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Date Published: 22/10/00
Author: Malcom Tait While the West sheds crocodile tears over the plight of Africa, it continues to take advantage of the continent’s disunity. The answer, believes Malcolm Tait, lies in the hands of Africans themselves. |
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Earlier this year, 'The Economist' ran an extraordinary examination of Africa. Describing it as ‘hopeless’, and using Sierra Leone as an example, one of its articles bemoaned the fate of the entire continent’s attempts at democratic unity and economic growth, laying much of the blame on the often-epauletted shoulders of the continent’s 50+ leaders.
‘It is not just unlucky coincidence that Africa has had such a poor crop of leaders. Leaders emerge from a society, and they remain a part of it,’ it shrugged, damning 700 million people and the way that they live in one deft stroke. ‘Does Africa have some inherent character flaw that keeps it backward and incapable of development? Some think so.’1
The magazine’s gross generalisations and stunning stereotyping spurred a howl of disgust from many quarters. ‘Your articles,’ stated one response, ‘reflect the tendency for one sensational story to “epitomise”- -the continent, as you note Sierra Leone does today. This is precisely what prevents the policy-makers and the public from understanding the diversity of a continent more than three times the size of Europe.’2
Very true, and 'The Economist' is not alone in this approach. It is rare to find more than one story about Africa appearing on the front page of any national newspaper, even when newsworthy events are happening simultaneously. The deaths in Zimbabwe of white farmers commanded vast acres of UK newsprint before that country’s election, but the growing problems in Sierra Leone were held back, while Sudan, Ethiopia and other African stories barely saw the light of day. It is as if news editors can only run one African story at a time: ‘Civil war in two parts of the continent and an election at the same time? Let’s just run the bloodiest story, and then we’ve covered Africa’.
Well, good news is no news, we all know that, and African success stories rate a long way down on the priority lists of most general media outlets. Yet to blame 'The Economist' and other newspapers for a myopic vision of such a vast continent is only to understand part of what is going on.
For the truth is that, for the time being at least, Africa’s problems suit the West. Consider these words. ‘We are at a pivotal point in Africa’s history.’ The speaker is Susan E Rice, US assistant secretary for African Affairs, in a speech in October 1998 to the Meridian International Center/Smithsonian Institution Forum.3 ‘Today, Africa stands at a crossroads, a decisive time when its future hangs in the balance… The United States can stand on the sidelines, or we can recognise and act upon our growing interest in a thriving Africa that can take its rightful place on the world stage.’
Rice goes on to list a number of conflicts on the continent, before coming to the hub of her argument.
‘Indeed, whether the challenge is adversity or opportunity, the reality is that the end of the Cold War calls for a new paradigm for US policymakers in Africa.’ What reality is this? ‘America, acting in its own interests, can and must play a constructive role in the region.’ To achieve this: ‘The Administration is actively supporting emergent democracies in Africa. We do so in full recognition that elections – although necessary – are not sufficient to sustain democratic change. As a result, we are investing also in the institutional foundations upon which lasting democracy thrives’.
ECONONMY RULES
Rice’s speech is revealing. International terrorism, drug trafficking, civil unrest and weak democracies are all cited as paramount problems for Africa. AIDS and malaria are shoved right down the list and given scant mention. But then disease is unlikely to affect the careful US businessman doing trade with Africa, whereas terrorism and corruption have more chance of doing so. And this is what it’s all about – making Africa more user-friendly. It’s no coincidence that although the Middle East provides the US with almost 18 per cent of its crude oil, Africa chips in with a further 14 per cent, which is likely to rise to well over 20 per cent before this decade is out.4
This mantra is not America’s alone. French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, on a tour of former French colonies of West Africa, has stated that democracy needs to be constantly strengthened as ‘an essential element of development for poor countries’.5 Meanwhile, France has around 6,000 troops permanently stationed on the continent, and 300 ‘political advisers’ working in African governments.
Earlier this year, British and French foreign secretaries Robin Cook and Hubert Védrine visited Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. The two neighbouring countries, each once a part of the former colonial powers’ empires, were chosen to host the tour as a symbol of a cooling of the rivalry between Britain and France in Africa. European rivalry in Africa? Isn’t that part of the continent’s pillaged past?
Yet it’s so much a part of its present and future, too. France is still miffed at its own impotence during and after the Rwandan war, leaving it bereft of a major presence in Central Africa. To help compensate, it has made a significant push into Kenya, emphasising on the way the importance to Kenyans of speaking French. Meanwhile, Britain has made a drive into Côte d’Ivoire, doubling its exports to the country. Franco-British rivalry is still a force in Africa – they just won’t let it drop.
It seems that everyone wants a part of Africa still, and is scrapping furiously for economic control there. There’s only one group of people that’s not allowed to get involved – and that’s the Africans themselves.
In the four decades of its steadily won independence, Africa has changed mightily: apartheid has fallen in the south, and the Asian influence in the east has risen; AIDS has had an incalculable effect on the continent, and tourism has become a major industry; the founding fathers have almost all passed on, and a new theme of regional co-operation has been developed. So much has changed, yet the political map of Africa – Eritrea’s breakaway from Ethiopia apart, has stayed more or less the same. Even Europe, that long-evolving collection of empires and democracies, has introduced new boundaries within itself in recent times. Discarding the inherited patchwork straitjacket of its nation-states may yet be the route to Africa’s future. It is up to the rest of the world to let that troubled continent exercise its right to find out for itself.
Take the Democratic Republic of Congo. Possibly the greatest national absurdity that hangs over from the colonial carve-up of Africa, the country formerly known as Zaire is a monstrous beast that sprawls over nearly 8 per cent of the continent, lapping the Ruwenzori mountains in the east, and dipping its toe in the Atlantic waters in the west.
It is a bizarre lump of a nation whose very borders bear testament to the demands of colonial greed. Belgium’s major contribution to African management from afar, the country, much of which is rich in mineral resource, tails off into the south-west because its original owners needed to get their pickings to the coast and away. But with the Zaire river – the country’s border in the west – emptying at the coast through Portuguese land, the Belgians won the right to the land right up to the sea, thus splitting Portugal’s ownership into two. After independence, this structure remained, Angola owning a small chunk of mainland Africa on the other side of the river.
For years, the mighty Zaire was run by a man whose name is among the founding fathers of modern Africa in fact, but definitely not in spirit. Mobutu Sese Seko (see box page 28) pillaged his country cheerfully until his overthrow in 1997. He was vanquished by the hitherto unknown Laurent Kabila, whose 30-year opposition to the despot had begun when Mobutu disposed of and assassinated the first president of Zaire, the pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba. No one expected Kabila to win once he started his seven-month push on the capital, Kinshasha, yet once he did, hopes were high that stability would come to the troubled Central African country. Instead, three years on, elections still lie on a distant horizon, opposition parties are silenced, over 100,000 Hutus have mysteriously disappeared, and foreign aid has vanished.
Kabila has turned to his neighbouring countries for help, both financial and military. DR Congo’s great potential mineral wealth has guaranteed that many of them have weighed in. Countries such as Zimbabwe and Namibia have spent so much on sending troops to the region, that their own citizens are feeling the pinch back at home. Kabila is making private promises to prominent people. Congolese are complaining that life was actually better under Mobutu. Disaster looms.
Yet is any of this surprising? DR Congo would never have existed had Belgium not put its flag on those ridiculous boundaries. A land that no man or woman could or should control, reaching as it does across former tribal grounds, attempting to unite groups of people who have little in common with each other, is a land that needs rethinking. There will be further war, that is certain. In all probability, other African countries will get involved. And without interference from the West, if DR Congo doesn’t work, then Africa will carve up the land itself, resulting in an entirely new set of boundaries. Perhaps there will be no boundaries at all. Perhaps, given time, Africa will sort out its own way of managing an unmanageable area of land, turning it into a system of co-operatives, or forming cross-continental alliances to administrate and share one vast and rich region, or returning it to the many peoples who find themselves lumped within its crazy boundaries. Perhaps the Congo is one war away from being solved.
Unfortunately, the West will not allow this to happen. It will attempt to maintain the existing pattern of the nation-state that currently exists. The problems of the region currently called DR Congo will continue, because there’s wealth in them thar hills, and it’s much easier to be able to do deals and get access to it when you only have to woo a single desperate president who is tied in to the usual requirements of aid acceptance, UN membership, global trade and the rest.
The horror of all this is that DR Congo will see much more bloodshed in the years to come, whatever anyone, inside or outside of Africa, tries to do, and it’s not alone. But the old colonial creations of land masses that suited their proprietors’ export and military needs have been examined frequently in retrospect, and history has consequently carried much of the can for Africa’s current welfare. The conclusion is always the same: the colonial powers may have made a mess of the political grid that now cages Africa, but history can’t be undone, so it’s now a matter of making the most of what we’ve got.
This, of course, is rubbish. Africa is a mighty land, with a mighty history. Like the rest of the world, its people spent millennia working out their own way of life, some moving constantly across the desert wastes, some forming empires which rose and fell, others carving out an existence in a single environment which they maintained for centuries. The Malian empire, the astonishing edifices at Great Zimbabwe, the expansion of the Bantu people’s range: the continent’s history is rich with movement and human endeavour, as dozens of different peoples sorted out their own best ways of developing a sustainable relationship with their own lands. There were occasional incursions from outside – the Roman advance into the north, and the slave trade on the east coast among the most notable examples – but Africans, in the land where man was born, were largely left alone to get on with it.
Then, in the space of just a few decades, the West moved in, stole people, carved up the continent, and made sure that thousands of years of evolving societal life were felled in a single chop. And now, only a couple or so lifetimes on from those days, Africa has been left with a grid, structure, dependence, political dogma, financial entrapment, social reshaping, concept of nationhood, pillage of resources and series of beholden leaders that it never asked for, didn’t want, and certainly never, ever needed.
None of this is to idealise or romanticise Africa’s past, or even to suggest that the continent needs to find a way of returning to it: many of the links to yesteryear have been permanently severed. Yet the assumption that a blip of a couple of centuries in a history as long as man’s own should have created the only possible existing continental order of Africa is arrogant, blinkered, and typical of the West, that part of the world that wants to recreate everyone else in its own likeness.
For many people, the current discussions about the possibility of an African Union fall firmly into that trap. Looking across the Mediterranean at the attempts by the EU to coalesce its members into a mighty force to take on the rest of the world’s economic superpowers, Union-supportive national leaders are hoping to be able to do the same with Africa. In 1991, the Organisation of African Unity agreed in principle a treaty calling for a continental parliament. The deadline set, however, was 2025, a magnificent stall of 34 years. Perhaps this was because, when it comes down to it, parliaments that attempt to govern the lives of 700 million people are ultimately what no one wants. In 1999, however, the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, called for the concept to be revisited, although moderating it somewhat into a United States of Africa. The Organisation of African Unity approved a blueprint for an African Union based on the EU model at its annual summit in Togo this July, but the timing of this event relies upon ratification by two-thirds of the OAU's 53 members.
Whether this union ever comes to pass remains to be seen, but as the concept has only received minor, nervous support over the years, it seems unlikely in the near future. Mass unions are often the brainchildren of those who wish to rule them, and it is no coincidence that the current proponent of a form of single African rule is Gaddafi, whose lifelong attempts to head up the Arab world have now been dropped in favour of good PR with the West.
This tentative prodding at the inert body of African unity is a far cry from the heady days of the early sixties, when the independent winds of change were gusting through the continent, and nation after nation was taking on the rule of self-government. The first of the founding fathers of Africa, Kwame Nkrumah, who took the reins of Ghana in 1957, was an avowed pan-Africanist. His belief in the potential strength of his continent knew few limits. ‘Never before have a people had within their grasp so great an opportunity for developing a continent endowed with so much wealth,’ he said in 19616.
‘Individually, the independent states of Africa, some of them potentially rich, others poor, can do little for their people. Together, by mutual help, they can achieve much. But the economic development of the continent must be planned and pursued as a whole. A loose confederation designed only for economic co-operation would not provide the necessary unity of purpose. Only a strong political union can bring about full and effective development of our natural resources for the benefit of our people.’
‘The emergence of such a mighty stabilising force in this strife-worn world,’ he continued, ‘should be regarded not as the shadowy dream of a visionary, but as a practical proposition, which the peoples of Africa can, and should, translate into reality. This is our chance. We must act now.’7
Strong words, but perhaps they missed the point. Africa may be a single continent, it may be referred to by many almost as if it were a single country, but in reality, it’s a geographical coincidence filled with a huge variety of different peoples trying to get by in their own way. Even the former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, a committed socialist, African unionist, and lifelong friend of Nkrumah has had his doubts. ‘I tried to get East Africa to unite before independence,’ he told the New Internationalist in 1970. ‘When we failed in this I was wary about Kwame's continental approach. We corresponded profusely on this.’
Today, the notion of pan-Africanism covers the entire African diaspora, embracing all the people of the world who can trace their recent roots back to Africa. The notion of being part of the African ‘race’ has never been stronger.
Meanwhile, as all this goes on, Jaabe So has more important matters on his mind. Jaabe is African, sure; Senegalese, certainly; but the most important regional label to him is that he lives in and belongs to Kounghani. The town was founded by So’s ancestors in 1720 on the left bank of the Senegal River. In the mid-seventies, So set up an independent farmers’ association in the region as a bulwark against the state’s increasing dependence upon foreign aid. Time and again over the last quarter century, the Senegalese government has attempted to draw the members of the foundation into the national agricultural programme, to keep its western puppeteers happy, and time and again So has resisted. In consequence, the members of the Federation, who through donations without strings attached, and an insistence on agricultural processes which suit their land and their numbers, thrived. They are not alone. Similar groups are beginning to appear in other parts of Africa, each fiercely refusing to have anything to do with their nation’s reliance upon aid and the western political model. Could there lie here the seeds of Africa’s future?
In 1996, in collaboration with his recently deceased wife Adrian Adams, compiled a history of his region and Foundation, 'A Claim to Land by the River' (Clarendon Press Oxford). He wrote: ‘At the time of Independence, if we’d had our wits about us, we should have become independent as nations: Fuuta, Bundu, Gajaaga, each with their own ruler answerable to the people. We should not have agreed to being all thrown together, so that a few could prey on all. All the talk about democracy is a lie.’
His conclusion: ‘There is no democracy now, nor will there ever be, unless it is based… upon our father’s house, upon what we
have.’
Malcolm Tait is the managing editor of 'The Ecologist.'
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