perhaps different countries have different interests with regards to the colonies they chose from the map, right?
Speaker: What was the historical context and what caused them to scramble for this massive collective expansion of territories?
Speaker: So I think a lot of viewers, a lot of listeners will probably assume that colonialism was an incredibly lucrative project, right?
Speaker: And that will be true in some cases.
Speaker: If you think about what India did for the British, it was absolutely a source of massive wealth.
Speaker: What Mexico did for the Spanish, the gold, it was definitely the case.
Speaker: But a lot of African colonies were not particularly lucrative.
Speaker: Just one example, right?
Speaker: When German colonialism was about to start, the German Chancellor Bismarck was actually quite reluctant to finance it because he thought, you know, this is going to be very expensive.
Speaker: We're going to pay for the policing.
Speaker: It's not going to be worthwhile.
Speaker: he was convinced by the enthusiasts in germany to actually get engaged and finally colonize today's namibia but it was far from clear that it would make any any money and frankly a lot of colonies didn't make that much money so you may ask why did africa attract so much attention my personal view is that in the late 1880s it had a lot to do with prestige
Speaker: So Germany, a newcomer to the colonial project, realizes all the other old powers, Britain, France, they have their own colonies.
Speaker: And so if we want to be a genuine power, we need colonies as well.
Speaker: And so again, it wasn't just the economic incentives.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I guess the question in my mind is when all the European leaders came together at the table, how did they choose and decide and allocate, okay, this is part of where I want to send my troops and settlers to?
Speaker: So that's a pretty interesting topic.
Speaker: We know quite a lot about what happened in Berlin, but essentially the core goal was to avoid warfare, right?
Speaker: The colonial powers did not want to fight over these different territories.
Speaker: And so there was a couple of different proposals at play.
Speaker: One proposal suggested that as long as you have a coastal base, that means you can colonize that particular area.
Speaker: Another proposal was, well, it's not enough to have a coastal base.
Speaker: You actually have to show that you have a substantial control even over some of the regions in the hinterland.
Speaker: And you may guess who, you know, favored which proposal.
Speaker: Of course, it was the newer powers that didn't have that many coastal bases that demanded greater control because that meant they had a bigger chance.
Speaker: But eventually they did settle on a proposal that said that as long as you had substantial control, that you could claim
Speaker: all the territory that goes inland.
Speaker: And then there were some smaller incentives such as the British wanted to connect their various colonies on the eastern and western parts of Africa.
Speaker: So they played kind of strategic games like that.
Speaker: But the core, again, the core driver was can we divide Africa without engaging in a conflict?
Speaker: In some sense, they succeeded at that.
Speaker: So why don't we now talk about a distinction you mentioned before about the direct rule and the indirect rule.
Speaker: And perhaps if I could slide in another question of mine is how much of this was a state sanctioned project or how much was it in the hands of private enterprises at the time?
Speaker: So I think I'll answer the second one first.
Speaker: So, you know, the private companies were involved at the beginning and in some colonies for a very long time, but eventually in most colonies, the state ended up taking over.
Speaker: And so you might even say that it was really private interest that drove the colonial urge, the colonial...
Speaker: mania, but eventually the states had to come in and had to establish their own structures.
Speaker: And so what's the difference between direct and direct rule, right?
Speaker: So if you are a European colonizer, you essentially want to do colonialism on the cheap.
Speaker: Especially colonies that didn't have that many resources, you wanted to avoid the associated costs.
Speaker: And so if there was a
Speaker: pre-colonial structure in place, a kingdom with a network of headmen, you might simply try to co-opt and use that structure to govern.
Speaker: This was very common for the British, they used the system in Nigeria, where they worked with all those pre-existing chiefs, and in some colonies they would even create chiefs if the chiefs did not exist, modeling those structures after the chiefs that did already exist.
Speaker: Now the French, for example, were much less likely to use the indirect system because their colonial ideology, if you wish, if you will, was a little bit more transformative, right?
Speaker: They wanted to turn, in some sense, their African subjects into citizens, or at least that's what they claimed.
Speaker: And so there was a bit of a distinction depending on who was the colonizing power.
Speaker: Some were more violent than others, some used more direct rule than others.
Speaker: Perhaps now is a good time to transition to your research area, which is South Africa, where your expertise lies, to talk about the impact of colonialism.
Speaker: Because as you said, how it manifests itself is so diverse between different countries.
Speaker: How violent was this project and I guess what were the biggest, you would say the lasting impact to the countries?
Speaker: Yeah, so Southern Africa was both lucky and unlucky in that it had a more temperate climate that the Europeans could handle.
Speaker: West Africa, for example, was never very conducive to European settlement because of its disease environment, malaria, you name it.
Speaker: But if you think about South Africa, if you think about Namibia, malaria, for example, was not a huge issue.
Speaker: You could, as a European settler, survive, you could set up a farm.
Speaker: And so what that means is that we have a lot more settler colonies.
Speaker: So Namibia was a settler colony.
Speaker: South Africa, obviously, was a settler colony.
Speaker: Even Angola received a lot of Portuguese settlers.
Speaker: And that meant that the Europeans who came didn't just want to take advantage of those resources.
Speaker: They also wanted to set up their own shop.
Speaker: They wanted to live there.
Speaker: They wanted to exploit the resources.
Speaker: And so that meant that from the very beginning, the process was bound to be more violent.
Speaker: Because not only, again, did you want to get a hold of those resources, but also remove the local population.
Speaker: And so, if we talk about Namibia specifically, we see the first genocide in the 20th century taking place in Namibia.
Speaker: And that happened exactly before, exactly because the Europeans wanted the land on which the native population lived.
Speaker: It depends on what
Speaker: how the European powers see the country fits into its global ambitions, right?
Speaker: I guess exactly that question then, how did Africa, southern African countries, fit into each country's global map at the time?
Speaker: What were the resources?
Speaker: Were they there for labor, minerals, land,
Speaker: Yeah, so let me start with South Africa, where I think the story is a little bit simpler.
Speaker: And then I'll talk about Namibia, which I think is also interesting.
Speaker: So in South Africa, you had a lot of contact with the Europeans, you know, since the year 1500 or so.
Speaker: because it was the southernmost tip of Africa, and so when you were traveling to India, you had to pass through a very temperate climate.
Speaker: And so some of the first European communities, the Dutch in particular, set up their settler colonies in southern Africa.
Speaker: And they were to some extent quite independent, right?
Speaker: They were not all that much dependent on their European motherlands.
Speaker: Now Namibia is very interesting, I think, because it fits within this larger discussion that was taking place in Germany, where Germany at that point, this is the late 1880s, was a booming, growing country, but it was also a country where the population grew very fast.
Speaker: there was not necessarily enough jobs for everyone.
Speaker: And so you saw massive amounts of immigration from Germany to, for example, the Midwestern part of the US.
Speaker: So if you visit states like Iowa, everybody speaks German more or less.
Speaker: Well, not everybody speaks German, but there's a lot of German traditions.
Speaker: That's because of this region.
Speaker: And so Namibia was seen by a lot of people in Germany as this alternative route where Germans could come, they could retain their German...
Speaker: They wouldn't lose it.
Speaker: They wouldn't be diluted by the American culture.
Speaker: And so that's how it fit within the larger discussion within Germany, right?
Speaker: We have too many people.
Speaker: Where do we send them?
Speaker: Well, perhaps Namibia, Southwest Africa is going to be the destination.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So this colonial project, let's say, was running successfully.
Speaker: Then what happened to stop the train going forward?
Speaker: Because now all the countries on the African continent has gained their independence.
Speaker: I guess everyone has their own stories.
Speaker: But under the historical backdrop, what happened, what led to this transitioning out of colonial rule?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think that has a fairly simple answer, which is that in
Speaker: the early 40s, of course, you had World War II happening in Europe, right?
Speaker: And that was a massive event that drained the resources of Britain, of France, all those colonial powers.
Speaker: Now, Germany had already lost its colonies after World War I. And so when some of the soldiers that were fighting, for example, on behalf of France, who were from Africa, came home, they realized that, you know, why did we fight all this war?
Speaker: Why did we die on behalf of a colonial power that doesn't even see us as real citizens?
Speaker: And so you had that happening.
Speaker: And then the colonial powers realizing we are broke.
Speaker: We're out of money.
Speaker: The World War basically cost us way too much money.
Speaker: And so the more I would say
Speaker: forward-looking politicians realize that their time is up.
Speaker: And so Britain, for example, is getting ready from the mid to late 1950s to basically give its colonies independence, even though it's a controlled process.
Speaker: France did resist, for example, in Algeria.
Speaker: They felt they could retain Algeria, but they too were wrong.
Speaker: The Portuguese resisted for a little bit, but it really was the 50s and the early 60s when the tide turned completely and was obvious that it was just a matter of time before nearly all colonies would gain independence.
Speaker: then I think then it begs the million dollar question if countries in Africa gained their independence around the same time or even before some other countries in Asia, Latin America, other parts of the world, then why, I have building an assumption there, why is colonialism
Speaker: shadow is still proportionally bigger in Africa than other parts of the world.
Speaker: Why we're still seeing this degree of underdevelopment?
Speaker: Would you point fingers at the colonizers?
Speaker: Would you say they did something different here than their other colonies?
Speaker: Or would you say there were some deeper rooted causes here?
Speaker: I guess here we're transitioning more to the topic of what's the way forward for the state we're in now.
Speaker: So that's a very good question.
Speaker: I think I would disagree with your assumption a little bit in that colonialism was much more transformative in Africa than elsewhere.
Speaker: I think you could look at
Speaker: South America and you could see similarly deep scars, similarly deep effects still today.
Speaker: I'm not an expert on Asia so I don't want to speak too much to Asia but I think, I hesitate to say that that's a uniquely African phenomenon.
Speaker: Now you asked about development, you asked about
Speaker: you know, again, not a million dollar question, but a super complicated question, you know, what determines why countries are developed and so on.
Speaker: And so I'll just touch on one or two topics and then happy to expand.
Speaker: But colonialism in Africa really did result in a lot of difficulties, right?
Speaker: Countries were created more or less arbitrarily from regions, from ethnic groups that did not necessarily see themselves as part of one big community.
Speaker: Nationalism didn't
Speaker: really take off until much later.
Speaker: And so, you know, some ethnic groups were split, right?
Speaker: That if you think about, let's say, Northern Nigeria, you've got groups that speak the same language.
Speaker: Some ended up in Nigeria, some ended up in Niger, and so you've got that problem.
Speaker: The road or the transition to independence happened within about a decade.
Speaker: So the Congo, for example, is a famous example where, if I'm not mistaken, there were 16 college graduates when the country gained independence in June 1960.
Speaker: Can you imagine running a massive country with so many different groups with 16 college graduates when they got two years notice about independence?
Speaker: That's just very, very hard.
Speaker: The last bit I'll mention is that there are these long-term trends that characterize, I think, economic development even beyond the colonial era.
Speaker: And so I don't think it's an overstatement or miss... I'm sort of mistaken when I say that Africa wasn't quite on the cusp of a economic takeoff in the late 1880s when the Europeans came, right?
Speaker: So I think in that sense,
Speaker: There is a longer trend that in some sense overshadows even the destructive colonial experience.
Speaker: There's something longer at play potentially.
Speaker: Can you unpack that little part a bit more?
Speaker: What do you mean?
Speaker: What is the longer trend there and what are you referring to specifically?
Speaker: Yes, I would again kind of reference Jared Diamond and his ideas, his thoughts and what I think he would argue is that a continent like
Speaker: Europe in some sense has a lot of going for it, right?
Speaker: You've got a lot of peninsulas, you've got a lot of islands, you've got a lot of rivers, and so innovation, especially after the invention of the printing press, spreads very quickly, right?
Speaker: So somebody discovers something in Spain, that innovation, that knowledge will spread, will diffuse very quickly to as far as Greece or Sweden, you name it, right?
Speaker: Because the continent kind of has that unique geography.
Speaker: In Africa, you didn't really have that, right?
Speaker: You definitely had trading routes, but if you make a discovery somewhere in Senegal, it'll take a while before it gets to Somalia, right?
Speaker: There's just that geographical aspect.
Speaker: And so there's people who would argue that the disease environment has a major role to play.
Speaker: So this is work by Jeffrey Sachs, who I think many listeners may have heard about.
Speaker: And he makes a big deal out of malaria, right?
Speaker: That if you're living in an area that has a difficult disease environment, it's just going to inevitably drain resources.
Speaker: And so, you know, I think the explanations are many.
Speaker: It's hard to pinpoint just one of them.
Speaker: But again, if you wanted to look at these longer term trends, then you could say that in the late 1880s, despite all those regional differences, again, Africa was not about to start booming.
Speaker: That simply wasn't the case.
Speaker: So the preconditions were not there even before the destruction during the colonial period that came afterwards, right?
Speaker: That was the, if I may summarize the statement,
Speaker: Yes, I think that's roughly correct.
Speaker: And of course, if the Europeans engaged in a less exploitative way, I think that Africa could have taken off.
Speaker: And I think that's kind of what we're hopefully seeing today, right?
Speaker: But as we know, colonialism was not about
Speaker: spreading innovation, spreading knowledge, helping the local people to live different or better lives or whatever.
Speaker: It was about coming and controlling the local populations.
Speaker: And so it didn't make things worse, that's for sure.
Speaker: It did not help.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think the European powers over time realized that and have been trying to rectify
Speaker: to some extent their historical past around the world and Africa is not alone in a sense.
Speaker: So for the countries you're studying, perhaps all the major investors are from their previous colonizers, right?
Speaker: Could you give some examples of how these countries are perhaps in their own ways trying to develop their ex-colonies in Africa?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think I would complicate the picture a little bit because especially in the last 20-30 years you see the growing influence of China, right?
Speaker: Which is a country which is of course booming economically, I think is seeking more political influence, but doesn't have a lot of the natural resources that it needs.
Speaker: I know people probably know that China doesn't have a lot of oil.
Speaker: And so it needs to import oil.
Speaker: China needs a lot of uranium.
Speaker: So again, since we're sitting in Namibia and Windhoek today, Namibia is one of the largest producers of uranium in the world.
Speaker: And so you do have other countries.
Speaker: you also have newer sort of mid-range powers just turkey or the united emirates trying to affect what's going on especially in the horn of africa so that's somalia that's ethiopia that's that's sudan those countries the newest trend that i would identify is that as the war between russia and ukraine led to a decoupling between
Speaker: Europe and Russia, a lot of European countries have been looking for new sources of energy.
Speaker: Gas from Russia is no longer there, so what do we do?
Speaker: Well, if I talk about Germany, for example, or Belgium,
Speaker: they've tried to come to Namibia and invest in green hydrogen, which is a very specific way in which hydrogen can be produced from clean sources.
Speaker: And so I think that's the latest thing that we've seen, basically a hunger for energy.
Speaker: And I think the task for both Africans and Europeans, excuse me, is to find a way to make those kinds of deals mutually beneficial.
Speaker: Because I think Africans are rightfully
Speaker: careful about something that they might call neocolonialism.
Speaker: But I also think that these are opportunities and if they are exploited properly, they can benefit both sides.
Speaker: So I don't want to generalize too much, but perhaps for a more philosophical level discussion, as a resource rich country,
Speaker: you're in dealt with great benefits to begin with, but how do you prevent yourself being exploited by other more advanced economies?
Speaker: What should African countries, for example, today's Namibia do to maximize its own resources for the benefit of the people?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think this is the million dollar question, right?
Speaker: Because you can point to examples like Norway that has a lot of oil and has managed it pretty well, has managed to use it for the benefit of their own people.
Speaker: And then you can look at countries like Angola, where I think most observers would agree that that hasn't happened.
Speaker: And so it's a difficult question, but I think the answer is that you need to make sure that you have the legislative framework and regulatory framework in place so that everything is transparent and so that the resources are used in a way so that eventually the population benefits.
Speaker: I think transparency is a big, big topic.
Speaker: If you don't mind, I'll mention just one example from recent Namibian history where about five years ago there was a massive corruption scandal in Namibian politics called Fishrot.
Speaker: People can Google it.
Speaker: There's a nice documentary about it online on YouTube.
Speaker: And there the problem was that the Minister of Fisheries was essentially dishing out quotas to politically connected people.
Speaker: And that's not a very good process, right?
Speaker: If one person can more or less use his influence to
Speaker: to give people the right to fish, right?
Speaker: Fish is a great resource that Namibia has.
Speaker: And so one challenge that Namibia has had now is trying to develop a new framework where perhaps the code would be auctioned or there would be a more transparent process so that no single individual or a couple of individuals can take advantage of those resources.
Speaker: Right, I watched that documentary by the way, thanks for sending me the link, it's highly recommended for anyone who wants to learn.
Speaker: Literally the title, the anatomy of a corruption, how the politicians
Speaker: using their power to extract benefits for themselves at the expense of the population and how to the extent that it was considered as a norm, a normative behavior, which is, I think, shocking and not shocking at the same time.
Speaker: So perhaps along that line, what would you say are the biggest challenges for South African countries you're studying today?
Speaker: Well, there's a couple.
Speaker: Outside of corruption, which we just state on this topic, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so outside of corruption, which is certainly a big one, I think I would mention two.
Speaker: Number one, I would say inequality is a big problem, especially in Namibia, which I think is the second most unequal country in the world, and South Africa, which is, I think, the first one, the first most unequal country in the world.
Speaker: and happy to talk more about it, because I think this is an important topic, but the challenge there is that it's hard to solve inequality in its ills quickly, I think, without tampering with property rights.
Speaker: If you want to guarantee that investors, that people that have owned land for a long time can indeed own it for the foreseeable future, it's hard to guarantee that,
Speaker: and simultaneously tackle inequality.
Speaker: And so you may ask, well, so why don't we relax property rights a little bit?
Speaker: Why don't we get a bit more creative with land reform and so on?
Speaker: And I think the answer is that partially, you know, if you have an economy that depends on mining, that depends on all of external investment, FDI, you cannot afford to scare investors too much, right?
Speaker: And so I think
Speaker: countries like Namibia are in this unique dilemma where if they want to tackle inequality, they might be tempted to tamper with property rights, but that might lead to less investment.
Speaker: And if you have less investment, your economy is going to suffer its capital intensive and so on.
Speaker: So that's inequality.
Speaker: Happy to delve deeper.
Speaker: The other aspect I think is climate change.
Speaker: And it's not just the obvious, which is that, you know, if you're in a fairly hot, dry region, as Namibia is, that, you know, if things get hotter, then your agricultural productivity will plummet.
Speaker: It's even more complicated.
Speaker: So Namibia recently discovered fairly large deposits of oil, high quality oil.
Speaker: It's a little bit deep.
Speaker: Not sure how easy it'll be to get it.
Speaker: But, you know,
Speaker: In the changing climate, where more countries try to move towards clean energy away from fossil fuels, is this a resource that Namibia will be able to exploit?
Speaker: Should it be able to exploit it?
Speaker: Those are all questions that are being affected by the climate change discussion.
Speaker: Just to add a footnote to what you just said on the climate change, it's very interesting of a coincidence that on my flight here to Windhoek, the layover in Addis Ababa, is that how you say it?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I met a Ghanaian banker who kind of told me about the same thing.
Speaker: The narrative is now is the time that a lot of African countries discovered oil, the new resource, the gold of the past, if you may.
Speaker: But at the time when all the
Speaker: developed economies are shifting away from this resource.
Speaker: So in a way, the global powers are talking about we want to meet all the United Nations sustainable development goals, increase the GDP per capita for these countries, but at the same time, you're basically eliminating this path to wealth for a lot of the countries.
Speaker: by very stringent green policies.
Speaker: And I think you started the podcast by saying that we will say some controversial things, so perhaps now is the time to mention a few things, which is that... This is not the most controversial I have planned on my outline, but... Well, let's get started, then we can warm up a little bit.
Speaker: But I think that...
Speaker: I think a lot of developing countries have seen the climate change issue from their own perspective, which is understandable.
Speaker: But again, if you're in Namibia, right, where poverty, where inequality is still a massive issue, huge unemployment, you know, 20, 30% of the population doesn't have a job.
Speaker: It's just the fact that exploiting oil is a primary goal, more important than in some sense than I think the effects of climate change.
Speaker: And so I think that's partially why it's been so hard to reach these international agreements because countries have very different incentives and very different contexts that they face.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like the European powers have passed the stage where
Speaker: you're in a very resource-intensive manufacturing, industrial activity-driven economy, right?
Speaker: They've passed the stage where now they're developing new materials, advanced manufacturing, your internet sector, internet of things, AI.
Speaker: So whereas a lot of other countries are still trying to make their ends meet, trying to
Speaker: have a more diverse diet even.
Speaker: So it's a very different incentive and priorities at play, which is why, like you said, it's hard to agree on a global objective in the crisis we're facing, like climate change.
Speaker: But I do think, if I may jump in, that the tide may be turning again with the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Speaker: I think Europe realizing that
Speaker: there are even more pressing, if you will, concerns, right?
Speaker: And that while climate change is something we've been focused on for a long time, we simply cannot ignore concerns such as security.
Speaker: And I think also what the Germans would probably be able to talk about openly is that sometimes certain decisions may backfire, right?
Speaker: So if you try to move away from fossil fuels too quickly,
Speaker: towards clean energy, you may realize that clean energy fluctuates a lot.
Speaker: And so to fill that gap, you need resources like Russian gas, which we know was not a great bet.
Speaker: Or you may, in fact, dip even deeper into fossil fuels to kind of smooth those periods when you don't have enough solar energy or wind energy and so on.
Speaker: So I don't want to talk about this too much because I'm not an expert on that.
Speaker: But I do think that things may be changing and maybe they will change in a way that will be more favorable for Africa.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's always at the beginning you have a very radical transformative agenda, but then over time you realize the practical challenges and obstacles and how long it will take.
Speaker: For anyone interested, you can check out my previous episode on hydrogen, which I'll link below, would provide a lot of great contact and a similar conclusion to what you said, Vlad, about how realistic it is with the green energy in
Speaker: in the context of their limitations.
Speaker: One thing I learned already as a high school student is that you cannot ignore physics.
Speaker: You've got to pay attention to physics, otherwise physics will find you.
Speaker: And I think it's the case here as well.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that was your controversial opinion.
Speaker: Do you have some more to share on this climate change before you move on?
Speaker: No, I don't think so.
Speaker: I'm not an expert on it.
Speaker: So one of my big rules that I think I violated today a little bit is that I don't want to talk too much about things that I'm not an expert on.
Speaker: So I'll stop right here.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Let's come back to one of the other challenges.
Speaker: So after corruption, you mentioned equality.
Speaker: I think equality is on the top of mind from the citizens to the politicians, business people.
Speaker: And the interesting element you brought in here is property rights, right?
Speaker: I think in our previous conversation, you told me the way which some countries emerged from colonial rule to reach independence kind of set the tone or determined how secure the property rights are or the level of inequality.
Speaker: Could you talk a little bit more on that?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So typically when people try to understand inequality, where it comes from, the argument that a lot of people would make is, well, settler colonialism was the unique trigger of inequality, right?
Speaker: Because if you have settlers coming in, taking the native people's land,
Speaker: trying to monopolize politics, economics, you're gonna get inequality.
Speaker: And so a few years back, I'm going through the statistics looking at specifically African countries, and I notice that this explanation isn't completely wrong, but there's these exceptions, right?
Speaker: So I looked at all the settler colonies in Africa, Algeria,
Speaker: Mozambique, Angola, Kenya to some extent, Namibia, South Africa.
Speaker: And I noticed that not all of them were very unequal.
Speaker: If you look at Algeria today, they're not very unequal necessarily compared to other countries.
Speaker: And so I started asking myself, so why is it?
Speaker: Why is it that some former settler colonies are unequal, some are not?
Speaker: So just in the case of Algeria, are you saying that the colonizers still living there just as...
Speaker: impoverished as the locals?
Speaker: Or are you saying the locals are relatively better off than in some other countries we find?
Speaker: Yeah, so let me get to it because that's part of the explanation.
Speaker: But Algeria, if you look at Algeria today, what you'll notice is that its inequality is about 34, 33 on the Gini coefficient, where 100 is most unequal, 0 is least unequal.
Speaker: But it was a settler colony, right?
Speaker: You had more than a million Frenchmen and Frenchwomen living there still in the 1950s.
Speaker: And so when I looked at these different cases, let's say Namibia versus Algeria, I noticed that there was one key difference, and that is, did that country gain independence through a successful, victorious liberation war, right?
Speaker: Did the local population manage
Speaker: to win their liberation war?
Speaker: And in Algeria's case, the answer was yes.
Speaker: They won the war, more or less.
Speaker: And when that happened, a lot of the French population either voluntarily or somewhat involuntarily left.
Speaker: And so that meant that the local population could then redistribute the land and all of the property that the settlers left behind.
Speaker: Now, this was a violent process.
Speaker: I don't want to say this was anything that should be in any way praised or whatever.
Speaker: It's just a fact.
Speaker: I'm describing what happened.
Speaker: And so that's kind of how the inequality was lowered.
Speaker: Now in Namibia, for example, that didn't happen, right?
Speaker: You had a liberation movement, the Swapol party, which is today's ruling party, that managed to fight a liberation struggle, but they never managed to put enough military pressure on the South Africans or the colonial power at that point to actually win.
Speaker: And so what that meant was that they had to negotiate.
Speaker: They had to negotiate with the South Africans.
Speaker: Some other international powers were involved.
Speaker: And one of the deals that was reached was that Namibia will gain independence, but they would have to respect the property rights that were established during colonialism.
Speaker: So if you were a settler that was living on a farm, you could keep your farm, for example.
Speaker: And so that I think is the key explanation for why countries like Namibia or South Africa are still unequal decades after becoming independent while Nigeria is not.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If I may drill a little deeper or pick your brain more.
Speaker: So what do you think is the sin of inequality?
Speaker: What is the biggest wrong with it?
Speaker: Why do people focus on it so much?
Speaker: Are the...
Speaker: If I just be very direct, are the 1% in these poor countries have some obligation to redistribute their wealth or feel personally responsible for the impoverishment of the 99%?
Speaker: You know, I think that inequality, ultimately, if it's extreme, and I think you could say that in the Namibia case or the South African case, it is genuinely extreme because, you know, we're sitting in Windhoek and we're sitting in one of the nicer areas where you could think that you are in Norway or Denmark or Sweden or any country.
Speaker: country that you pick, and then you drive a couple of miles further and you would think that you are in, you know, pick your least developed country in the world, right?
Speaker: And so having that within a couple of miles is,
Speaker: not only shocking, not only disturbing, I think, from a moral perspective, but it's also that it makes any country less stable, right?
Speaker: A lot of fences in Windhoek have these electrical components on them.
Speaker: The first time I came, I thought, this is shocking.
Speaker: We have a fence with electricity on it, and you can understand why that is.
Speaker: So I think inherently it just makes the society less stable,
Speaker: And I don't think it's good for anyone in the long term.
Speaker: But there's nothing wrong with these more developed areas in these cities.
Speaker: But the problem is how do we lift the 99% up?
Speaker: That should be the focus.
Speaker: Well, I think you have to ask yourself, how did we come to this?
Speaker: And the answer is the colonial experience, where basically a couple of settlers managed to accumulate a lot more resources at the expense of everybody else.
Speaker: But I think I will double click on what you just said, which is to say that all that we need to do is to simply redistribute
Speaker: the land or the property or the wealth that the existing minority has and give it to everybody else, that would be a solution.
Speaker: I think that's a mistake, right?
Speaker: We know of cases where something like that happened in a fairly violent way.
Speaker: Zimbabwe is a great example where there were farm invasions in the early 2000s and it did not improve the economy.
Speaker: It led to a flight of investors and so on.
Speaker: And so I think the real challenge is how do you tackle inequality while not abandoning the institutions that we know, I think,
Speaker: pretty well are necessary for economic growth.
Speaker: And property rights, that's one of those institutions that is crucial.
Speaker: And so if we go back to Algeria, Algeria is certainly much more equal than South Africa or Namibia, but is it more prosperous?
Speaker: Probably not.
Speaker: Economic growth, GDP growth, depending on what decade you look at, isn't necessarily as impressive.
Speaker: And so I think that
Speaker: Some of these challenges don't have a quick solution.
Speaker: I think it'll take decades.
Speaker: And I know that's less than satisfying, but I think there's no quick way out of this.
Speaker: I do think that the colonial history just bequeathed the country with such a complex inheritance that it does not have a quick, a simple solution.
Speaker: Right, this is the hands that you're dealt with to begin, to have such a stark contrast.
Speaker: of the disparities, wealth disparities of your citizens.
Speaker: How could a government reverse the trend or do something about it?
Speaker: There's no quick solutions, right?
Speaker: I think one thing that I would recommend the governments do,
Speaker: I don't think it's controversial to say that, let's say the South African government is not doing it, right, is to run their own affairs in as clean, as non-corrupt, as efficient a way as possible.
Speaker: You know, I think that a lot of governments are thinking about big questions, you know, how do we reform the economy, what do we nationalize, what do we not nationalize, and so on.
Speaker: Or at least some political parties raise those topics.
Speaker: But I think you want to start with the basics.
Speaker: So do you have a government that is not corrupt, that is transparent, that is efficient?
Speaker: How long does it take to start a business?
Speaker: Do you need 14, 15 permits?
Speaker: Do you need just a couple?
Speaker: Does it take six months or does it take six weeks?
Speaker: And I think that, let's talk about Namibia specifically, if you look at Namibia, there are some very impressive rankings.
Speaker: So Namibia, some people might be surprised to hear, ranks higher on the Press Freedom Index than the United States.
Speaker: So the press in Namibia is completely free, very effective.
Speaker: I enjoy reading the Namibian paper pretty much every day.
Speaker: I think it's higher quality than some of the news outlets that I read in the US.
Speaker: But if you look at things like ease of doing business,
Speaker: It's not in the top 15, 20, 30, 50.
Speaker: And so I think that's where the government would probably want to start, in my view.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And in the global context, I would say inequality is on the trend of rising, right, especially in the more developed economies like United States.
Speaker: Even China today, where you see the top 1% have the ability to move their wealth around the world with the rise of trend of private banking, if I may bring even this into the conversation, you know, the
Speaker: Singapore, Switzerland, everyone is trying to be the banker for the top 1%.
Speaker: I think that will just even further this trend and the equality is definitely here to stay, which is unfortunate.
Speaker: But come back to this question I asked, do you think people belonging to the 1% here should feel personally responsible
Speaker: for the suffering of the 99% under the poverty line, do they have some moral responsibility, speaking philosophically?
Speaker: Yeah, so I think this is definitely the hardest question of the day.
Speaker: And I think there's two ways to think about it, right?
Speaker: One way to think about it is to look at all the complicated history.
Speaker: and ask yourself, how did we come to this?
Speaker: Why do we see so much inequality in Namibia?
Speaker: And you could say that there are unresolved questions.
Speaker: I think it's not a secret, you know, we spent a couple of weeks traveling to Namibia together and we went to different museums and so on, right?
Speaker: And we saw museums, both of us, where certain aspects of Namibian history were not emphasized as much.
Speaker: Happy to talk more about that if you like.
Speaker: And so I do think that there is some work to be done with properly commemorating, understanding, acknowledging all that has happened and realizing that that's what led to some of these problems such as inequality.
Speaker: But I think the one aspect or the one perspective that I personally prefer is to not so much
Speaker: try to belabor the past all that much, though that too is necessary.
Speaker: But to look to the future and ask yourself, can you have a prosperous, stable country for the long term, in the long term, if it's persistently unequal?
Speaker: I think the answer is no.
Speaker: And so I think that might be the way to start the conversation, right?
Speaker: It's not so much let's
Speaker: trade blame, who's to blame for this or that.
Speaker: It's more about realizing that if we want to have a common future, a future that is stable, that is prosperous, then we need to address inequality.
Speaker: So it's as much about the past as it is about the future, I think.
Speaker: So looking ahead to the future, transitioning to perhaps a slightly different topic, how should the southern African countries aligning themselves today in the context of great power struggles, of the polarization you see in the world with a rising risk everywhere, even on the verge of, you know, Third World War, some people might say.
Speaker: So where should they position themselves
Speaker: So one thing I'll have to say of course is that it's not up to me to decide.
Speaker: It's up to those countries.
Speaker: I'm not a Namibian.
Speaker: I love Namibian.
Speaker: My wife is a Namibian and I'm maybe partial Namibian, but I'm not a Namibian.
Speaker: I don't live here and so it's not up to me to tell Namibia how to organize its external affairs.
Speaker: So at best I will just try to analyze what I think is happening.
Speaker: What I think is happening is that the world is increasingly being divided into certain camps.
Speaker: We went through it during the Cold War, it had a very bad effect on Africa.
Speaker: And I think we are seeing some of that maybe again, you know, and I think the war in Ukraine is a great turning point, a critical juncture that kind of splits the world into different camps.
Speaker: I think you wrote an article on that, right?
Speaker: A blog post after it happened.
Speaker: I wrote articles on a couple of different topics, I'm not sure which one you have in mind.
Speaker: Some events happen that changes the world history, was that after the Ukraine war?
Speaker: That was, yes.
Speaker: It was more of an amateur historian attempt to explain some things.
Speaker: But I think Namibia historically has had this non-aligned
Speaker: position where the statement goes a friend to all and enemy to none, which I think is a very nice and idealistic statement.
Speaker: I do wonder to what extent that is possible in a world that's becoming more and more polarized, more and more divided.
Speaker: And again, it's not my business to be giving Namibia any advice.
Speaker: But I do think that Namibia is a democracy, right?
Speaker: Namibia has clear values.
Speaker: I think that there are- Perhaps if I may jump in here just to give the cost benefit analysis, the pros and cons of being closer to the US versus Russia's China of the world or trying to play the two great powers against each other.
Speaker: I think the West needs to do its homework, right?
Speaker: And if it wants to engage with Namibia, if it wants to engage with Africa, it has to do it with a genuine understanding of what a partnership looks like and not as an attempt to, again, take advantage of Africa or to become interested simply because they need the resources or whatever.
Speaker: But I think from Namibia's perspective, at least among the current political establishment in Namibia, there is some amount of nostalgia that I think a lot of people would find surprising if you don't know the country towards places like Russia or Cuba or...
Speaker: you know, I think even North Korea at times, but I don't think that's very prominent today.
Speaker: Because the leaders who were fighting for independence were getting a little help from the Soviet bloc.
Speaker: You know, I met people who spoke some Czech here in Windhoek because they studied in the communist Czechoslovakian schools back then.
Speaker: Now, I think that sort of sentiment is understandable.
Speaker: But I think it might lead to an inability to maybe focus more on the economic imperatives.
Speaker: And I think as I see it, as I analyze Namibia's position, I think there are great benefits to be gained from a partnership with the EU, with the United States.
Speaker: I mean, green hydrogen is a great example, right?
Speaker: New projects are being developed where billions of dollars are invested into new green hydrogen projects.
Speaker: And so I think that that's where the future lies.
Speaker: But again, it's not up to me to give anybody any advice.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: You're being very nice today.
Speaker: But okay, so perhaps we could even move on to...
Speaker: a more controversial subject area that I think you have nowhere to hide this time.
Speaker: You can't talk about inequality in this part of the world without apartheid, or apartheid, some may pronounce.
Speaker: perhaps first give us a descriptive overview of what is apartheid and some of its implications today.
Speaker: Sure, sure.
Speaker: I mean, I think this is fairly widely known that until 1994 in South Africa and until 1990 in Namibia, there was a system in place that was specifically designed to segregate society between, well, in Namibia, mostly white and black Namibians.
Speaker: Namibia at the time was under the South African...
Speaker: rule, right?
Speaker: So it was more of a starting South Africa but because you're research areas.
Speaker: Yeah, and so that system was designed to separate people.
Speaker: It was of course designed to give the benefits to the white population and then deny the black population good schooling, good health care, and you name it.
Speaker: And that is one of those long-term
Speaker: effects that we're still seeing shaping politics, shaping society.
Speaker: So how does it compare to
Speaker: the Jim Pearls of the US, the Southern States segregation laws before the Martin Luther King racial justice movement.
Speaker: How does it compare?
Speaker: I mean, I think in some ways it compares fairly well in that segregation was in place, racism of course was in place.
Speaker: it's slightly different in certain aspects.
Speaker: So for example, apartheid was all about limiting movement, right?
Speaker: So people would have these permits, passes that would allow them to go somewhere.
Speaker: There were these homelands established in South Africa where the black population was supposedly living and white areas where they couldn't go, the black Africans couldn't go unless they had a special permit.
Speaker: And so, you know, again, I don't want to
Speaker: compare which one was worse or not.
Speaker: They were both very bad, but the apartheid system had some unique features such as the passes that would limit even movement between different regions.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think this racism at the personal level, also at the institutional level, were long ingrained or deep-rooted
Speaker: ever since the European powers came or even before, during the cross-Atlantic slave trade.
Speaker: So it only became part of the written, codified law during the apartheid regime.
Speaker: I think it draws so much attention and also at the time where like all the other countries were moving towards more democratic liberal societies where you value freedom and equality, right?
Speaker: So in that context, how would you describe the racial relations today versus back then?
Speaker: Have we made progress and how does equality play into this
Speaker: I'll speak more about Namibia because I know Namibia much better.
Speaker: I'm married to a Namibian who's a black Namibian, so we spent some time here and so we got to experience or observe certain things.
Speaker: I think I want to say something optimistic.
Speaker: There's certainly challenges.
Speaker: I think my friends in the US would find it unbelievable sometimes, but I think that the US, compared to some
Speaker: some of the other countries that we're talking about, is doing pretty well in terms of racial relations.
Speaker: And there's problems to overcome for sure.
Speaker: But again, I think when you have the comparison, the perspective, you actually are quite optimistic, even about the United States.
Speaker: And so I think
Speaker: Namibia, if you asked me for a prediction 30 years ago, which I was three years old, so I would give you an eight, but if I was observing Namibia, I don't think I would give you such a positive prediction as what we're seeing today, despite all these issues, inequality and so on.
Speaker: Namibia is a fundamentally, I think, peaceful society.
Speaker: Each time I come to visit, I come roughly every year.
Speaker: During COVID, I didn't quite come as much, but I see improvements.
Speaker: I see infrastructure getting better.
Speaker: I see schools getting better.
Speaker: And so there's a lot of work to be done, but I do see improvements.
Speaker: And again, I think my general take on these things is that there is no shortcut.
Speaker: These things take a long time.
Speaker: They may take decades.
Speaker: But I do think that Namibia ultimately is on the right track.
Speaker: Nothing's guaranteed, but things are so much better than they were 15, 20, 30 years ago, for sure.
Speaker: And I think a key difference of a country like Namibia here versus US is in the United States, the whites are the majority, right?
Speaker: Proportion-wise population.
Speaker: But here, the whites are the minority.
Speaker: So I think it came up in our conversation in the car that white privilege was more of the institutionalized
Speaker: in the US in a way that transformed into, in the form of majority versus minorities.
Speaker: Whereas here it's less visible because there are just so much fewer of them to be a subject of conflict and contention, right?
Speaker: I mean, I think one thing you can say is that as a white person, you see it, you feel it here in Namibia a lot more than anywhere else, right?
Speaker: And I think that is, as you say, because when you're a member of a minority,
Speaker: Not only do you understand it, you feel it, you see it in ways that you just can't imagine if you're living in a majority white country, speaking from my perspective, but it's also that here it's a bit more visible.
Speaker: I've been in situations where I would walk with friends who were black Namibians and they would be searched when you go through a security checkpoint and I wouldn't be searched.
Speaker: I would be part of the same group of people walking somewhere.
Speaker: And so I think that speaks to the fact that there are still challenges, but also that
Speaker: From my own experience, it's more visible.
Speaker: It's hard to deny.
Speaker: It's more visible on the personal level, but it poses less of a risk or a source of instability for the country as a whole, right?
Speaker: Because there are so few of them, few in terms of ratio relative to a country like the United States, where everywhere you go, race,
Speaker: is at the front center of discussion, at the front of mind.
Speaker: So here I feel like it's not as much of a hot button issue, whereas that white privilege certainly exists, but it's more on the personal level.
Speaker: I mean, you would have to invite more Navipians to talk to you again, right?
Speaker: I hesitate to say much more, but...
Speaker: Again, one more positive thing, if it's a positive thing that I would mention is that I do think that conversations about race, racial relations, ultimately in Namibia to me feel sometimes more open, sometimes more open than I think in the United States.
Speaker: I think that people are just very unwilling sometimes to talk about these things openly, right?
Speaker: That there's these moral implications that go along with it that people just prefer to avoid it.
Speaker: I think here you could literally talk to a gas station assistant, the person who puts fuel in your car, and you could ask them, what do you think about white people?
Speaker: What do you think about the racial relations?
Speaker: And they'll open up very much.
Speaker: Why do you think that's the case?
Speaker: Why racial relations?
Speaker: Why do I think that's the case?
Speaker: So again, I would distinguish between the relations and the actual conversations about race.
Speaker: Why if I... I think this is... I'll just say this.
Speaker: I mean, that's my guess as somebody who has lived in a couple of different countries.
Speaker: I think this is more about the United States than about other countries.
Speaker: I think that the way the discourse has developed in the US,
Speaker: just makes it so, and I don't even know why that is.
Speaker: I mean, that's for viewers to determine for themselves why it is that it is such a sensitive topic in the US, but it's also sensitive in a way where conversations about it are just very hard to have.
Speaker: And I don't think those two things are necessarily two sides of the same coin, because I do think you could have difficult conversations about difficult topics
Speaker: but it doesn't quite have to be as sensitive.
Speaker: I'm not sure if I'm being clear, but yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: I think that was my experience too.
Speaker: Having lived in multiple countries where you see the dynamic of
Speaker: the diversity of different race and ethnicities living together.
Speaker: Like Singapore is another example where you have a Chinese majority with Malays, Indians, you know, other, even a white population, other ethnicities at play.
Speaker: But U.S., I think, is the country where these conversations become the most difficult and challenging.
Speaker: Do you think it has to do with...
Speaker: perhaps the leadership of political discourse, which happens at media, government institutions, and college campuses.
Speaker: Because these basically, I think, set the tone for the social discourse, the way people approach these subjects.
Speaker: When you see a news anchor that
Speaker: are unwilling to discuss these things openly, of course, then you think about your own family and your own neighborhood.
Speaker: Like, should I be open about it?
Speaker: Should I share my own views?
Speaker: You know, I genuinely don't really know.
Speaker: I mean, I think what we're describing is a fact that, again, racial discussions in the United States seem interestingly, weirdly difficult, sensitive,
Speaker: but they're there, right?
Speaker: Like the issues are there and people don't want to really want to have an open honest discussion about them sometimes.
Speaker: I don't really know why that is, but I think one thing I would say, so again, talking from my own experience or talking with my wife who is, you know, now living in the U.S., but she's originally, you know, a black African who transitioned to living in the U.S. about a decade ago.
Speaker: I think what's helped me is to think about the United States as a case.
Speaker: And I think one of the flip sides of American exceptionalism is that so many people see the US, Americans that is, as a unique case that is just not comparable to anything else.
Speaker: I think that's how some people think about it.
Speaker: And in some sense it is unique, of course, but in other senses it's not.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: It's just helped me visiting other countries that have had issues with racial relations, inequality, you name it, and just viewing my own or the society which I live in now, which is the US, through that perspective.
Speaker: And it just...
Speaker: It teaches you something.
Speaker: I know this is a vague answer, but basically my advice is try to view the US as another case more than as something super unique that cannot be compared to anything else and that cannot learn anything else from other countries.
Speaker: Because I think the US can learn from other countries just as other countries can learn from the US.
Speaker: How has your experience been being in a mixed race relationship with your wife in the US?
Speaker: Well, so this is an easy one to answer, right?
Speaker: Because you're not asking me to pass a judgment on society or other people's experience.
Speaker: You're only asking me about my experience, so that's easy.
Speaker: Because that's been your excuse multiple times.
Speaker: I don't want to speak on behalf of the Namibians.
Speaker: I don't want to speak on behalf of the colonizers.
Speaker: Yeah, sure, sure.
Speaker: I'll tell you what my experience is.
Speaker: So our experience has been very positive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's been very positive.
Speaker: I mean, I recall moments, you know, just to illustrate the difference, where we would be in Namibia and we would be walking, you know, holding hands with my wife by the road.
Speaker: This is maybe 2015, so that's what, nine years ago.
Speaker: And, you know, you would have people like verbally commenting on the fact that we are a mixed couple and they would comment, you know, in a sort of
Speaker: I don't think they meant it in a bad way.
Speaker: It was not a critical comment.
Speaker: They were saying, you know, it's good to see people doing this or, you know, I'm wondering what your kids will look like or something like that.
Speaker: But they're very open.
Speaker: They're very open.
Speaker: So clearly there are these assumptions that go with your race and being in an international relationship and so on.
Speaker: But people are open.
Speaker: And I think I probably prefer that than the U.S. where I think our experience has been very positive.
Speaker: I mean, I can't think of, and ask my wife, but I think she too would probably suggest that we can't think of more than like...
Speaker: maybe one bad experience, right?
Speaker: Where race at all was an issue or a factor.
Speaker: And granted, we don't hang out with everyone in all different circles or experiences limited, but we did notice just like the topic itself just is very, it's very hard to talk about.
Speaker: It's just very hard to talk about it.
Speaker: So even if there are certain things that happen,
Speaker: people just won't want to talk about it.
Speaker: I mean, I'm being vague, but yeah.
Speaker: That's all right.
Speaker: I think, I mean, you can share your personal views with me after this podcast.
Speaker: Or, you know, for anyone who's... I mean, I can give more examples if you'd like, right?
Speaker: We'll move on from here.
Speaker: Okay, good.
Speaker: I think perhaps the last topic for today, in my mind, would be among your favorites, which is the current intellectual climate on college campuses.
Speaker: Being a professor yourself, I didn't show you as part of the outline, but as kind of a surprise bonus to you.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: which ties back to some of the themes we have so far on discussions on equality, on racial tensions, which is quite different from talking about colonialism in Africa.
Speaker: But I think, you know, interesting observations today, this year has been particularly transformative or stands out because of the reaction on college campuses on the Israeli and Gaza conflict.
Speaker: which has been a very polarizing issue.
Speaker: The precedence of our college, Khan College, and also my school I transferred to Cornell University both resigned, along with a lot of other academic leaders in Harvard, Columbia, numerous more.
Speaker: What are your thoughts on that in general as an educator?
Speaker: So I'll start by saying that my
Speaker: approach as an educator when I'm in the classroom is to teach my students how to think, not what to think.
Speaker: And in fact, my goal is to essentially confuse my students as to what I think.
Speaker: So if we discuss the difficult question like inequality, affirmative action, you name it.
Speaker: If the students by the end of the class tell me they're not really sure what I actually think about it, that we've covered both sides so thoroughly that they don't really know what I think, I think that would be a successful class.
Speaker: If they ask me later during office hours, what do you actually think?
Speaker: I might actually say something.
Speaker: But I think that the core of a good education is that you're able to argue both sides, that you can put yourself in the shoes of others, that you really learn how to think because I think a lot of us,
Speaker: tell ourselves that we believe something because it is the right thing or because we genuinely thought about it and rationally arrived at a particular position.
Speaker: But I think in reality, we're shaped by much simpler impulses.
Speaker: I think a lot of us, you know, have opinions that go back to our upbringing, our parents and so on.
Speaker: And I think just realizing that, realizing that if we were born in a different family, we had different opinions is very important.
Speaker: And so to bring it back, I think you really need to have a climate on campuses where people,
Speaker: don't identify, perhaps, as strong with particular positions, and they can engage with another person.
Speaker: I think that the best response, the best solution to wrong speech is more speech.
Speaker: And so in that sense, I'm a traditionalist.
Speaker: I don't think there's anything we need to reinvent.
Speaker: I think that the way the universities, at least in this respect, have worked for a long time is the right way.
Speaker: And so as someone who believes this... Protecting freedom of speech on both sides.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's not foundational.
Speaker: Not confusing violence with speech, like physical violence with speech, I think is important because speech is not typically violence, right?
Speaker: And that's important.
Speaker: And I think that...
Speaker: And as just as a previous student myself who has engaged in a various form of campus activism, looking back, you know, I know how far I've come intellectually and understanding of the world.
Speaker: So, which I wasn't even that active at the time, but just to, if I could go back was to tell myself,
Speaker: to be able to accept your ignorance even further to what you already think you are.
Speaker: So to assume the other side knows more than you.
Speaker: That's always as a starting point.
Speaker: To have this humility to understand the world is a lot more complex and challenging than you think.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, I have friends who I know have politically very different opinions from me.
Speaker: And they disagree with me and I disagree with them and I think they're wrong.
Speaker: I genuinely think they're very wrong about some very important topics.
Speaker: But I don't see the point of like getting so angry that I can't talk to them.
Speaker: I mean, they can just be wrong and we can be friends.
Speaker: I mean, I don't see the reason why you couldn't go to the gym with somebody who's politically wrong because when we lift the weight, it's the same weight.
Speaker: And so I have seen, if you wanna talk a bit more about the classroom, I've seen a bit of a rise of students kind of hedging their opinions very much.
Speaker: So you discuss some topic and you say this is just a topic that we'll talk about in the classroom.
Speaker: It's a trigger warning over trigger warning.
Speaker: Either that or students will sort of
Speaker: give all the warnings and all those, what is it called, standpoint epistemological warnings, like as a particular gender of a particular color, I'm gonna say this, and then they say something completely harmless, like what kind of ice cream they like, right?
Speaker: I don't think that's helpful to free discussion.
Speaker: Now, to say something more positive, I do think that these
Speaker: issues that you're talking about are not equally present on all campuses and universities.
Speaker: In fact, I would say most of the campuses and universities that I attended were pretty much fine most of the time.
Speaker: But I do think there is universities, there's context, there is climates that have major problems.
Speaker: And, you know, listeners, viewers can go on, let's say, fire.com, which is the foundation for...
Speaker: individual rights in education and they have a ranking of which universities are the most restricted when it comes to free speech and they'll find, you know, who's number one, they'll find who's the last one.
Speaker: And I think that's it.
Speaker: I think on that positive note, on your observation of the current state of college campuses, we should probably conclude this conversation.
Speaker: Again, thank you very much for coming to the podcast.
Speaker: And I think
Speaker: listeners, me as well, learned a ton in this very honest conversation, tackling some of the challenging topics.
Speaker: So yeah, thank you very much, Dr. Vladimir.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
