The Nature of Belonging

Part Four: The spiritual dimensions of wealth {#part4 .part} The thinkers of Part Two and Part Three were mostly statesmen and scholars. The traditions of this part are spiritual. They look at wealth from the inside, as something that happens in the heart and between people before it happens in the treasury. They are often sceptical of rigid borders and loud nationalism, which they see as artificial or as a distraction from what matters. And yet, as we will see, they have a great deal to say about why some societies prosper. # Chapter 8. Dharma and artha: wealth in its right place {#ch8} ## The four aims of life Hindu philosophy describes four legitimate aims of human life, the *purusharthas*: 1. **Dharma**: righteousness, duty, moral order, the right way of living for one's station. 2. **Artha**: wealth, material prosperity, the means of life. 3. **Kama**: pleasure, love, the enjoyment of beauty and the senses. 4. **Moksha**: liberation from the cycle of rebirth. What is striking is that wealth is on the list. Indian spiritual tradition does not tell the householder that money is evil. Artha is a proper goal, and the *Arthashastra* we met in Chapter 5 is its textbook. But artha must be pursued within dharma. Wealth gained by cheating, cruelty or neglect of duty is poison. Wealth gained honestly and used to support family, guests, teachers and the needy is a blessing. ## Wealth as a flow In this view wealth is not something to hoard but something to move. The householder stage of life, *grihastha*, is honoured precisely because the householder produces the wealth that sustains everyone else: children, elders, students, ascetics, guests and the poor. Giving, *dana*, is a religious duty. Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, is said to be restless; she does not stay where she is not honoured and used well. ## What this means for nations The Indian spiritual frame suggests that a nation's wealth multiplies when people fulfil their duties to each other: the merchant who gives honest weight, the official who does his work without a bribe, the farmer who repays the seed loan, the rich family that funds the village well. It suggests that clinging to a narrow political identity matters less than the ethical quality of everyday dealings. Modern economists would recognise this. Honesty lowers the cost of every transaction. Where people can trust a weight, a signature and a word, they can trade more, faster and with less paperwork. Dharma, in economic language, is a public good. ## Gandhi's twist In the twentieth century Mahatma Gandhi gave the idea a national form. His *swadeshi* movement asked Indians to spin their own cloth and buy Indian goods rather than British imports. The spinning wheel became the symbol of the independence movement. Gandhi also proposed the idea of *trusteeship*: that the wealthy should regard their surplus as held in trust for the community. Here spiritual belonging, economic self-reliance and national identity all met in one simple object, a wheel turning in a village hut. # Chapter 9. Ibn Khaldun and the bond that builds empires {#ch9} ## A scholar in the desert In 1377, sheltering in a castle in what is now Algeria, the North African scholar Ibn Khaldun finished the introduction to a history of the world. That introduction, the *Muqaddimah*, became far more famous than the history it introduced. Arnold Toynbee called it one of the greatest works of its kind ever created by any mind in any time or place. It is often called the first work of sociology, and economists keep rediscovering it. Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332 and served as a judge, diplomat and courtier across North Africa and Andalusia. He met the conqueror Timur outside Damascus in 1401. He had watched dynasties rise and fall in his own lifetime, and he wanted to understand why. ## Asabiyyah His central concept is *asabiyyah*, usually translated as group feeling, social cohesion or solidarity. It is the bond that makes a group of people willing to defend each other, sacrifice for each other and act as one. It is strongest among desert and mountain peoples, bound by kinship and hardship, and weakest among the comfortable people of old cities. A group with strong asabiyyah can conquer a city and found a dynasty. In the first generation the rulers still share the hardships of their followers. Taxes are low, effort is high, and wealth grows. In the second generation the ruler begins to separate himself, gathering power and luxury. By the third or fourth generation the rulers have forgotten the bond that raised them, depend on hired soldiers, and pile on taxes to pay for luxury. The economy weakens, the group feeling is gone, and a new group from the edges, with fresh asabiyyah, replaces them. Ibn Khaldun estimated that a dynasty usually lasts about three generations, roughly 120 years. ## Ibn Khaldun on taxes and markets Ibn Khaldun's economic observations are remarkably modern. He wrote that at the beginning of a dynasty taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments, and at the end of a dynasty it yields a small revenue from large assessments. When rates are low, people are encouraged to work and trade, the number of enterprises grows, and the total collected rises. When rates rise too high, people lose the incentive to produce, business shrinks, and revenue falls. Twentieth century economists rediscovered this as the Laffer curve, and Arthur Laffer himself credited Ibn Khaldun. He also wrote that when a government itself goes into trade and farming, competing with its own people, it harms them and harms its revenue. And he argued that injustice, by which he meant the confiscation of property and forced labour, ruins civilisation, because people stop striving when they see that what they earn will be taken. ## Belonging beyond the passport For our question, Ibn Khaldun's insight is that the wealth of a civilisation rests on a psychological and spiritual bond, not on a legal contract. Asabiyyah can be built by kinship, but Ibn Khaldun also saw that religion could create a group feeling far wider than any tribe, as Islam had done in its first century, uniting Arabs who had been divided for generations. ## The Islamic ethic of circulation The broader Islamic economic tradition adds rules about how wealth should move. *Zakat*, one of the five pillars of Islam, requires believers above a threshold of wealth to give a share of their savings each year, traditionally two and a half percent, to the poor and other named recipients. The prohibition of *riba*, interest, pushed Islamic finance toward partnerships in which lender and borrower share profit and risk, such as *mudaraba* and *musharaka*. The Quran warns against letting wealth circulate only among the rich. The effect of these rules is to keep wealth moving and to bind the rich and poor into one community of obligation. Like dharma, they turn an inward spiritual commitment into an outward economic behaviour. And they mattered on Mozambique's own coast, where Muslim merchants traded for centuries under shared commercial customs that did not depend on any single state. # Chapter 10. Ubuntu: I am because we are

A philosophy in a proverb

Across southern Africa, in Nguni languages such as Zulu and Xhosa, there is a saying: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons. It is often shortened to "I am because we are." The philosophy it expresses is called Ubuntu. Similar ideas, under other names, run through the Bantu languages of the whole region, including those of Mozambique.

The South African philosopher Mogobe Ramose, in African Philosophy through Ubuntu (1999), argues that Ubuntu is not just a moral rule but a whole way of understanding being: a person becomes fully human only through relationships with others, with the ancestors and with the unborn. A person who lives only for himself is, in a deep sense, not yet fully a person.

Wealth as relationship

From this follows a very different idea of wealth. In traditional Ubuntu thinking a person or a family is wealthy not because of what is stored in a granary or a bank, but because of the strength and reach of their relationships. Cattle loaned to a neighbour are not lost; they are an investment in a bond that will be returned in a hard year. A feast that feeds the village spends grain but earns standing. A family with many children, many in-laws and many friends is secure even when it has little cash.

True prosperity, in this frame, is collective security. The question is not "how much do I have?" but "who will stand with me when the rains fail?"

Ubuntu as economic machinery

Economists have learned to take this seriously. Relational belonging solves real problems:

• Insurance without insurers. Gifts and loans within kin networks spread the risk of drought, illness and death.
• Credit without banks. Rotating savings groups, called xitique in southern Mozambique and stokvel in South Africa, let members save and borrow with no collateral, because social pressure enforces repayment.
• Labour without wages. Work parties, in which neighbours help each other plant or harvest in exchange for food and future help, mobilise labour at the busy moments of the farming year.
• Contract enforcement without courts. Reputation in a dense network is a powerful guarantee.

These systems are not primitive versions of modern finance. They are sophisticated solutions to life without reliable states and banks. That is exactly why they have survived.

The limits of Ubuntu

Ubuntu also has limits that honesty requires us to name. The obligation to share can make it hard to accumulate capital: a family member who saves to buy a tractor may be asked to pay for a funeral first. Trust inside the circle does not easily extend to strangers outside it. And in politics, the language of Ubuntu can be borrowed by leaders to demand loyalty without accountability.

The task, as we will see in the final chapters, is not to choose between Ubuntu and citizenship. It is to widen the circle of Ubuntu until it includes the stranger, and to give citizenship some of the warmth of Ubuntu.

Part Four: The spiritual dimensions of wealth {#part4 .part} The thinkers of Part Two and Part Three were mostly statesmen and scholars. The traditions of this part are spiritual. They look at wealth from the inside, as something that happens in the heart and between people before it happens in the treasury. They are often sceptical of rigid borders and loud nationalism, which they see as artificial or as a distraction from what matters. And yet, as we will see, they have a great deal to say about why some societies prosper. # Chapter 8. Dharma and artha: wealth in its right place {#ch8} ## The four aims of life Hindu philosophy describes four legitimate aims of human life, the *purusharthas*: 1. **Dharma**: righteousness, duty, moral order, the right way of living for one's station. 2. **Artha**: wealth, material prosperity, the means of life. 3. **Kama**: pleasure, love, the enjoyment of beauty and the senses. 4. **Moksha**: liberation from the cycle of rebirth. What is striking is that wealth is on the list. Indian spiritual tradition does not tell the householder that money is evil. Artha is a proper goal, and the *Arthashastra* we met in Chapter 5 is its textbook. But artha must be pursued within dharma. Wealth gained by cheating, cruelty or neglect of duty is poison. Wealth gained honestly and used to support family, guests, teachers and the needy is a blessing. ## Wealth as a flow In this view wealth is not something to hoard but something to move. The householder stage of life, *grihastha*, is honoured precisely because the householder produces the wealth that sustains everyone else: children, elders, students, ascetics, guests and the poor. Giving, *dana*, is a religious duty. Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, is said to be restless; she does not stay where she is not honoured and used well. ## What this means for nations The Indian spiritual frame suggests that a nation's wealth multiplies when people fulfil their duties to each other: the merchant who gives honest weight, the official who does his work without a bribe, the farmer who repays the seed loan, the rich family that funds the village well. It suggests that clinging to a narrow political identity matters less than the ethical quality of everyday dealings. Modern economists would recognise this. Honesty lowers the cost of every transaction. Where people can trust a weight, a signature and a word, they can trade more, faster and with less paperwork. Dharma, in economic language, is a public good. ## Gandhi's twist In the twentieth century Mahatma Gandhi gave the idea a national form. His *swadeshi* movement asked Indians to spin their own cloth and buy Indian goods rather than British imports. The spinning wheel became the symbol of the independence movement. Gandhi also proposed the idea of *trusteeship*: that the wealthy should regard their surplus as held in trust for the community. Here spiritual belonging, economic self-reliance and national identity all met in one simple object, a wheel turning in a village hut. # Chapter 9. Ibn Khaldun and the bond that builds empires

Asabiyyah

His central concept is asabiyyah, usually translated as group feeling, social cohesion or solidarity. It is the bond that makes a group of people willing to defend each other, sacrifice for each other and act as one. It is strongest among desert and mountain peoples, bound by kinship and hardship, and weakest among the comfortable people of old cities.

A group with strong asabiyyah can conquer a city and found a dynasty. In the first generation the rulers still share the hardships of their followers. Taxes are low, effort is high, and wealth grows. In the second generation the ruler begins to separate himself, gathering power and luxury. By the third or fourth generation the rulers have forgotten the bond that raised them, depend on hired soldiers, and pile on taxes to pay for luxury. The economy weakens, the group feeling is gone, and a new group from the edges, with fresh asabiyyah, replaces them. Ibn Khaldun estimated that a dynasty usually lasts about three generations, roughly 120 years.

Ibn Khaldun on taxes and markets

Ibn Khaldun's economic observations are remarkably modern. He wrote that at the beginning of a dynasty taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments, and at the end of a dynasty it yields a small revenue from large assessments. When rates are low, people are encouraged to work and trade, the number of enterprises grows, and the total collected rises. When rates rise too high, people lose the incentive to produce, business shrinks, and revenue falls. Twentieth century economists rediscovered this as the Laffer curve, and Arthur Laffer himself credited Ibn Khaldun.

He also wrote that when a government itself goes into trade and farming, competing with its own people, it harms them and harms its revenue. And he argued that injustice, by which he meant the confiscation of property and forced labour, ruins civilisation, because people stop striving when they see that what they earn will be taken.

Belonging beyond the passport

For our question, Ibn Khaldun's insight is that the wealth of a civilisation rests on a psychological and spiritual bond, not on a legal contract. Asabiyyah can be built by kinship, but Ibn Khaldun also saw that religion could create a group feeling far wider than any tribe, as Islam had done in its first century, uniting Arabs who had been divided for generations.

Part Five: Africa's thinkers of liberation {#part5 .part} The spiritual traditions of Part Four were old. The thinkers of this part wrote in the twentieth century, in the middle of the struggle against colonial rule. They saw belonging and citizenship not as abstract ideas but as weapons that had been used against Africans, and that Africans now had to seize and remake. # Chapter 11. Frantz Fanon and the trap of the national middle class {#ch11} ## A doctor in Algeria Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean island of Martinique, then a French colony. He fought for Free France in the Second World War, trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon, and in 1953 took charge of a psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. There he treated both the victims and the perpetrators of the colonial war, and soon joined the Algerian independence movement. He died of leukaemia in 1961, aged thirty-six, just as his last book, *The Wretched of the Earth*, was published. ## Citizenship as exclusion Fanon's first great insight was psychological. Colonialism, he argued, was not only an economic system but a way of dividing the world in two: the settler's town, lit and paved and well fed, and the native's town, crowded and hungry. The colonial state offered the language of universal citizenship, liberty, equality and fraternity, while systematically excluding the colonised from it. That gap between the promise and the practice produced a deep, lasting distrust. ## The pitfalls of national consciousness His second insight is the one that matters most for wealth, and it was a warning to his own side. In a chapter called "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," Fanon predicted what would happen in many newly independent states. The danger, he wrote, was that the colonial power would leave and a national middle class would simply take its place. This class, he argued, had no capital of its own, no industry and no inventions. It would not transform the economy; it would act as an intermediary, a business agent for the foreign companies that still controlled the mines and plantations. It would use the language of nationalism to justify its own enrichment. It would buy imported luxuries, build villas, and leave the countryside as poor as before. And as its legitimacy faded it would rely more and more on a single party, a strong leader and the police. Against this Fanon called for a nationalism that was really social: power and resources pushed down to the regions and the villages, political education of the people, and an economy rebuilt around the needs of the rural majority. Post-colonial nationalism, he argued, must not merely replicate the European state model. It must change who owns and who benefits. ## The Fanon lesson Sixty years later Fanon's warning reads like a description of many African economies. Independence changed the flag but not always the flow of wealth. Where a narrow elite captured the state and its contracts, the majority went on living outside the formal economy. Fanon teaches that nationalism is not enough. The question is always: whose nation, and who benefits from it? # Chapter 12. Mondlane, Machel and the making of a Mozambican nation

Samora Machel

Samora Moisés Machel, also from Gaza, trained as a nurse, joined FRELIMO, became its military commander and, after Mondlane's death and a period of collective leadership, its president. When Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975, Machel became its first president. He died in 1986 when his plane crashed at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa.

Machel's most famous phrase captured the project of nation-building: para que a nação viva, a tribo deve morrer, "for the nation to live, the tribe must die." The idea was that colonialism had ruled by dividing people into tribes and that only a single, united national identity could reclaim the land and resources for all Mozambicans. FRELIMO's literacy campaigns, its insistence on Portuguese as a national language, its rejection of chiefs and traditional authorities and its communal villages all served this goal.

The cost of making a nation in a hurry

The vision was generous. It aimed to give every Mozambican the citizenship that colonialism had denied. But the methods carried a cost. Traditional authorities, which for many rural people were the most familiar form of belonging, were pushed aside. Families were moved into communal villages, sometimes against their will. State farms replaced peasant farming in many areas, and many of them failed. The new state was highly centralised and run from Maputo.

As we will see in Part Six, this centralisation collided with a regional war fed by hostile neighbours, and the result was catastrophe. Machel himself, before his death, had begun to recognise some of the failures and to open the economy.

Part Six: Mozambique, a history of belonging and wealth {#part6 .part} It is often said that Africa ignored wealth creation, or that it never developed the institutions that made other regions rich. Mozambique's history shows something different. Its peoples built wealth for centuries through transnational networks that did not fit the European template of the nation-state. Colonial rule did not bring wealth creation to a land that lacked it. It dismantled one system of wealth and replaced it with a system of extraction. # Chapter 13. Before borders: gold, ivory and the Indian Ocean {#ch13} <div class="figure">{{FIG_NETWORK}}<p class="caption">The traditional Mozambican trade model before 1500: inland states, coastal towns and the Indian Ocean world, and the colonial intervention that cut across them.</p></div> ## The inland states From the eleventh century, Shona-speaking peoples on the plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers built powerful states based on cattle, farming and gold. The most famous, Great Zimbabwe, flourished from about 1200 to 1450, and its great stone walls still stand. After its decline, the state of Mutapa, often written Monomotapa by the Portuguese, became the leading power in the region, its rulers known by the title *Mwenemutapa*. Its territory reached into what is now Tete and Manica in Mozambique. These states were rich because they sat at one end of a long trade route. Gold was mined and panned in the interior, ivory was hunted, and both were carried to the coast. In return came cloth from India, beads, glass and porcelain from as far away as China. Chinese ceramics and Persian pottery have been found at Great Zimbabwe. ## The coastal towns On the coast, a string of Swahili towns stretched from Mogadishu to Sofala, near present-day Beira. Their people spoke Swahili, a Bantu language rich in Arabic words, practised Islam, built in coral stone, and lived by trade. Sofala was the great gold port of the south. For a long period in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, much of the Sofala gold trade passed through Kilwa, in what is now Tanzania, whose rulers minted their own copper coins. Further north lay Angoche and the island of Mozambique, which later gave its name to the whole country. The monsoon winds made the trade possible. For half the year they blew from the northeast, carrying dhows from Arabia, Persia and India down the African coast. For the other half they blew from the southwest, carrying them home. A merchant from Gujarat could plan his year by the wind. ## Belonging without borders Here is the crucial point for our question. This system created great wealth for some, and it did so without the European idea of the nation-state. - **Identity was fluid.** Swahili society was the product of centuries of intermarriage between African, Arab, Persian and later Indian families. A person could be African and Muslim and connected by marriage to a family in Oman or Gujarat, all at once. - **Trust travelled through networks.** Merchant families, religious brotherhoods and shared commercial custom made it possible to lend, deliver and pay across thousands of kilometres. A contract was secured not by a state court but by reputation, faith and kinship. - **Rulers taxed trade but did not own it.** Coastal sultans and inland kings levied duties and took a share of the gold, but the trade itself was carried out by many independent actors. - **The economy faced the ocean.** Mozambique's coast was connected more closely to India and Arabia than to many parts of its own interior. This was belonging of Ibn Khaldun's kind and Ubuntu's kind, extended across an ocean. It had its own injustices, including a trade in enslaved people that grew much larger in later centuries. But it shows that the region had a working model of wealth creation long before Europeans arrived. ## The Portuguese arrive In 1498 Vasco da Gama's ships anchored off the island of Mozambique on their way to India. Within a few years the Portuguese had built a fort at Sofala, in 1505, and soon after at Mozambique Island. Their aim was to seize the gold trade. They largely failed. The trade shrank under their attempts to monopolise it, and for three centuries Portuguese presence was mostly limited to coastal forts, trading posts along the Zambezi and the *prazos*, large estates held by Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese families who ruled them like local chiefs. The decisive break came not with the first arrival but with the scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. # Chapter 14. Subjects, not citizens: the colonial state

The indigenato

The legal heart of colonial rule was the separation of the population into two kinds of people. Under the system known as the indigenato, given its fullest form in the native statutes of the 1920s, Africans were classed as indígenas, natives. They were subject to customary law administered by colonial officials and appointed chiefs, not to the Portuguese civil code. They had to carry a pass. They paid a head tax. And they could be compelled to work.

A small route out existed. An African who could speak and write Portuguese, had a "civilised" occupation, dressed and lived in a European manner and renounced his customary ways could apply to become an assimilado, with some of the rights of a Portuguese citizen. Very few did. By 1950, out of a population of more than five and a half million Africans, only a few thousand had been granted this status, fewer than one in a thousand.

The Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, in Citizen and Subject (1996), showed that this pattern was common across colonial Africa. Colonial states were bifurcated: in the towns a small minority of citizens lived under civil law, while in the countryside the great majority were subjects ruled through chiefs under so-called customary law. The state was two states, one for citizens and one for natives.

What this did to belonging

Think about what three generations of this experience teaches.

• The state is a threat. It takes your labour, your crops and your sons. The sensible response is to avoid it.
• Citizenship is for others. Rights belong to the settlers and a tiny assimilated minority. For the majority, the law is something that is done to you.
• Visible wealth is dangerous. A family that grows a big surplus or builds a good house attracts the tax collector and the labour recruiter. Better to keep wealth in forms the state cannot easily see: cattle, kin, savings groups and gifts.
• Trust lives in the circle. The only reliable institutions are the family, the church or mosque, and the neighbours.

This is the root of the deep distrust of state mechanisms that many observers still notice in rural Mozambique. It was not irrational. It was learned, painfully and over many decades.