The Scramble for African Oil: Oppression, Corruption and War for Control of Africa’s Natural Resources by Douglas Yates, and: The French Oil Industry and the Corps des Mines in Africa by Douglas Yates (review)

The Paris-based political scientist Douglas Yates has produced two important contributions to our understanding of the political economy of the oil states in the Gulf of Guinea, building upon his earlier research on oil rents and state form in Gabon. These new books are complementary: one provides a synoptic account of the “oil curse” in Africa, focusing on such issues as corporate power, militarism, corruption, and the panoply of critical intellectuals and activists who have resisted the incursion of Big Oil, all structured around what he calls “power from above” and “power from below.” The other, perhaps more original though less glamorous, is what one might call a social biography of French oil companies in Africa told from the vantage point of the motley crew of soldier-engineers, financiers, and state functionaries who took the industry from its humble beginnings to the giant TotalFinaElf. In tandem, these two volumes shed new light on both the conventional wisdom of “oil dependency” and on the distinctive national trajectories and institutional settings of particular oil and gas sectors (in this case, France).

The Scramble for Oil covers familiar territory—what Yates calls the “dys-functions” of oil states—but makes two interesting analytical moves. One is to adopt a comparative case method approach—here there are certain similarities to the pathbreaking book by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Oil Politics in The Gulf of Guinea (Columbia UP, 2007). The other is to attempt to link different scales or levels of analysis that are relevant to the international system and the oil sector as a global business, as well as to the state, domestic politics, and popular mobilization and civil society. This is important because so much of the “oil curse” literature centers on the state; paradoxically little attention is paid to the oil companies as social agents (whether national companies like Sonangol or global corporations like Total), or the ways that oil as a natural resource seems so combustible politically or ineffective as a lubricant of social development. Each of the two sections in the book—entitled “Power from Above” and “Power from Below”—addresses a cluster of five substantive issues and dynamics, each typically built around a case study (drawn primarily, it should be noted, from Francophone Africa). Yates provides synthetic accounts of the current scramble for oil (focusing on China and the case of Gabon), the tensions between the national and private oil companies and the key roles played by a comprador class of African elites (focusing on Cabinda), and, in two powerful chapters, the nature of corruption in rentier states (particularly Equatorial Guinea) and militarism and Praetorian guards in oil states (especially Congo-Brazzaville). In the second section on power from below, Yates turns his gaze to popular struggles over imperial oil: one chapter focuses on journalists and critical intellectuals (based on the case of Cameroon’s Mongo Beti), another examines opposition political parties in Sao Tome, and two others examine oil and conflict (in the Sudan) and popular resistance movements (in Nigeria’s Niger Delta). Yates concludes with some provocative reflections on “unscrambling African oil”; his recommendations include tackling corruption through new institutionalism, innovative policies that will allow oil revenues to by-pass the state altogether, the deployment of smart boycotts, and building on the “missions” model of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. There is much to argue with in Yates’s account, but he is surely right to want to take the oil story beyond the rentier state and to plumb the depths of other oil-saturated arenas (OPEC, the transparency industry): that is, to open up...