Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

O
N THE
 B
ANKS OF THE
 K
ASAI
One of the great tributaries of the River Congo is the Kasai. Rising in
Angola, it heads north and merges with the Congo northeast of
Kinshasa, the capital of the modern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Though the Democratic Republic of Congo is poor compared with the
rest of the world, there have always been significant differences in the
prosperity of various groups within Congo. The Kasai is the boundary
between two of these. Soon after passing into Congo along the
western bank, you’ll find the Lele people; on the eastern bank are the
Bushong (Map 6, 
this page
). On the face of it there ought to be few
differences between these two groups with regard to their prosperity.
They are separated only by a river, which either can cross by boat.
The two different tribes have a common origin and related languages.
In addition, many of the things they build are similar in style,
including their houses, clothes, and crafts.
Yet when the anthropologist Mary Douglas and the historian Jan
Vansina studied these groups in the 1950s, they discovered some
startling differences between them. As Douglas put it: “The Lele are
poor, while the Bushong are rich … Everything that the Lele have or
can do, the Bushong have more and can do better.” Simple
explanations for this inequality are easy to come by. One difference,
reminiscent of that between places in Peru that were or were not
subject to the Potosí mita, is that the Lele produced for subsistence
while the Bushong produced for exchange in the market. Douglas and
Vansina also noted that the Lele used inferior technology. For
instance, they did not use nets for hunting, even though these greatly

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improve productivity. Douglas argued, “[T]he absence of nets is
consistent with a general Lele tendency not to invest time and labor
in long-term equipment.”
There were also important distinctions in agricultural technologies
and organization. The Bushong practiced a sophisticated form of
mixed farming where five crops were planted in succession in a two-
year system of rotation. They grew yams, sweet potatoes, manioc
(cassava), and beans and gathered two and sometimes three maize
harvests a year. The Lele had no such system and managed to reap
only one annual harvest of maize.
There were also striking differences in law and order. The Lele
were dispersed into fortified villages, which were constantly in
conflict. Anyone traveling between two or even venturing into the
forest to collect food was liable to be attacked or kidnapped. In the
Bushong country, this rarely, if ever, happened.
What lay behind these differences in the patterns of production,
agricultural technology, and prevalence of order? Obviously it was
not geography that induced the Lele to use inferior hunting and
agricultural technology. It was certainly not ignorance, because they
knew about the tools used by the Bushong. An alternative explanation
might be culture; could it be that the Lele had a culture that did not
encourage them to invest in hunting nets and sturdier and better-built
houses? But this does not seem to have been true, either. As with the
people of Kongo, the Lele were very interested in purchasing guns,
and Douglas even remarked that “their eager purchase of
firearms … shows their culture does not restrict them to inferior
techniques when these do not require long-term collaboration and
effort.” So neither a cultural aversion to technology nor ignorance nor
geography does a good job of explaining the greater prosperity of the
Bushong relative to the Lele.
The reason for differences between these two peoples lies in the
different political institutions that emerged in the lands of the
Bushong and the Lele. We noted earlier that the Lele lived in fortified
villages that were not part of a unified political structure. It was
different on the other side of the Kasai. Around 1620 a political

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revolution took place led by a man called Shyaam, who forged the
Kuba Kingdom, which we saw on 
Map 6
, with the Bushong at its
heart and with himself as king. Prior to this period, there were
probably few differences between the Bushong and the Lele; the
differences emerged as a consequence of the way Shyaam reorganized
society to the east of the river. He built a state and a pyramid of
political institutions. These were not just significantly more
centralized than what came before but also involved highly elaborate
structures. Shyaam and his successors created a bureaucracy to raise
taxes and a legal system and police force to administer the law.
Leaders were checked by councils, which they had to consult with
before making decisions. There was even trial by jury, an apparently
unique event in sub-Saharan Africa prior to European colonialism.
Nevertheless, the centralized state that Shyaam constructed was a tool
of extraction and highly absolutist. Nobody voted for him, and state
policy was dictated from the top, not by popular participation.
This political revolution introducing state centralization and law
and order in the Kuba country in turn led to an economic revolution.
Agriculture was reorganized and new technologies were adopted to
increase productivity. The crops that had previously been the staples
were replaced by new, higher-yield ones from the Americas (in