 I think that I should start by telling the story of what we've heard. I went down to South Africa in 1990, just after the release of Nelson and I data. And that women boycott was coming to an end, but I was getting elected to South Africa. And in Cape Town, this young man, a fresh out of graduate school, came to my lecture and objected to everything I said. And we became very good friends as a result of a wonderful encounter. And I've worked with Greg on a number of occasions. And I want to say that I've not met in any other part of the world a person of greater originality, greater pride, and greater intellectual courage. So it's our great pleasure here at SOAS to be holding the launch of this young book, which is one of those antidotes to a preliminary view of Afro-Pessence. This book says you should not be mindlessly optimistic, but there are huge distance when optimism becomes possible, but certain ways forward can be followed. But I want to introduce, firstly, the panel who is speaking this evening, and then hand over to the participants. So Dr. Greg Mills is actually sitting with the meeting team, Mike Lanthier. General Sincarta, the chief of the general staff, is sitting beside him. John Flopkinheimer is sitting beside him. Richard Dowden, who will try to keep you all out of control in the professional answer session, will be seated next. And then Johnny Pegg will play a step for us in the seated act at the end of that. Without further ado, what I want to do is to introduce John Flopkinheimer to you. As a person who knows Greg very, very well, and I still have to say a few words to get this evening's proceedings up and running. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the opportunity. I really don't have a huge amount to say. I was thinking long and hard about what we are here to talk about and to really begin to interrogate through something like Y State's Recover. And Greg and I have now known each other for not quite as long, only I think 17 years. And we worked together very much on a number of these things over the last 10 or so. And the best way I came to think about describing Y State's Recover is it's the end of the first chapter of a journey that we've traveled together. And it's been remarkable, and I cannot begin to give you a sense of the extraordinary courage, extraordinary thoughtfulness, and I'm afraid to say craziness, or dr. Miller. I don't know of another person who's traveled more extensively in Africa. He spends his time walking the walk, not researching the walk from afar. And for those of you who are students here, the idea of actually getting out and working with original data and doing extraordinary original things is something that I would encourage you all to think very hard about. You're undergraduate. Anyone here doing undergraduate work and you try that on your teachers, they'll tell you to get stuffed. But in reality, actually, it's an amazing ability and it requires enormous courage. And I've been very, very lucky to travel some of that journey with him. And what Brake does is he goes and he actually kicks the tires. And he does it in a way that scares a lot of us. And Janet is here, and Janet, you're one of the most incredibly brave people I know because you allow him to go away. I keep on waiting for the call to come home and to say, Greg has a travel ban. Actually, I sort of wish you'd do that from time to time because I'm rather scared where he goes. But the reality is Greg does this and he does it not only in Africa but across the world. And his ability through that enthusiasm and passion to get access to those people who are at the heart of the decision-making in these incredible, crazy parts of the world is extraordinary. And what happens in his books is he distills this in a way that can be read and understood by many more people than I think would otherwise have the opportunity. And so it is with great pleasure and a great deal of encouragement that I would hope that you will go out, buy, why states recover, devour it page by page, not let it put you to sleep. And it actually races along relatively speedily so it shouldn't do that. And take many of its lessons, interrogate them, challenge them and change them and encourage, and I encourage you all to take what you read and add that to the debate of your daily lives. And don't be scared, it's not the law of the Meads and Persians by any measure but it is a different and truly unique and original insight driven by very, very original basic data. And I think in that it is a piece of work that we should embrace and use and encourage others to use in advancing the debate around how developing countries move towards maturity. And it's unbelievably lucky that we have such an extraordinary panel and Nick's gonna come and tell you in much more effective ways about some of the things that are happening. And I really don't wanna take too long but just to say that it's been an incredible privilege for me, for the Brenthurst Foundation and for my family to be associated with Greg over the 10 years that he's worked as the director of the Brenthurst Foundation. And I truly do believe that we are now beginning to draw to the end of the first chapter of that journey. And that was built around a lot of the need for security and stability within states and why states recover is in some respect the culmination of that. And hopefully you can watch the space and in two to three years, there'll be something new again. So ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Nick Hart. Hey Jonathan, thanks for that introduction and Greg, thanks for asking me to speak at this book launch. It's a great privilege to be here and to have the chance to say a few words about you and the book. I wish I'd read this book before I started my military career about 35 years ago. It would have served us in great stead I think as we found our way through the Balkans and then through the various other places that the British army have been deployed during the course of the last 15 to 20 years. And how good it is to read a book that talks about how states recover rather than why they fail, which so many books have been about during the course of the last 10 to 15 years I would suggest. And of course it's an extraordinary book as well because I think what amazed me when I sat down and read it and looked through it is the extraordinary breadth that it covers. Now that of course reflects his desire for travel. It is a travelogue in some respects but it's a travelogue that gets into some serious detail about some of the most dangerous places in the world which I've had a privilege to go to as well and he has in some great detail. And he used to send me these great reports as I sat in my dark bunk in Kabul where I've spent a lot of time over the course of the last three or four years. And it made me very jealous to see these photographs from these extraordinary places with this depth of analysis which made me wish that I was where he was and certainly not where I was sitting in the capital of Afghanistan at the time. But I think importantly I want to tell you a bit about his personality and what he does. I mean I haven't known him that long but we've got to know each other in some difficult places. And I first came across him in 2010 when I was commanding Southern Afghanistan when you will recall General McChrystal had arrived and Afghanistan was very much in the headlines and there was this real sense of optimism that a new broom, a troop uplift and all of that was going to change what was happening in Afghanistan. And there was a new approach as well. It was described as something that was population centric. We were going to identify ourselves with the Afghan people. We were going to partner the Afghan security forces and politics apart we were going to solve the problem. So there was a huge sense of optimism about what was happening. And I arrived amidst all of that with the British division commanding some 55,000 troops which around 40,000 were American and I needed all the help I could get. And I was advised that there was this clever chap called Mills who had provided some input to a former British commander in Afghanistan in 2006. And then actually bringing him along we might get some first principle analysis which might help us in what was then called our prism cell. And the idea of a prism cell was that it would help you to look at the problem from a different aspect. Anyway, Greg very generously came and worked with us for a period of six weeks, two, three weeks since. And I think this goes to the heart of what I would really emphasize is it's not just intellectual courage that he has, it's physical courage. And I suspect I'm going to get you into trouble with Janet here because I'm going to tell you a story that demonstrates his absolute physical courage. One of the challenges that we had was trying to connect the Afghan population to the government. A challenge that I suspect people are still wrestling with. But this particular challenge was a lot of it was down to the lack of freedom of movement that Afghans have on the ground. If as an Afghan you wanted to travel on any of the major highways, you were going to be significantly fleeced by the local police. And if it wasn't the local police, it would be the local warlord. And if it wasn't the local warlord, it would almost certainly be the agents of the insurgency. And the 70 or 80 mile journey that there was from the Pakistani border up to Kandahar was a piece of highway that was arguably one of the most dangerous pieces of highway anywhere in the world. And we were pretty certain that there were a number of illegal checkpoints on this route, that were being demand by any of the aforementioned groups. But we didn't really know how bad the problem was, because we passage it as NATO forces. And the checkpoint certainly didn't stop us. What I really wanted to know was what it was like for the average Afghan, or indeed for a Pakistani trucker bringing supplies up the old Silk Route to Kandahar. And I scratched my nut and thought, how can I get to the bottom of this? Anyway, my friend here volunteered. I think he probably dressed himself as an Afghan. He found his way down to the Afghan-Pakistani border and he stuck his thumb out, metaphorically speaking, and he got himself into the front of a cab. And he worked out exactly what it cost, the average truck driver, to get his load across the border into Afghanistan, up to Kandahar city, through the customs houses, the number of illegal checkpoints involved in all of this. And all of this was done under the radar without any support, because the mobile telephone wouldn't have worked, I can assure you of that. And this was one of the most courageous things I've ever seen anybody do. And my goodness me, it gave me a depth of analysis that I would not have got from anywhere else. So that is a measure of the man. It's not just intellectual courage, it's physical courage. Perhaps what Jonathan described as being a bit wacky and a bit mad, but my goodness me, if anybody deserves a medal, he deserves a medal for what he did that day. And he then did a huge amount of work in terms of the economy. He spotted, perhaps because he might be a bit of a health freak despite his physical appearance, that pomegranates could be a way to sort out Southern Afghanistan's economy. And he did some really interesting first principle analysis, which is now having an impact in the Kandahar economy. And he worked out how you could go from a value chain one economy to a value chain two economy through making it possible for pomegranates to be stored in a simple way, and then how those pomegranates could ultimately be exported as juice or whatever else to the outside world. Good first principle analysis which got to the heart of the challenge, which was how you could get a private sector economy beginning to work in that country. He then came back about two years ago when I was the deputy commander to the American four-star in Kabul and did some more work at more of a strategic level. And that depth of analysis, which is reflected in the book, is really good analysis because what he perceptively identified is that actually the more money you throw at the problem through the aid community, the less effect you'll have. The challenge of course is the aid community always goes after big grand projects. And invariably they're too big and they're too grand for the economy in these sorts of countries ever to be able to accommodate them and they generally fail. What we have not done in Afghanistan is to try and develop a burgeoning private sector. And he put his finger right on that and he worked with some clever Americans to identify how that could be improved, how it could be developed and he did it in a way that is genuinely perceptive. And if ever I think there are lessons to draw from his book and his analysis. It's about the importance of governance and it's about the importance of generating a private sector and an economy. That's what changes things. We the military can help provide security but we're only simply providing the space, the governance and for that government to connect to people and for the private sector to develop. And there are some really good lessons that the aid community could learn from that. So just to pull all of that together, you're looking at a man who I think is, as Jonathan suggested, not just intellectually courageous, he's physically courageous. I've dropped unit, I'm sure, in your marriage, Greg, for which I apologize. But it's important that people understand the extent to which you've done that and the extent to which you've helped us. And it's really important that we learn the lessons that are in his book because those lessons will inform us the next time we get ourselves into one of these entanglements, as I think a foreign office official put it the other day, and we'll be better at it as a consequence of so much of what he's written in his book and what we've learned. So I would commend the book to you. I've read it and I really would recommend that others read it as well. It's a great piece of analysis. Thanks, Greg. Thank you. What to say after that? You've earned your retainer. I said I could have been nice about you for five minutes. It's very difficult, ladies and gentlemen, to follow a rising star and then to be followed by a rock star. So I'm the sort of unnecessary meat in the sandwich. I guess Nick and Jonathan and Stephen and their very kind introduction have really answered in great part why I wrote this book. And I wrote it because it was a way of capturing my professional and personal experiences over the last decade of working for the Brenthurst Foundation and for the Oppenheimer family and then various secondments as a presidential advisor in various African countries and then of course the secondments in Afghanistan. Now having been personally engaged and involved in interventions to stabilize fragile countries, I started off writing this book in an effort to try and understand where we could get it right or how we could get it right. And to understand that, I had also had to understand how we had so often got it wrong and how then we might improve the way in which interventions, whether these be hard military interventions at one end of the spectrum or the more softer benign forms of aid or advice at the other end of the spectrum might actually occur. Of course, as Nick has indicated, this is not an easy sometimes and certainly never a linear process. This is not all about vectors and straight lines. And I certainly take heart in the statement by former president Mandela in conducting the sort of work that judge me not by my success but judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again. This is a very iterative process and I think that that, I hope, comes across in the book as well. The answers, it doesn't pretend to have all the answers. It really is viewed from within the prism to use the word that Nick used about our strategic analysis cell. And I always thought it was an unusual term to have a prism cell. I did feel like a prism cell from time to time. It's really about that iterative learning process. Nick has mentioned something that will get me into trouble in my marriage but it's too late now, the cat's out of the bag. But it's indicative of some of the stories in this book which I hope is much more than just a dry academic analysis. It has an explanation I chanced on from the last surviving officer who was with Sevimbi when he died, for example. And it was one of the most extraordinary interviews I ever did. I asked him, one question, we sat in a room together and he looked at me and I looked at him and he clearly wasn't gonna say anything. And so I said to him, so tell me where you were born. And two and a half hours later, I stopped writing. And it's those sorts of opportunities that I've been very fortunate enough to have in the course of the work of the last 10 years and I hope to enrich this personal tapestry. Nick, as I said, mentioned the root diagnostics in Pakistan, it reminds me of a story about how when dressed as probably the most unbelievable Afghan imaginable, we went down to the soak area in Spinboldak to look for a petrol tanker. Because we took this journey, it was on a 45,000 liter petrol tanker. And one of the things I often remember is the noise of 45,000 liters of fuel behind you going gloop, gloop, gloop as this truck wandered its way up the Kandahar Highway, if you can call it that. But when we went down and I went with a colleague, former US special forces soldier, whose name was also Greg. And we went down very much in the early light of the morning and we chanced upon a truck. When we looked and chanced upon it, we basically went to him and said, we are coming in your truck. And two things always stick in my mind in this regard. One is picking out this other Greg's rucksack from the back of the four-wheel drive that had dropped us in Spinboldak. And my arm nearly fell out of its joint. And I said to him, what do you got in here? And he said, a little extra ammo and a few other things. And I always wondered what the few other things were. And there was almost in me a sort of temptation to see, maybe if something happens, I could really see what's in this unbelievably heavy bag. But the more amusing perhaps, moment in this particular venture, came when we went to the truck driver and we said, we are coming in your truck. And I introduced myself and stuck up my hand and said my name is Greg. He looked at me, quite horrified at the prospect of having the two of us come with him. And then I said, and this is my colleague, and his name's also Greg. And he looked and you could see he was thinking, no, no, no. And I said, no, his name really is Greg and my name is also really Greg. And so in that wonderful South Asian way, wobbled his head and said to me, oh, he said, department of Greg's then. One of the things we try to do in the Brenters Foundation is identify things that will travel across boundaries and borders. Where you have a good idea or a good experience and to see how this might be applied elsewhere. And it's not, and I'll come back to this in a second, simply about policies that you can then try and replicate and emulate elsewhere. It's about this inter-tourism. It's about this intersection between politics, economics and security constantly. This weave that we have to continually try and manufacture in these circumstances. But it's also fundamentally about personalities. One of the things I've learned in the advisory business as it were is that you have to establish a personality with the people that you're trying to provide advice to. It's perhaps the most unrecognized part of this business. You really do need to spend a lot of time investing with the very people that you're trying to work with. And it's the most difficult thing to do because their attention span is limited, not senior military commanders, of course. Their attention span is limited. There are many things happening all at once often for them and there are many people coming at them with all sorts of bits of ideas and advice. And the book not only includes three dozen case studies from conflict and post-conflict countries around the world, also includes more than a dozen interviews with heads either current or former heads of government or heads of state. And that's been one of the most personally enriching things. It's particularly to get people to reflect back on their time in government and very interesting little moments. And speaking, spending time, for example, with Pierre Boyoya, who of course was a two-time president of Burundi, and he was being pressurized to negotiate himself out of power by president, a former president Mandela in the early 2000s and was taking some heat from his own Tutsi community back in Burundi. And he said, how do I deal with this guy Mandela? I don't know how to deal with him. And he told me something which I thought was absolutely extraordinary and I'd never heard before, which was he traveled down to South Africa to speak to the national party negotiating team to see how they had learned to manage Mandela. And it was an insight like that in the way in which conflict negotiations and resolution occurs that I think we can learn a great deal from. All of this, of course, has been enabled by remarkable personal privilege, working for the Oppenheimer family. I'm very glad that Jonathan, Jennifer and Sam are here tonight. It's been a privilege to work with you rather than for you with you over the last 10 years. And of course, before that time, Jonathan, so thank you very much for that. And of course, for being supported by Janet and my family. She does say, however, that the secret to a good marriage is the fact that I'm never around and that I'm a destructive, a rather distraction and destructive force when I happen to be at home. But I do plan, Jonathan, to spend a little bit more time now that this book is completed. And then of course, while I'm on thanks too to Stephen and to Richard for putting this event on and of course to Nick. We've only known each other for four years but it's been an extremely enriching four years and long may it continue. And of course, Johnny, who I'll come to in a second. And it's a, I think it's a book that's been wonderfully put together by the Hearst team. I believe there are copies outside and this is the cheap part of being an author that copies outside on sale. And I know it's a big book but somebody once said to me in apropos Nick's comment or somebody once said to me, it's no thicker than you. I don't think that was being very nice. But the reason why it's a big volume is because these situations are different and complex and they can't easily be homogenized and sanitized. I wonder that I think the dangers is we always try and look for silver bullets. We always look for the one thing that we can do. We try and dumb down the experiences we have in individual countries and then try and extrapolate them over a range of different case studies. And that is one reason, as I search for commonalities that this book is as big as it is. Let me conclude by mentioning just five things that I have learned in the process and I'm gonna run through them very quickly of writing this book. The first is that you can't want peace any more than the locals do. If the locals don't want peace it's very hard to try and manufacture it in somebody else's circumstances. And of course local ownership is absolutely essential in this part. And I think one of the key lessons from South Africa and our negotiation process, and I spent some time with F.W. de Klerk arguing the point with him on the way in which the negotiations were conducted in South Africa. The key point is that you have to want to end fighting more than you want to continue it. You have to believe that conflict resolution negotiations is gonna give you more than continuing war. I think secondly is that we underestimate the importance of security and we underestimate the importance of an effective armed forces at our peril. Security is the door through which much else follows. If you don't get the security but right, if you don't get the armed forces but right I'm afraid it's very unlikely that a peace will stick and that prosperity will ensue. And of course it's not easy to get the armed force but right especially from outside. We see what's happening in Iraq at the moment. Many billions of dollars spent over the last decade and of course it's questionable as to what the effect of that money has been. The third point I would make is that as policy advisory types we tend to go in from outside and the bits that we see are the bits that we deal with and the bit that we normally deal with is policy and I liken this to the top 10% of the iceberg that's above the water line. So we can see it, so we deal with policy and we try and fiddle around with different policy opportunities and alternatives and that's the bit we try and manage. But underneath the water line is the other 90% which is about politics, it's about informal rules, it's about customs, it's about personalities and those are the sorts of things you have to understand better in order to be able to manage these environments. My fourth pointer is that the period of recovery is at least as long as the period of decline in these circumstances. So you've really got to think things through to the finish. The international community has to take a long view as indeed the locals have to take a long view and I liken this in the book to the view of Warren Buffett in terms of buy hold. You've got to buy hold to fix states and leadership has to take a very long term strategic view in this regard. And indeed, ensuring a peaceful and a prosperous environment is really about changing the cycle of conflict and that the book spends some time in describing how this cycle works and intersects and it's a theme that Johnny is gonna pick up on in a moment. And then fifth and finally, recovery requires doing things differently. You can't just keep doing the same old thing again in the expectation that this time that some are going to be different. It's the old Einstein, you know, the definition of madness being that you continue to do the same thing in anticipation of a different result. I'm afraid working in recovery or environments that demand recovery has the same sort of law attached to it. And for outsiders, this means you have to use your tools differently, whether these tools be aid or military assistance or whatever else is in that toolbox, whether it be the advisory business, you have to change the game. You can't just keep on using the same tools in the anticipation. You're going to get things better. And then for the insiders, it's very important not to just simply tinker with the way in which society and state is organized. And one of the images which is enduring for me when I started writing this book is this notion of a walking society. And this came when I was driving down from Lillongui to the lake in Malawi and of course, like everywhere in Africa, you see people walking, often carrying nothing, sometimes carrying whatever they can manage, very seldom on bicycles or in transport, but just walking from one place to the other, filling their day enormously unproductively, in huge amount of energy going to this task of going from one place to another. And we have to find in this process of recovery ways that people engage in society differently, that simply this is not about filling your day with activities in an unproductive manner, but changing that cycle completely. And I know that Johnny is going to pick up on this notion of a walking society, the way in which we have to find a different way out of the cycle and a different way to use our energies as we strive for more competitive environments. And then it finally let me end on a rather facetious note and to say that in the movie Wall Street, when the character Gordon Gekko was asked what people could learn from his experience of managing money, he said three words, buy my book. Thank you very much. This is basically, wow, can you take the reverb off? Thank you. This is basically the soundtrack to the book. I've been asked to perform a number of walking songs. These are, these are very rich cultural musical tradition amongst the rural Zulu and Goonie peoples and obviously across a lot of Africa. And what I've done is I've brought some instruments along just to share them with you. But before I do this, just a few concepts around which the music is based. The organization of time is an important, is a key principle in any developed society, in any organization, whatever it is. And you'll have different activities operating in an organization and you'll have people who are managing the time and all the timelines. And so the more complex the society and the more developed the economy is, the more highly fraught your experience of time is. In traditional rural areas, time is also a social currency. If you choose to spend time with somebody that is an investment because you walk five or 10 kilometers to a homestead to invest in that homestead, a relationship and to build it. It takes you time to get there. So all societies have different what we call durations. That is the flow of time, how that time is experienced and how that time is organized. The further away you get from a metropolis to the extreme periphery and you land up there where there's no cell phone signal or wifi and you're in a rural area and you come from a highly geared time-conscious place, you go through a little bit of a panic attack and you have to accept that the flow of time has changed. It's an incredible assault on your senses and people can sit for a long time not talking. And one is at times quite unnerved by this because we want to fill the flow of time with sound or with activity, but this is now slowed down. In the very early periods run about when I first went to Zulaland in the earlys of the late 60s mid 60s, the thing that I was tremendously puzzled by was that if you were walking and another person came, you had to stop before you spoke to them. So you would stop in silence and you would say, saumona or he would say saumona, which means we see you. You are seen by me and my clan and you would wait 10 seconds before you replied and you would say saumonana, we see one another. And a whole set of traditional linguistic interactions would build up so that this time that he's passing is actually socially valuable. So it's a social capital. The way you organize time is a social capital. Now, I'm going to talk about walking songs. These were songs that I learned as a young person. And what I want to emphasize is that they're immensely clever because music is how you organize time. In rhythm, we have here a free duration. It's just flowing. But if I go one, two, three, two, two, three, three, two, three, four, two, three, I lock you in to a timeframe and you cannot ignore it, especially if it's a good melody. So you are now going into this kind of flow and duration and each, you are now, as we move to the next beat, you are anticipating it. And the moment that you start to anticipate it, any beat you have given up, you are captive to it. So time is organized in rhythm, in music. It's one of the most powerful things that you can do to capture somebody's participation or attention. Now, if I go do-ch, do-ch, do-ch, do-ch, do-ch, you suddenly feel the duration is sped up. You have a sense of anticipation. You have a sense of excitement. And there's a hidden promise at the end of it. Whereas in a waltz, there isn't. Cause you're just going one, two, three, two, two, three. So there is a social value given to the organization of rhythm in any society. We do a waltz in formal occasions and we do disco beat in a very informal space. If you are now walking a long distance, you can put yourself into a cycle of rhythm and melody which will make you experience the duration of the time of your 10 kilometer walk has been much shorter. It's a trick. It's a temporal magical technique that is used by traditional people when they are just walking. Say you're walking. Um um um um um um um um um um. Um um um um um um um um um. Uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh. One, uh uh, two, uh uh, three, and four. Now, I feel that I put my foot down four times because of the cycle. But actually, I've got another four for free that I didn't feel. It is the trade-off in that cycle. And so, there are very clever ways to use those kinds of cycles in a walking society. This musical tradition, which is called Muscanda, comes out of the development of concertina music and guitar. The concertina is the earliest instrument that the Zulu, the migrant laborers who went to the Kimberley diamond mines, used. And what they did is like the guitar, they took the instrument and they reconfigured it. So you buy the concertina for 2,000 rands and you take it then to a migrant labor hostel and somebody will take the buttons apart and reconfigure it so you can play traditional Zulu, Muscanda music. The same with the guitar. In 1967, I was 14, I met a Zulu street musician and I worked out that it was just an amazing tradition that had developed and I asked him to teach me. And this tradition, the guitar is tuned differently, it's played differently. And I realized that this was a unique genre of guitar music like the Delta Blues in America. This tradition took the guitar and reconfigured it as well. This is a tradition which comes out of the 30s, the 1930s, 1940s and develops its own picking style. It started as a strumming tradition and then it moved into a picking tradition in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s it reached its peak. The 80s it started to die out and today walking songs you won't hear anymore in the streets of Johannesburg. So what I'm presenting here is a collection of songs which I learned as a youngster and basically kept up with it. And so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to give you a... Shall I do the concertina first, maybe? Just right there. My mother was a jazz singer. Now jazz is a very interesting musical tradition because although it is a free flow of notes, it can only be played against the structure of music, of chords and rhythm. So there's a structure, but then when you play your jazz notes, it's you're trying to find very interesting timing and very interesting notes to play, extreme notes to play against a basic set of chords. So when I started playing this music in my home when I was 14, I used to drive my mom mad because all it did is went... And after 10 minutes you come banging on my door, as you'd say. If you play another kadankal, smash the guitar over your head. So I used to say, why? And she would say, because it doesn't go anywhere. And I said, but that's not the point. The point is that it is for you to go somewhere. It is a walking song. You've got to get into the cycle. And the idea of the cycle is that when it comes around, it bumps you into the next cycle. So it is not really repetitive. It is spiraling forward. And if you get into it, you must surrender to it. You give yourself over and you will benefit because it will give you a very, very short experience of your journey. So he has a typical walking song. I'll start just with the bass line to give you so you can focus on it. This goes on forever. So that's an instrumental walking song. Then there are antiphonal walking songs. These are songs we have a bunch of guys walking to a destination over a long period of time and the guitarist may be playing a walking song like that. Then they'll break into this call and response. Call and response. This is a very, very classical, famous, Nguni nursery rhyme adapted to the guitar for walking song purposes. It says, It's a song about somebody who secretly steals food from the back of a hut and a trap has been set. Now the Zulu have a way of songwriting when they want to attack somebody who is quite strong or powerful or they want to just hint at something. It's called, which means to go around the subject. So as you go around the subject, this particular person is likened to a water monitor. The lizard, the big huge lizard that lives on the banks of a river and it's called Utamo. So when the singer sings the song, there's a repetitive response. So I'm gonna sing what he sings. Just give you an example of how to operate. So in this way of singing, he would be singing. So in this way of singing, he would be singing. So it's a call and response all the way through while you're walking. This last one is another song. Basically it's a proud owner of Catalan Goats. And he's out going to fetch them and he's got a guitar and he's basically sung the song, which is really saying my goats and my cows are bleeding and bellowing, which is the most beautiful sound of success because there are many of them. My tradition, I'd been playing guitar before. It was much easier. This is a far more difficult instrument. Unlike an accordion, when you play a note and you push it in, the bellows, that note, when you pull it out, it's the same note. Within a concertina, if you push the note in, the note changes. So if you've got a song that needs a sustained note, you've got to find, say, that note. This note, I've got to get it, pull it out on that side. Instrument is a chromatic scale. It's a western musical scale. And the zoos had to take this apart and change it button by button. And if you play this instrument, you realise how incredibly complicated that is. And to put them in a way that your finger is going to be able to sustain the notes on each side. So what they did is they divided it up. They put all the bass notes on the left-hand side. And they put all the melodic notes or the high notes on the right-hand side. And by dividing that up, they managed to find a way to create a way in which you could sustain and create songs. So I'm going to play a song which is based on the Zulu proverb. The Zulu are a military society. They are a warrior nation. And so there's a lot of symbolic capital in being a great fighter. You can create a lot of status for yourself even if you're not wealthy. You'll be taken seriously in any meeting. Your contribution in a discussion is listened to very, very attentively. And so this song is about a man who has been insulted by a much younger man. And he says to him, Which means grab hold of the sun so that it does not set. Because when it does, your day is over. And my day will begin. And this is in a classic sort of concertina walking song tradition. It was so interesting that I think we can talk about it as well. So I just ask you to ask anybody on the panel a question on music or on war or peace or rebuilding states. Who would like to ask the first question? Okay, yes, say Edward. I'm sorry. Is what is being attempted now against IS by this coalition another way of defining madness? Wow. Should we take a group of questions? All right. We'll have a chance to think about that one. And we'll add two more then. Okay. There's one over here. Yes. Hiya. Without wanting to step on the point that you make about not being too general, Greg, what's your view on the position of democracy in the recovering states? Is it always necessary? Is it in developed states? And one more. Let me ask one. Can people get addicted to war? You, Johnny, just said, talked about the Zulus and their warrior tradition. And you think of Sudan at the moment and the war in South Sudan. We can all think of them. You think societies can get addicted to it. They have to fight. So there's three questions. Who would like to... I think next job probably depends a lot on the first question. Let me just have a crack at it. Edward, I think that as an outsider viewed a long way away from Johannesburg, I guess one does question where the strategy sits behind the actions against IS and how much can be achieved by simply attempting in President Obama's own words to degrade the capabilities from the air. And it's a sort of half-pregnant notion that you somehow are going to fix this by not becoming involved. Well, then should you... And you're going to fix this from the air, but then why should you do that at all? So I maybe wouldn't put it in the stronger terms as you have, but I would certainly ask, you know, where's the strategy behind this? What is the goal behind this? And where's the skin to end? And it certainly seems as if there's no appetite to put in any number, boots on the ground. And so how are you going to embolden or enable the local forces to be able to do this on your behalf, if that's indeed what your intention is? Because as I mentioned in my talk, I mean, I think that the last 10 years of record, less so in Afghanistan, but certainly in Iraq, of building up the Iraqi forces from external assistance has not been a, let's say, altogether a success. And I think in Africa, as we know too well, external assistance and trying to build up the capacity of armed forces is also something of a mixed bag. Look at Mali, 20 years of assistance ended in a coup d'etat and essentially a shambles. So, you know, I do question the strategy behind it or the absence of strategy behind it. I think the question of democracy is an excellent one. And the book spends some time going into this question of the relationship between democracy and growth and democracy and development. And I think there's a danger here of simply saying, oh, what the Asians have done is not democratic and it's not representative and that's another way. And that's an argument that's often used in Africa by those who have those tendencies. And, you know, it's what we've seen emerge in Africa I think particularly over the last decade, the sort of form of a Kigali consensus, which is you run your economy reasonably well but you're not tested at the polls and that's acceptable somehow and that that is going to endure. And I think the record suggests otherwise. The record suggests that these things have a way of eating themselves and that the reason why Africans have representative systems of democracy is not because leaders work up one day believing that this is the route that they should take is because this was demanded by their populations. And yes, they're not perfect systems but the econometric analysis which I cite from several sources is very clear. Is it the duration of democratic systems and the record of development? There's a correlation between the two of them. The longer that you're democratic and the more that you're democratic, the better the results. Now, I'm just going to Asia for a second. People tend to say, well, they're not democratic but I do think in Asia there's a commitment to popular welfare which is very deep and abiding in those societies and they may not have Western-style democracy but they have a certain degree of accountability that we have at least found in Africa to be lacking absent formal systems of electoral democracy. Are we addicted to war? One of the things I always found curious in Afghanistan was given that the Pashto in particular define themselves by their martial character is trying to avoid giving them what they wanted by essentially fighting them. You were defining them by the very means that they wish to be defined. I don't think it's an addiction to war. There are certain cultural characteristics and Johnny might like to also throw his few words in here but I think there's certain cultural characteristics of society that make definition by your military experience and your military role very important but I would argue that in most developed countries the opposite is true. General would you like to... Johnny? I think the idea of the 10% of the iceberg the 10% of the iceberg analogy is actually very accurate because I'm an anthropologist and I studied the cattle complex from sort of the Sudan, Kenya area and there's a place called the Ilemi Triangle and these are warrior nations who raid cattle from one another and part of a young Moran or Masai warrior's right of passage is to go on a cattle raid and to steal cattle from another tribe down the road and this is with the Turkana, with the Samburu there's a whole lot of cultures around that the Zulu are similar in the early periods of the state formation of the Zulu they were constantly raiding cattle from one another cattle being the source of wealth so in that invisible nine tenths of the iceberg if you're going to address a particular political issue you have to take into account the value system the culture, the social organization the way people are mobilized and one of the problems with the transition in my country in South Africa was that there was such a sense of national I suppose focus on the transition how do you make the transition possible and the transition was seen to be just between a white minority government and the ANC and so the Zulu nationalist movement in Qatar took umbrage and they said it's not just between a dominant ANC movement and a white movement there are also other people in this equation and so we saw a huge upsurge in violence and conflict between ANC, UDF and this Zulu nationalist movement who eventually were at the last minute cajoled into a national vote the first democratic national vote in South Africa and it was literally the last minute because they had to print stickers of Gacha Boutillesi to put it onto each of the voting sheets and this was really an example of a culture which had been very dominant they are the most popular group in South Africa they have had a history of fighting with everybody and also respecting those who conquered them in a way and so these kinds of dynamics were seen to be part of a white manipulation of tribalism all sorts of explanations came out of it but when you did interviews with any of the participants in this violence you discovered that there was a very strong sense of national identity, warrior value system I want somebody to take account of me what I want to be able to shape my future in Natal and Zulu land so these societies where you do have warrior traditions or traditions where there is a construction of masculinity which is based on war or fighting or tension one has to actually look at that see how you can deal with it incorporate it into your discussions and it takes time as Greg has pointed out in the book and this idea of policy and this idea of getting a process together whereby all of these things are put in can take time again time is an issue so in our own country we've also gone through that right now there's a war which is a traditional war between the Dinka and the newer in the Sudan we were all so amazed that South Sudan would become independent and this is a group of basically in the cattle complex two warrior groups who have been traditionally raiding cattle from each other for centuries, decades and so these things have now not been taken care of in the first set of negotiations so what you're going to end up with is going to have to go renegotiate now between the people who are talking to the central government now they have to sort out their differences so there wasn't enough care and attention taken into incorporating them in a way that made them feel satisfied obviously thank you perhaps dealing with war addiction first of all and speaking from a soldier's perspective I think soldiers absolutely understand that war is not what we want and indeed as we look to define the function and roles of the British Army we should be pretty clear that two of the roles of the British Army are first of all to prevent conflict and secondly to deal with disaster yes we're here to protect the UK's population and of course to fight the Queen's enemies but it's very important that people understand it's about preventing conflict so I think from a soldier's perspective we absolutely understand how unpleasant and destructive conflict is and war is and therefore we would do whatever we can to help prevent it and I think that's an important starting point and I would echo Greg's remarks about Afghanistan and the reason I think that Afghanistan will work itself through is that actually people are war weary particularly the Pashtun population and it's my expectation that with the political framework now in place with a new president who will work I suspect in decent cooperation for at least nine months with his vice president or chief executive that actually will begin to see some progress there because people don't want to fight much longer and I think that as we step back from it that war awareness will be in there so I don't think it's about addiction I think people fight when they need to fight and people don't want to fight if they don't have to fight taking on the question up there top right you wouldn't expect me to answer it particularly directly but suffice it to say that I think that all of us have learnt a lot of lessons over the last 15 years about how these problems need to be solved by locals rather than by outsiders and of course the challenge we all have had in Iraq and Afghanistan is that our level of understanding of the problem is of course never as good as that of the locals and ultimately they will be the people who will solve their problems and what we are there to do is perhaps to provide them with support and to catalyse them in terms of taking on the problem for themselves and I was always very struck by that great Afghan joke that God came to Afghanistan hundreds of years ago and he said to the Afghans when he saw the size of the problem he said don't do anything till I come back and sure enough they haven't and what we can do as outsiders I hope is to try and catalyse the locals to own the problem for them and I think if you look and it's out in the open press as to what people are trying to do at the moment in respect of the Syria-Iraq problem is it's about in a sense degrading it to begin with whilst you try and bolster the locals to take on the problem for themselves now how that bolstering occurs remains to be seen but that is what we want to see happen here is that the locals are going to end up taking on this problem for themselves and they need our help to be able to do that and I think that's the right approach it'll be solved ultimately by the locals gripping the problem Another round of questions, yes Greg, I don't know how to ask this question but do you foresee or do you know of any society or culture that you've been involved with where the woman's perspective is ever taken into account when it comes to going to war, not going to war things of war you know I mean we've obviously this is a very male dominated subject but do women ever have any significant say in these issues? And there's a question here and a question there I was just wondering about the long-term impacts of Ebola in West Africa and even extended into the rest of Africa what do you think there will be and how important this crisis will be in 50 or 40 years? You mentioned the role of the private sector which is close to my heart the aid machine is very much bureaucracy and public servant orientated there is of course NGOs but how do you think this balance could be tilted towards the private sector? Okay, who would like to kick off a private sector let's take them in reverse order I think Jonathan can do the private sector It might be Mike I think fundamentally this idea of local ownership is central and if society itself embraces the idea of increasing disposable income and the community works towards that which is ultimately growth then the inevitability of the emergence of a private sector is there what we so often see in emerging countries is a bifurcation of that between a regulated formal sector and an unregulated informal sector and the cost structure difference between the two is extraordinary so I would argue that a large enabler to create greater private sector growth is to try and match those two environments not by increasing the cost of the informal sector but by decreasing the cost of the formal sector and if you're able to do that certainly some very very anecdotal and somewhat potentially suspect data would suggest you could put 2% on Africa's growth rate and most of that would be in the private sector so that certainly would be my take on that if it's driven locally I think then you can invest into it Greg Thanks very much quickly on the woman's perspective I mean I'm in hugely dangerous territory It is out here and it's going to be recorded for posterity Is that on? Okay There was a plan there, thank you Dominic I mean I think increasingly in Africa the perspective of women is taken into account I just spent a year serving on a high level panel I don't know if there's an oxymoron between me serving on the panel and being high level I'm sure but for the African Development Bank on fragile states and the majority, the chair was a woman president and the majority of the panelists were women and certainly the bulk of the conversation was about the disproportionate impact of conflict on women and of fragility on women and on children which is I guess a related aspect to your question in Africa and what to do about it whether this be rural women who of course are most affected of all arguably and as well as the urban dwellers and I mean I think that that is the fact that that is a topic for discussion I think is a significant change in the last 20 years and that this is now to use that term mainstreamed into debate and into policy is very important however whether there's any effect in this ironically of course depends on the other 50% and how they respond and of course Africa is notoriously chauvinistic partly because men have been allowed to get away with this and there's a long road to be traveled in this regard on education on access to livelihoods and all sorts of things and there have also been I mean and I would distinguish here between sort of formal approaches which is percentages of women in parliament the initiatives like the one I've just described and then the informal aspect which is you know how things happened and how livelihoods actually happened on the ground as I say clearly there's a lot of changes and a lot of those changes I think and a lot of those the conversion of women's lives in a significantly positive way will happen through some basic improvements I mean water, impotable water in villages will have a tremendously I think positive impact in those societies and areas where this is able to happen my wife and I spent the best part of a year living and working in Rwanda and if you spend a lot of time in the rural areas of Rwanda you get used to the yellow bucket syndrome and people trekking for miles in the walking society mode, picking up water children out of school often girl children out of school and very unproductive use of time and in my book when people say to me you know Africa's lack of growth or lack of development obviously a bigoted comment is because people don't work hard they don't work productively which is maybe a better way of putting it I say there's no one who works harder for less than the rural African woman there is nobody so it's about how they are employed and how their energies are directed let me just make a comment quickly then about Ebola you know the history of managing SAAS is about isolation and tracing and clearly it reflects very badly on Africa's governance environment that we are unable to do either of those things without significant international help now international help is coming but it's coming quite late and it's coming I think instead of dribs and drabs the Americans of course have led the way with a significant effort Britain I see is now following with the military hospital going to Sierra Leone I believe but it's a long way from probably putting in place the sort of isolation capability that these countries require one of the things I've just spent some time in Singapore and one of the things I learnt about SAAS was of course the Chinese government were largely shamed by what happened with SAAS is it was in Guangzhou and they didn't do anything about it and one man travelled, he was a doctor and he travelled to a hotel in Hong Kong called the Metropole and he infected various people in the hotel Metropole one of whom was an American who then flew to Singapore via Vietnam and when he got to Vietnam he was feeling ill, took him off the airplane he went to a hospital and he later died and the doctor who said this doesn't look right an Italian working at the French hospital in Hanoi also died but they were able then to determine what this was and that this was not something really new that they hadn't seen before but the Chinese government were so shamed by this that in seven days they built a thousand room hospital outside Beijing and that was the scale and volume of the effort that was required to manage this crisis Singaporeans created an isolation hospital in Singapore to deal with their cases Africa clearly doesn't have the capacity to do that and I think to address Ebola we're going to need to see a significant ramping up of international capability international assistance to provide that capability and then the role of the private sector now I always find it, despite the best will in the world fundamentally remarkable that donors expect countries to develop in a different way that they did which is the philosophical underpinning of aid is we get to give you money and you're going to do things and develop differently in the way in which we developed and then they wonder why the results aren't quite as they should be and particularly in a place like Afghanistan where you had enormous aid volumes and you have the same in other post-conflict situations not to the same extent you have enormous aid volumes speaking at $10 billion annually in roughly 2010, 2011 that really the metrics became not where you spent the money and the effect of it but the amount of money that you spent and it was just simply shovelling money out of the door as quickly as possible and often this totally undermined the private sector in a whole variety of ways it undermined them because the best and the brightest went to the aid industry and undermined them because it established businesses that were fundamentally not commercial they were temporary so long as the subsidies existed and subsidy farming is a well-known phenomena in particularly the post-conflict environment and really if you want to help the private sector you improve governance as Jonathan has suggested you make it easier to open a business you make it easier to hire and fire people you make it easier to communicate you make it easier to get goods across borders you do the work that we did in Afghanistan why things weren't flowing properly you spend money on infrastructure you spend money on electricity one of the things that we looked at in Kandahar was the fact that there were various parks that were established with aid money in Lashkagar and in Kandahar but no electricity being provided to them and you wondered why they didn't operate effectively so you need to get the package right and it needs in the long term to be sustainable and the rocket science required here but sometimes the political imperative pushes things in the opposite direction and the aid environment distorts politically it makes people accountable to the wrong sources often although I have to say I'm not a Dambisa Moyo adherent in this regard I don't think aid is the problem with everything it's like me saying I'm going to give you money and thus you're poor it's not like that it's how that money is utilized it's where it is spent to understand some of the negative incentives that it creates in the process Stephen, are we looking? All right, okay I just said two, it's like corrective there you say Africa hasn't got the capability Uganda had two outbreaks of Ebola and on both occasions they were absolutely ruthless I mean they took the people from the family you'll never see them again and they were not allowed burial the bodies were burned they were adopted in its track and of course in Rwanda which you mentioned has a majority of women in parliament which is unique in the world I think but anyway, a quick last round yes, right in the middle there wait for a microphone speak loudly Thank you my questions directed to Greg and Johnny something a little bit more close to home obviously every nation is unique it has its own set of challenges there's a African who is an African expat who's heavily involved in politics through the democratic alliance abroad and who wants to go home and pursue a career in politics how do you find compared to other African countries how do you find South Africa is with regards to the level of corruption within the current government compared to other African countries 20 years on from when they became democratic countries corruption in South Africa yes, two at the back there that would be easiest yes, you've been waiting a while I wanted to return to your metaphor of the iceberg which I like what does the 90% that's hidden imply for the scope of policy change and the rate of policy change in my experience we are terrible at misreading when a right moment exists and even worse at creating a right moment at mobilising domestic actors to create that opportunity for change just some I guess very quick thoughts on that would be great I'm wondering if you can speak a little on the dynamic between state fragmentation and state recovery as the mostly adhered to commitment to colonial boundaries actually hindered the recovery of post-conflict states okay I think that sorry Johnny I think that you will find again the iceberg most traditional societies come out of what we call big man politics that is that your crew as many cattle or whatever the good things are in your society we use those products and commodities to ensnare a following in currently even now there's a very big controversy in South Africa about the role of chiefs we know that in Nigeria it's also a very big issue and that is these traditional chiefs a crew power because there is a communal owners that their clan the land and if you want to come and build a home on that land you have to which means you have to see political allegiance to get an area where you can put your house and where you can plow and put your cattle with the communal cattle so it's the ability to disperse or to give some asset to somebody who is born without access to that asset to control over scarce resources so this tradition of patronage which is what we call it is a kind of acceptable way in which politics operated now democracy in this kind of situation occurs where the only way you can get the incumbent out is to support a contender and so you would if the chief is not doing his job right or if he is burdensome to the population they will start supporting a contender but that contender is in the chief's clan so they still the clan will always own the land and that's the limitation of it and obviously out of this comes a whole set of favours and opportunities that are created by these favours which are either given or requested by the chief or by the community that he rules over and so big man politics is an integral part of traditional African politics it is clan based if you look at Somaliland the role of the clans, the warlords it's a similar kind of structure so when you have this translated or transposed into modern democratic politics you start to find a skewing of relationships around this idea and that is where corruption comes in and so one has to fight and be very vigilant around the idea of patronage because patronage is where this starts on the other hand when I look at the level of corruption in South Africa it's still quite minor compared to say 16 billion euros in Brussels in the EU which was stated the other day it's just that those societies tend to hide it better and do it in a much more sophisticated way so one can't really burden the emerging economies with completely out of the forthright criticism on that side the other thing which I find very interesting related to what we regard as corruption or regard as the control of access or resources if you look at China our current government is very inanimate with the idea of the developmental state that is a ruling party which takes over the levers of government and then directs all the social, economic, political, cultural transformations from above to below and it's not democratically voted for and I mean you've seen how some of the Chinese have dealt with corrupt political figures this has suddenly come out in order to every now and again there's a clean sweep and people are shot and executed or sent off into a gulag but this idea that the state is the entity to guarantee development not private enterprise not a system based on individual merits or expertise or entrepreneurship this entrepreneurship is only allowed to go in a certain direction now there is also in China a whole set of patronage within the economy run mainly by the military and so all different models I think everybody who is in a developmental state looks to China to say how can we fast track this development how can we make speed it up there is a kind of a resonance around the idea that if the state can be used to do this and there might be a little bit of patronage going on but when you look at the bottom line and you look at how these states actually improve and develop it's probably the best way to go so this is quite an interesting debate that's going on currently in South Africa I'm mindful of the fact that I sit between you and buying a book so I won't take long you know it's very easy to be glass half empty about South Africa I mean it does our challenges do indicate you know that clearly transition is not an electoral moment it wasn't the 27th of April 1994 and then we didn't have to work at it we have to work at it extremely adroitly and with much perspiration and we'll have to continue to do so if you look at the balance sheet you would say well the actions of the executive over parliament riding roughshod over institutions is one nail in the coffin the levels of corruption the potential and nuclear deal with the Russians kind of off the books another nail in the coffin the personalization of politics over certain institutions yet another very low growth you know just obbling it around the 2% 2.5% margins too low and widening inequality the highest rates of inequality measured worldwide these are all things that worry us but on the other hand there are other things that we should be extremely pleased about for one the big questions that define South African politics for much of my life no longer exist they exist in a different shape and form but they're not as they were before 1994 we still have a very vibrant media we still have extremely robust institutions not least the judiciary not least the public protector although we should guard against over personalizing that institution as well we have extraordinarily innovative politics you know I welcome Julius Malema and the EFF not just they in terms of adding color literally into parliament but they add color in terms of energy and it's from a different place and it makes politics much more competitive indeed the DA's increasing size makes politics more competitive and I think that we also have great South African companies which have existed for a long time and continue to do extremely well in international business South African breweries just to name one of them I was love pointing out to my American friends that South African breweries bought Miller it wasn't the other way around and you know that's but one of a I think of an increasing pantheon of South African companies from mining companies to my left to companies involved in the retail sector and so on and so forth and it's just I think we have to remind ourselves constantly where we've come from that we are just 20 years old we're about to be 21 next year it's very youthful and there's a different generation of people really in the majority in South Africa who have a different set of experiences to my generation and that's going to demand different sets of interaction so my bottom line with South Africa is it's work in progress and we all have to pay our part in that work otherwise there won't be much progress on this issue of the iceberg if you want to add to us just add one thing to that in terms of South Africa certainly as a very interested observer the reemergence of civil society as an actor in the political sphere I think is a very big positive there's some nasty things around it to whether it's service delivery riots and deepslut but the fact that civil society is re-engaging in that process in a very active and vocal and public way is wonderful and ultimately there'll be a difficult time in between ultimately has to be a good thing and so while the immediate trend is down I see a lot of evidence that the future will be flat to up and I'm hopeful on the issue of the iceberg I mean I think just to throw one idea out here and it's an area that aid agencies have been very cagey about getting into and that is you know I think that if you want to promote change in many of these environments you've got to support change agents now I think South Africa's history before 1994 was all about support for political movements the ANC would not I didn't think have been in the shape and form that it was come 1990 had it not received an enormous volume of international assistance from all sorts of sides of the political divide during the Cold War and indeed from this country the home of the anti-apartheid movement so there was a huge amount of support for political actors but that appetite has been lost for supporting opposition movements and I think if you go to play a part you have to in my book deals with this issue authoritarian democracies, ones that have elections would actually behave differently and increasingly the chaves phenomena and there are other examples from around the world and many in Africa that you have to support change agents in the political domain as much as you try and do it in the developmental area and then on this very controversial question of fragmentation I think in the case of some countries yes maybe small is better or different is better but try and tell a Congolese that I always find it remarkable that a state that's done it's citizen so badly yet they have such attachment to it they have such attachment to a notion that doesn't really function and I think we also have to guard against the notion that different is better simply from our experience with South Sudan you know sometimes a different type of unit has different sets of problems and they can define themselves against what it is that they want to leave and divorce but then they have to work out the terms of the marriage internally as well and I think fundamentally this relates to an issue which has plagued Africa from independence which is in Europe of course boundaries were largely formed by alliances or by military actions with a appropriated territory based on military capability the ability to govern to an extreme whether it be a mountain or form another form of topography or river or whatever and taxation went hand in hand with that process of raising armies and extending governance in Africa governments or states governments nations were delivered a particular geographic territory and they didn't ever have to govern to the extremes it was those borders were defined and they were agreed that nobody would discuss them way back 51 years ago so that has led to extremely uncompetitive governance where essentially you govern the capital and you govern the country you didn't have to do very much else if you capture the capital you essentially capture the whole place and I think that then saying well fragmentation is the answer sometimes it does it may be applicable but in many cases it's not it's not the answer for everywhere but it you know it begs the question in a country like the Congo where as I term it in the book there's an invisible state they're all sorts of states there's stillborn states in South Sudan there's an invisible state in the Congo despite the fact that in fact many of the areas of the Congo have much more in common with the countries on the borders than they do with Kinshasa somehow this this notion of a single Congolese identity through music through opposition through the Zaireanization process that was of course accelerated by Mobutu that somehow this notion prevails today even despite what the history has been. Ladies and gentlemen it's been the great pleasure of ourselves in concert with the Royal Africa Society to host the event tonight the School of Oriental and African Studies exists to propagate the learnings and the cultures and the languages and the modern developments of precisely what we call the Orient and Asia in all parts and between which means we also try to observe the courtesies that emerge from these parts of the world and in this case courtesies that originate from my part of the world so we have some presentations to make tonight to thank our speakers, our panelists who have given very generously of their time but also as is the tradition of my own family to honour the families of the speakers who have also made a long journey with them so I wonder whether I could make my first presentation to members of those families. The second presentation to members of the panel excluding Richard who owes me a drink in any case. We work together on a constant it's a presentation which is very slightly embarrassing for me because what happens at SOAS is that every year we make presentations of the so called SOAS book of the year which unfortunately this year is my book so this wasn't planned but it is very much the gesture of saying thank you ladies and gentlemen you will have seen the way that Greg Mills works he collects together all kinds of personalities including some of you in the audience tonight and my fellow panelists who might seem disparate and odd bedfellows in the first instance but somehow he turns all of this into a wonderful performance which in different ways illustrates the very important work that he is trying to do in the world. He sets an example to us all we should be grateful that he spent some time with us tonight I ask you once again to thank all the panelists in particular and thank Greg Mills