Why Nations Fail

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

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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 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

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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 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.

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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 particular,
maize, cassava, and chili peppers). The intense mixed-
farming cycle was introduced at this time, and the amount
of food produced per capita doubled. To adopt these crops
and reorganize the agricultural cycle, more hands were
needed in the fields. So the age of marriage was lowered
to twenty, which brought men into the agricultural labor force
at a younger age. The contrast with the Lele is stark. Their
men tended to marry at thirty-five and only then worked in
the fields. Until then, they dedicated their lives to fighting
and raiding.
The connection between the political and economic
revolution was simple. King Shyaam and those who
supported him wanted to extract taxes and wealth from the
Kuba, who had to produce a surplus above what they
consumed themselves. While Shyaam and his men did not
introduce inclusive institutions to the eastern bank of the
Kasai, some amount of economic prosperity is intrinsic to
extractive institutions that achieve some degree of state
centralization and impose law and order. Encouraging
economic activity was of course in the interest of Shyaam
and his men, as otherwise there would have been nothing
to extract. Just like Stalin, Shyaam created by command a
set of institutions that would generate the wealth necessary
to support this system. Compared to the utter absence of
law and order that reigned on the other bank of the Kasai,
this generated significant economic prosperity—even if
much of it was likely extracted by Shyaam and his elites.
But it was necessarily limited. Just as in the Soviet Union,
there was no creative destruction in the Kuba Kingdom and
no technological innovation after this initial change. This
situation was more or less unaltered by the time the
kingdom was first encountered by Belgian colonial officials
in the late nineteenth century.

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K
ING
S
HYAAM’S ACHIEVEMENT
illustrates how some limited
degree of economic success can be achieved through
extractive institutions. Creating such growth requires a
centralized state. To centralize the state, a political
revolution is often necessary. Once Shyaam created this
state, he could use its power to reorganize the economy
and boost agricultural productivity, which he could then tax.
Why was it that the Bushong, and not the Lele, had a
political revolution? Couldn’t the Lele have had their own
King Shyaam? What Shyaam accomplished was an
institutional innovation not tied in any deterministic way to
geography, culture, or ignorance. The Lele could have had
such a revolution and similarly transformed their institutions,
but they didn’t. Perhaps this is for reasons that we do not
understand, because of our limited knowledge of their
society today. Most likely it is because of the contingent
nature of history. The same contingency was probably at
work when some of the societies in the Middle East twelve
thousand years ago embarked upon an even more radical
set of institutional innovations leading to settled societies
and then to the domestication of plants and animals, as we
discuss next.