This study of “roadblock politics” in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR), measured through roadblock taxation and the hidden logistics of supply chains, offers a new interpretation of power in weak states. Peer Schouten makes bold claims, including that roadblock politics have long been a feature of state formation. The power to control trade and logistics at chokepoints along transport routes offered state functionaries—underpaid soldiers, rebel groups, ethnic or village authorities, and local big men—the ability to tax trade and control scarce resources and, in contemporary conflict zones, intervene in global supply chains. Control over checkpoints and roadblocks countered the desire to move commodities, goods, and people. This argument is not totally new, but Schouten attempts to link present-day roadblock politics with historical practices in much of Africa, as well as preindustrial Europe. If the argument has much explanatory power for conflict zones with little infrastructure, the historical analogies do not always work.
In Part One, Schouten presents a “prehistory of the roadblock,” with the aim of showing that the proliferation of roadblocks and roadblock politics in the contemporary DRC and CAR is not an aberration but is the direct outgrowth of a three-stage historical sequence. According to the argument presented in Chapter 2, “Hongo Politics (1830–1890),” the first stage was the development of long-distance trade in central Africa as global market demand for tropical products exploded. The expansion of tropical products created opportunities for chiefs and big men in the many polities astride long-distance trade routes to use their strategic position to tax caravans (or canoes on the Congo river) through enforced hongo payments. This was leveraged through shows of force at key points along the caravan routes, and traders had little choice but to hand over a portion of their expensive trade goods in order to obtain access to much-needed food, water, and local trading rights. The second stage, described in Chapter 3, “Infrastructural Empire and Anti-colonial Resistance (1890–1960),” was the imposition under European colonial rule of systems of transport infrastructure, including railways, steamships, and ports, typically following the older trading routes but no longer subject to impositions of hongo. This enabled the colonial state to effectively monopolize the transportation of tropical products, both agricultural and mineral, and thus exploit the productive energies of the colonized. A consequence was occasional rebellion by colonial subjects who gained little benefit from their own natural resources and labor. The third stage, outlined in Chapter 4, “Ruination and the Revenge of Distance (1960–2000),” saw infrastructural decay and ultimately collapse. With the revenge of the “friction of the terrain,” railways rusted and roads turned to mud, as the postcolonial state lacked resources for maintenance (or diverted them elsewhere). The end of forced labor in 1960 also eliminated much of the rural workforce previously engaged in road maintenance for the colonial state. Enforced liberalization and privatization from the 1980s and the collapse of the Congolese state was the coup de grâce.
The material on the contemporary DRC is on a different level altogether, with an exciting and conceptually rich analysis of the emergence of roadblock politics in postindependence Congo and then, after 1997, its dominance in supply chain economics in North and South Kivu. This is covered in the four main chapters of Part Two: “La route, ça coûte: Roadblock Geographies,” “The Supply Chain Frontier,” “Non-Conventional Logistics,” and “Transparency Goes to War.” State collapse and informalization of the economy set the stage for roadblock politics. Roadblocks and checkpoints became “a central strategy and site of struggle” because they could be set up at key chokepoints to control the passage of ordinary commercial goods, aid, and strategic minerals (115). For example, the distribution of Heineken beer—which dominates the market—into the most remote villages, despite the imposition of dozens of roadblocks operated by numerous official and rebel armed factions, illustrates the larger pattern. In these stories and many more we hear from a vast array of participants in the supply chain economics of the eastern DRC, including truck drivers, peasant producers, charcoal traders, market women, artisanal miners, dissident and ethnic politicians, rebel militiamen, military officers, long-distance traders, subcontracted logistics specialists, NGO managers, UN officials, and more. In researching these chapters, Schouten and his fellow researchers traversed the greater and lesser transport routes, especially in North and South Kivu, mapped the proliferation of roadblocks and checkpoints, and conducted dozens of face-to-face interviews. A particularly insightful examination of “non-conventional logistics” shows how the poorest and least mobile people are most subject to taxation by armed groups. Among these, the Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) are the most efficient. They have established record-keeping systems and are masters at controlling off road movements. If the political and military situation changes, then the non-conventional logistics system moves with them.
On the surface, the argument in Part One looks persuasive. However, there are several weaknesses. First, Schouten overreaches. His real focus is the DRC with the CAR as a comparison, yet his primary precolonial historical model is East Africa’s long-distance caravan routes connecting Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean World with the continental interior. All of this is referred to as “Central Africa,” as if these vastly far-flung regions are essentially parts of some undefined whole. This will no doubt puzzle historians who see African geographies and histories as too varied and complex for simplistic reduction on this scale. This geographical and historical compression sometimes confuses Schouten himself: the Pare mountains are not in northwest Tanzania, they are in the northeast (48); Mazinde is near the Pangani valley caravan route, not the Mombasa route (34). On the penultimate page of the book Schouten recognizes that “the study of the connection between supply chains and roadblock politics should not aspire to discover the iron laws of how they interact, but rather to delve into the rich and context-specific dynamics which emerge at each of their intersections in time and space” (272). This comes too late, especially when he underlines that “Nyungu, Mirambo, and other such new hongo warlords, writes [Joseph] Miller, eventually managed to attract or control ‘a large enough proportion of the population to redefine political authority on the basis of commercial wealth and slave followers rather than on magico-ritual technique, agriculture, and tribute’” (51). The problem is that Miller wrote of the far off Loango Coast and Kasanje, not the “hongo warlords” of nineteenth-century Tanzania. Parts of Gabon and Angola are somehow slipped into Tanzania, which itself is a stand-in for the eastern Congo.
A second weakness, in Chapter 2, is that the East African caravan system (extending into “Central Africa”) and its logistics are misrepresented. Hongo was not just about taxation. For people like the Gogo of central Tanzania, living in a marginal arid environment, it was also about rationing. Large caravans, many hundreds strong, sometimes up to two or three thousand, could quickly exhaust resources in modest communities. The strength of Gogo chiefs (who for Schouten were key hongo warlords) lay in control over food and water that hungry porters totally depended upon given their inability to carry more than a few days’ rations, in addition to their 60–80 pound loads. Access, therefore, had to be carefully managed during peak dry season travel. The Gogo never built powerful states. In contrast, the Nyamwezi, who did, were open to trade and prospered through it, as well as through control over most of the caravans, elephant hunting, and increasingly, commercial agriculture. The chiefdom of Unyanyembe, where Tabora is located, was the linchpin of the entire East African trading system (for many decades Tabora was larger than Dar es Salaam), and its rulers made close alliances with coastal Muslims. Tabora hosted significant resident communities of Arab, Swahili, and Indian traders. Yet Fundikira I of Unyanyembe is described only as a “powerful hongo chieftain” (39). It is unfortunate that the Nyamwezi, key movers and shakers in nineteenth-century East Africa, were invisible in Schouten’s book. Schouten also misses the complexity of the caravan infrastructure and the widespread caravan culture of the central routes. Joking relationships (utani) were central to this, as was the labor culture of porterage, the spread of Kinyamwezi and Kiswahili, beneficial trading relations, and increasingly, a common material culture. At the coast, all imports and exports passing along the caravan routes had to pass through the relatively efficient Zanzibari customs system. This operated along the entire 2,000-kilometer-long coastal strip of Zanzibar’s “commercial empire.” Yes, there was sometimes violence along the caravan routes and the main routes were occasionally blocked. It was precisely Mirambo’s aim to extend control over a huge territory, including the central caravan route and reduce the friction of hongo and the demands of individual big men and small chiefdoms. His priorities were not roadblock politics but empire building and an African as opposed to an Arab agenda.
In sum, this is an exciting but flawed book. The promised contribution to state formation theory is not developed and should have been left out. The connection between roadblocks and violence is, surprisingly, only fitfully explored. Yet the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding how supply chains work, and how value is extracted through roadblock politics in the context of infrastructural collapse and conflict in the eastern DRC.
