The Africa Dummy

In political science, when we try to explain simple things like development or war, we like to account for the fact that some regions of the world tend to experience these things just by virtue of being what they are. In a statistical regression, we call this the regional dummy: it answers questions like "ok so we see a civil war here... is that because we're in Africa?" Including this regional dummy in a statistical regression prevents any one particular region from driving the entire relationship we're analyzing. If, say, we are trying to explain economic growth and, say, Africa always tends to experience low growth while Asia always tends to experience high growth, we might want to account for those regional particularities in order to move beyond them and pin down what factors systematically explain growth across time and space. Hence the regional dummy.

The Africa dummy, by the way, is pretty much always a significant and negative factor when it comes to pleasant things like growth or peace or social harmony. Go figure.

But lately I have gotten a taste of what the Africa dummy feels like on the ground. The Africa dummy has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That stupid line they use in Blood Diamond, TIA (This Is Africa), which usually comes out just before old friends start shooting at each other or stealing from each other, is an actual mentality here. TIA appears to explain anything and everything. Forget all the other acronyms we like to use in our discipline - GDP, HDI, ELF... It's all about TIA.

I have become acquainted with two types of TIAs over the past nine months:

There's the angry, almost hostile TIA that is thrown at me by either (1) young men I ignored in Lagos, or (2) immigration and visa officials who enjoyed their temporary position of power over me a little too much. This one is supposed to scare me away, warn me that I am not in Kansas anymore and that all bets are off.

And then there's the apologist but also self-deprecating TIA, most commonly used to explain long waits for no apparent reason, ubiquitous tardiness, or differing concepts of honesty and truthfulness. This one takes cultural relativism to a whole new level.

I resent the Africa dummy. It may be the kind of rhetoric I'd expect from some Texan politicians, but it's not the kind I expect from Africans themselves. It creates and reflects a resignation that only perpetuates the lines that never move because there's only one person who can help and he's off to lunch, the meetings that never happen because people don't bother showing up, the time everybody wastes on flattery and deference in order to get anything from anybody.

But most importantly it is simply not true. It is a shell of an excuse. The immigration officials in Cotonou may be bastards who like to ignore your questions when they don't have your passport and visa ready for you after the 48 hours they said it would take, but the officials at the Niger embassy are kind, professional and efficient. Our first landlord may have been a crook who evicted us after reneging on our agreement but our second one offered us a wonderful apartment for an honest price. Some transport companies may be incompetent liers who claim the truck that is carrying your fancy solar electrification equipment is on its way out of Cotonou while it is still stuck in the Port (and then, when caught red-handed, claim that what they said did not technically constitute a lie), but others provide the service you expect for the price you agreed upon. The Africa dummy is much worse than a significant variable in a statistical regression - it's become an entire mentality, the most over-rated and exasperating excuse, the worst kind of apology.

When i went to the immigration office in Cotonou to extend my visa and the officials decided to keep my passport without reason for a few extra days, a man standing in line next to me thought he was doing me a favor by suggesting I offer them some money because "this isn't Europe after all." He then leaned toward the window and smiled at the official on the other side, the single most unpleasant individual I have ever met, saying "it's ok, I understand, I am African too." He was from Lybia.

I don't know if his method worked but I payed no more than the appropriate fee and eventually got my passport and my visa extension. If I survived the Nigerian border without paying a dash, I thought, there was no way I was going to pay my first bribe in a country where Nick Kristof thinks we should all buy real estate.

The TIA crowd is like the cool kids in high school who do bad things like smoking and cheating on tests. It's cool to know when to offer a dash, and it's cool to expect that things don't function otherwise. Instead I'm the white girl who believes what the signs advertize and calls people on their crap as they smirk back at me. It's nothing new, really. I never was a part of the cool crowd in high school after all.