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

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
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, 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 maizeharvests 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 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 andpolice 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 particular, maize, cassava, and chili peppers). The