What's in a national motto?

To the best of my knowledge, only Brazil and Saudi Arabia have a national motto (or whatever you want to call it) on their national flag. Many more have a motto on their official coat of arms, though and from there, it frequently gets onto passports, official documents and the currency.

So how does the motto get chosen? And what does that choice say about a country?

I suppose most mottos are chosen at independence, so the leaders of the nationalist or revolutionary movements are probably important. But can we learn about a country's history from a motto? Or, especially in Africa, the personality of its first President or 'founding father'?

Compare these two, for example:
"Unité-discipline-travail" (unity-discipline-work)
"Unité-progres-justice" (unity-progress-justice)

The first is Côte d'Ivoire: serious, conservative, in keeping with President Houphoët's non-revolutionary ideology. The second is its neighbour Burkina Faso: superficially similar (and following France's lead by doing things in threes) but more progressive-sounding, more socialist maybe, with a revolutionary tinge. Coincidence?

I don't think so. When Burkina Faso was Upper Volta, its motto was actually "Unité-discipline-justice". When Thomas Sankara renamed it 'The Land of Upright People' in 1984, he changed the flag, national anthem and motto as well. Out with discipline, in with progress. A subtle change, but a symbolic one.


Or how about these two in East Africa? Kenya has 'Harambee' ('Together') while Tanzania has 'Uhuru na umoja' (Freedom and unity'). Almost identical, you might think. But 'Harambee' wasn't just a slogan for Jomo Kenyatta, it became a defining ideology for Kenya: nationalism, economic development and the uniquely Kenyan institution of the 'harambee meeting', community fundraising events in which local dignitaries donate to worthy causes and politicians (pardon my cynicism) return some of the cash they have looted to the people. Meanwhile, Tanzania - then as now a lopsided federation - stresses unity. The word 'Uhuru' is important too: Tanzania's president Julius Nyerere published two collections of speeches with 'Uhuru' in the title ('Freedom and Socialism' and 'Freedom and Development')

As to why Kenya has lions on its coat of arms and Tanzania has a man and a woman, I am afraid to speculate, but the symbolic contrast is striking.

Some slogans are unintentionally ironic. Liberia's fine emblem (left) fails to mention is that only 2% or so of its population where brought there by "the love of liberty". The rest of them were probably as bewildered by the beautiful ship with the white sails as I would be if a bunch of white Baptist Americans showed up in northern England and announced they had come to settle there.

How about the choice of language? Do you choose a colonial language, or do you pick a local one (and thereby risk offending minority ethnic groups?). Most countries in West Africa seem to go with English or French, whereas Swahili rules in East Africa, maybe because it's a regional rather than a local language so there's less chance of offending someone. The British and the Dutch royal families both have French mottos, but nobody seems to care.

Sometimes national mottos resonate in unintended ways. Mali's motto is a super-idealistic "Un peuple, un but, une foi" ("One people, one goal, one faith"). At first I thought it sounded like a song by U2. Then I remembered where I had come across 'one people' before. The motto of Hitler's Germany was "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer". Thankfully, a motto does not always a people make.

Belated benefit from slave castles

Last year a trip to Senegal opened my eyes to the evils of the slave trade in West Africa. More recently, I went to visit two of the 'slave castles' on the coast of Ghana. Both are carefully preserved and profoundly moving. I was impressed, as I have been throughout Ghana, with the knowledge and professionalism of the guides. They provided telling details of the greed and hypocrisy of the mostly British and Dutch traders. At Elmina (below), the governors used to have women they had captured parade in the courtyard and select one by leaning over their balcony. She was then dressed, washed and brought to the governor's quarters. If, at close quarters, she was found wanting, she was sent straight back to the dungeons.

The guides reminded us that these people operated with the connivance and support of European governments and many African rulers as well. Very few people are blameless in this sorry saga. So credit goes to the government, local authorities and Africans from the diaspora for helping to keep the memories alive.

In one respect, though, I felt that the slave castles were sadly unable to break from the past. Both the towns of Elmina and Cape Coast seemed extremely poor and unable to profit from their main attractions. I had expected to find legions of small hotels, restaurants and souvenir stalls, which might bring the people of these towns some belated benefit from their sorry history.

Instead, the dominant mode seemed to be "bus in, bus out". There are tourist hotels along the beaches, but virtually none in the towns. At Elmina, I only found one hotel catering to visitors; at Cape Coast, just a few budget backpacker places. Where there should be a bustling restaurant-and-souvenir complex, there is a ruin with a faded sign promising a 'visitor centre'. What went wrong? Where did the money go? Even the postcard and wood carving sellers, who are ubiquitous on Accra's beaches, were absent.

I would never suggest turning these lively fishing towns into slave coast Disneyworld. But fishing is a risky business and in decline, thanks to the European fishing fleets offshore. If big projects have failed, how about promoting small businesses? There are lots of little chop bars that no visitors go to: you could find a few ambitious ones and help them print English menus, maybe hire a kitchen help, put up some coloured umbrellas, then double prices. Or maybe set a fruit seller up with microloans to buy a juicer - I'd rather pay $1 for a glass of orange juice than try to peel my own for 10 cents. Or organize a fisherman's cooperative to offer canoe rides in the afternoon, for $5 per person? Set a fixed price, post it on a few notice boards and anyone shy of bargaining will jump at the opportunity.

Of course, if it were so easy, someone would have done it already. Would they?

The Great Illusion: Part One

Paul Krugman has a thought-provoking piece in the New York Times. He compares the international situation now with 1914, when the last great wave of globalization ended and the world turned in on itself for more than a generation.

I am substantially less well informed to comment than Krugman or many others, but it seems to me he is right to highlight the end of Pax Americana (but didn't that end in 2001, if it ever existed?). He is also right to point out how quickly national selfishness and protectionism reared their heads in the food price crisis - with export bans and the like.

There are three crucial differences between 2008 and 1914, however, which make me hopeful that we are not about to see an end to globalization.

The first is that international institutions are enormously stronger now than in 1914. The UN Security Council may have been powerless to do much about Russia and Georgia fighting, but that's because Russia is a member of it. The League of Nations would have issued a nice condemnation, but that institution was useless precisely because the USA, USSR, Germany and Japan were not a partof it. Besides the powerful military and economic bodies, there are countless talking shops where even sworn enemies without diplomatic ties can talk to each other in private, with a mediator if necessary. Europe depends on Russian gas; but Russia depends on Europe's continuing custom: you can't re-route a pipeline.

Second, unlike the Great Depression, the food price crisis contains the seeds of its resolution. 'Crisis' is often taken to mean a disaster, when really it means a turning point: this crisis is also an opportunity, by giving farmers in food-importing countries the incentive they need to grow more food. Here in West Africa, the price of imported rice and cooking oil has gone through the roof; but local food and oil production are starting to rise. Behind the crisis talk on the World Bank's website, a press release celebrates the halving of rice imports in countries as diverse as Guinea, Nigeria and Uganda, thanks to high-yielding rice varieties!

Third, there are large areas of the world that are as stable now as they ever have been. Krugman reminds us that war is now unthinkable in Western Europe; I would argue this extends to all 27 EU member states. The Americas and most of Asia are not islands of stability, they are oceans.

Rather than the end of globalization, I am much more concerned about another great illusion: the idea that we can deal with climate change by burying our heads in the sand. More uninformed ramblings on that to follow . . .

Four stations on the slave trade

Last week I travelled from Monrovia to Dakar, Senegal and then to Brussels and Lisbon. This unusually indirect itinerary (the product of indecision and obscure ticket conditions) has made me think about something that rarely occupies a white European: slavery.

We spent two months living in the Baptist Compound, Congo Town: named after the ‘Congos’, as the freed slaves who founded Liberia were called. Monrovia was built by them, funded by their guilty ex-masters and grew rich on enslaving the locals in their turn. The Americans who settled in Liberia created plantations whose rubber still contributes half their country’s exports. Only one of Liberia’s presidents was not Liberian-American: Samuel Doe, a semi-illiterate brute whose vindictive rule so incensed the elite that they helped fund his removal. He was succeeded by Charles Taylor, a pale-skinned, white-suited Baptist preacher. Taylor’s concrete palace, freshly painted, is right opposite the Baptist Compound.

I flew to Dakar on Slok Air. Its clapped-out 737 performs the West African stopping service the Royal Mail steamers used to. We stopped at Freetown to take on passengers. Across the river, a peak shone in the late afternoon sun. You could make out scattered houses on it: this is Hill Station, where the ‘Krios’ who founded Sierra Leone built their bungalows well above the malaria-infested ‘native settlement’ down below. The Krios were freed slaves too, but after 50 years of self-government the British decided they were getting ‘uppety’ and took over on the pretext that the Krios were excluding the natives of Sierra Leone from power. You guessed the next bit: a century of resentment and rivalry, boiling over in a bloody civil war . . .

Senegal is a complete contrast. It is the model of a self-confident Africa: it celebrates its French administration and bread as much as its Islamic heritage and vibrant music. A little offshore of booming Dakar, the Ile de Goree welcomes visitors. I went on Sunday, along with thousands of Senegalese, to delight in the colonial architecture. One of the prettiest buildings is called ‘La Maison des Esclaves’. Each room has a label: ‘Hommes’, ‘Femmes’, ‘Jeunes filles’ and so on. An arched door leads straight into the Atlantic ocean. Through this door, it is estimated that some tens of thousands of slaves were packed into waiting ships. There were many such houses on Goree, which was so lucrative that it changed hands repeatedly between 1650 and 1815, captured and recaptured by Dutch, French and British navies. Just like the Portugese, Arabs, Germans and British fought over Zanzibar.


What the guide on Goree didn’t tell us was that Mauritania, 300km to the north, tolerated slavery until 1981. Indeed, while I was in Senegal, the parliament of Mauritania voted to make slave trafficking a crime, so as to be able to prosecute it (see this article in Jeune Afrique, or the BBC for background). Mauritania’s democratically elected president – its first since 1960 – had made the issue a central pillar in his campaign.

I flew to Belgium on SN Brussels, a fading relic of empire whose Airbuses are still the best link to Kinshasa and Kigali. Belgium was the last European country to get into slavery. To make up for lost time, they kept the slaves right in the Congo where they came from. The pompous palaces of Brussels were paid for with Congolese copper and diamonds. In Tervuren, near the airport, King Leopold built the ‘Royal Museum of Central Africa’. It is still open, but when I visited in 2004, the ivory tusks and photos of happy natives dancing were being replaced with maps and mementoes of slaughter: for when Mr Kurtz died, he took an estimated 5 million Congolese with him.

Finally to Lisbon, from where Europeans first set sail for Africa and the Carribbean. Portugal was the first country into Africa and the last out: Angola and Mozambique didn’t attain their independence until 1974. The picture below shows the Cap Sao Vicente, the most south-westerly point in Europe. On the cape is an old fort: a naval college built by Prince Henry the Navigator. Its style reminded me of a fort in Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast some 5,000km away: not surprisingly, since that too was built by the Portugese. When Portugal abandoned East Africa in the 16th century, the Arab traders took it over.



What, if anything, links these four stations?

First, it turns out that the slave trade was the largest mass movement of people in human history. Some 12-15 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1900. 5 million went to Brazil and another 5 million to the Carribbean – mostly Cuba and Hispaniola. Less than half a million ended up in the USA. In countries like Jamaica, Haiti or Guyana, Africans essentially replaced the native population. Yet it is estimated that FOUR OUT OF FIVE captured slaves died before they got across the Atlantic – half of them didn’t even make it onto the ship. This puts the total captured at something closer to 25 million. To that add millions sent through Zanzibar to the Arab world or bought and sold in countries like Mauritania. (See here for details on the Atlantic slave trade or here for the Arab - though they were really part of the same phenomenon).

Second, nobody escapes from blame. All maritime powers were involved in the slave trade and many African rulers connived in it. Christian preachers like William Wilberforce and David Livingstone fought against slavery, but the slave traders of Lisbon, La Rochelle and Liverpool were Christian too. The great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, writing in the 14th century, described Africans as “the only race who willingly accept slavery, owing to their low human state and closeness to animals”.

Third, slavery doesn’t end with being freed. The sad stories of the three republics founded by freed slaves – Haiti, Sierra Leone and Liberia – should make that clear. Haiti spent 100 years trying to pay ‘damages’ to France and the next 100 years oscillating between dictatorship and chaos. Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas and Sierra Leone the poorest country in the world. In the early 20th century, Liberia exported slaves to the Spanish colony of Fernando Po (now Equatorial Guinea) to work on the cocoa plantations. The League of Nations censured it for this in 1929 and when President William Barclay came to power in 1931 he largely ended the practice.

Growing up in Central Europe in the 1990s, my history teachers focused on the twin horrors of the 20th century: the Holocaust and the Gulag. The slave trade deserves similar attention: not just in Africa or America, but in Europe and Arabia as well.