The Myth of International Protection by Seymour Claudia;

Author:Seymour, Claudia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520971417
Publisher: University of California Press

CONTEMPORARY PATRONAGE

Struggling with unemployment, poverty, displacement, and instability, families are no longer able to offer the support they once did. Consequently, other strategies are being sought by young people, none more so than finding a patron. In a social system that has been transformed by monetized exchange, generalized conditions of poverty, and the distrust associated with decades of political and structural violence, the once strictly regulated patronage ties have become informalized and often violent, reducing options for self-protection and offering little support in ensuring long-term survival.

The work of James C. Scott, political scientist and author of The Moral Economy of the Peasant, lays the foundation for understanding the relationships that govern many aspects of rural life, including patrimonialism and patronage. Patronage is traditionally defined as a relationship of exchange, usually based on “dyadic (two-person) ties involving a largely instrumental friendship in which an individual of higher socioeconomic status (patron) uses his own influence and resources to provide protection or benefits, or both, for a person of lower status (client) who, for his part, reciprocates by offering general support and assistance, including personal services, to the patron.”27 As noted by Scott, in contexts of economic adversity and political uncertainty, the client’s survival is constantly under threat, thus making patronage support an essential aspect of ensuring one’s personal security. Patronage relations tend to dominate in contexts where there are significant wealth and power inequalities and where there are no institutionalized guarantees of physical security for those in the position of weakness.

In such a system, portraying weakness, subordination, and deference can increase one’s chances of gaining protection and assistance from those with greater power: “Where subsistence needs are paramount and physical security uncertain, a modicum of protection and insurance can often be gained only by depending on a superior who undertakes personally to provide for his own clients. . . . When one’s physical security and means of livelihood are problematic, and when recourse to law is unavailable or unreliable, the social value of a personal defender is maximized.”28

Throughout modern Congolese history, patronage has been a dominant feature of daily life and public administration. In the precolonial era, traditional authority over the control of land was held by local chiefs, who presided over geographic areas that coincided with unified language and identity groups. People would pay regular tribute to their chief in exchange for access to land, while supporting a “local moral economy” in which loyalty was offered in exchange for protection.29 Eventually these traditional patron-based systems of rule became formalized as the Native Authorities in which traditional chiefs were largely subsumed within the colonial machinery.30

As explained elsewhere in discussions of colonial governance throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the colonial administration used the existing patronage system to its advantage in order to extract the “maximum resources from the least financial and coercive expenditure.”31 While constructing themselves in the “paternal image,” the Belgian authorities contributed to the long process of weakening “the powers of the local lineage chiefs over land attribution replacing those by more individual and monetarized transactions.

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