What does not resonate broadly with the public, what rings hollow, and what alienates people when it smacks of oblivious privilege at best and self-serving hypocrisy at worst, are top-down name-and-shame critiques by elite white men that rely on liberal ‘rule of law’ legalese that is abstracted from – and blatantly contradicted by – complex realities of patriarchy, sexism, racism, and inequality (here and here). If commentators are to build progressively on existing popular critiques in Angola (and elsewhere) of the complicity between consultants, celebrities and corrupt figures, then they need to join critiques of corruption with explicit progressive commitments, rather than root evaluations in abstract liberalism (‘liberalism’ here as a general philosophy, not the peculiar US label for left-leaning perspectives).
Anti-corruption rhetoric unfortunately sometimes relies on and gets hijacked for pernicious racially tinged myths in order to quarantine an artificially separated ‘good (Western) liberal rational capitalism’ from a ‘bad (non-Western) political capitalism’ – witness how Forbes’ influential headline reduced IS to “an African princess.”
That particular dichotomy of rational vs political capitalism in fact was promoted by the imperialist, racist German ‘father’ of sociology Max Weber – whose family was instrumental at the highest levels in the colonization of Africa and the ‘robber capitalism’ of brutal Congolese rubber extraction – as he drew on imperial German explorers’ biased accounts of the Angolan regions “between the Congo and Zambesi rivers” that recently produced diamonds for IS.
In contrast, decades of incisive scholarship have shown how liberalism and ‘rational’ capitalism have been mutually constituted with empire, racism, slavery, violence and geographies of corruption. These dynamics are often clear to Angolan publics fed up with corruption. And at the same time such inconvenient tangled histories are left out of persistent white-savior and celebrity anti-corruption narratives in the West, with important media commercialization on Netflix and other platforms of digestible movies and TV series about the Panama Papers, McMafia, etc, often involving “substantial deals” for authors.
When stories about corruption rely on contrasts between abstract legalist liberalism and emphases on charismatic archetypes like IS and sensational stereotypes of ethnic chauvinism and chaotic slums, they blind us anew to long-recognized important complexities of states and politics of the sort that brought to power Angola’s new reformist President Lourenço (indeed, Lourenço had since 2011 been mentioned repeatedly by some more astute observers as a potential Presidential successor, even after his momentary sidelining in the early 2000s).
In sum, to be broadly effective over the long term, progressive critique of corruption must explicitly disrupt corporate globalism, imperialism, racism, authoritarianism, militarism, elitism and sexism in order to avoid being hijacked to reinscribe them.
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Aharon de Grassi | Radio Free (2020-02-09T11:20:04+00:00) Luanda Leaks and the limits of liberalism: can anti-corruption work?. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/09/luanda-leaks-and-the-limits-of-liberalism-can-anti-corruption-work/
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