Africa is a beautiful place, they say. The cradle of humankind, mecca for animal lovers, exotic and wild, with spectacular scenery.
Ridden with disease, violence, poverty, and corruption.
There’s no dearth of possible culprits to blame: bad luck, bad climate, bad predators, bad slavery, bad colonialism, bad post-colonial decisions, bad tribalism, bad religion, bad education, bad Soviet influence, bad nurture, bad nature?
Yesterday commenter “RA” offered a link to this article on the subject by Kim du Toit. Entitled “Let Africa Sink,” it makes for exceptionally chilling reading.
Can the situation really be that hopeless? Is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness still just a sinkhole of horror? What I know about Africa is shallow, and it’s all gleaned from book learning, but I do know this: once a country or a region falls apart, it is a million times harder to put it together than to make it work in the first place, and the latter isn’t what you’d call easy, either. And maybe in Africa things haven’t been together for centuries.
A while back I read Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, about how human violence has been steadily declining during our long history. At first I laughed at the thesis; with the history of the 20th century alone, who could even think such a thing? And yet about a hundred pages into the book I was becoming convinced—if you look at the big picture, which Pinker does.
Here’s a summary of Pinker’s main thesis (which is exhaustively documented in the book), taken from one of the reader comments at Amazon:
Pinker’s sequence of the decline in violence is based on synthesis of a large volume of literature generated by archaeologists, ethnologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists. Pre-state societies, while low in absolute population and absolute number of violent acts, had very high per capita levels of violence. The emergence of states resulted in some decline in violence and the gradual strengthening of the state resulted in a progressive decline in interpersonal violence, even as states became more capable of waging war. This is best documented in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present. Pinker highlights a number of important parallel processes. The “Civilizing Process” described by the great historical sociologist Norbert Elias of the increasing importance of self-control, manners, and social amity from the Renaissance onwards is prominently featured as a key feature in the decline of violence. Similarly, Pinker emphasizes the humanitarianism of the Enlightenment and subsequent reform movements…
But Africa may be some sort of exception (or at least a less dramatic example of violence’s decline), and reading that summary it’s possible to guess at one of the big reasons why, although certainly not the only reason. Many African countries seem to have skipped some of those stages. The African continent is not the only place on earth that happened, of course. But it’s the place where such movements have “taken” the least, and possible answers to the question of “why?” lead us back to that long list of “bads” that I offered towards the beginning of this post.
The entire question is a fascinating although depressing one, and it led me to a couple of hours of reading last night, with the Google query “Why is Africa such a mess?” leading the way. What I discovered was a certain consensus, and although I don’t think it goes deep enough it’s certainly a credible piece of the whole.
The gist of it is that, after colonialism ended, when Africa had a seeming chance to set its own trajectory, its countries rejected liberal democracy and capitalism in favor of strong men and socialism. The strong men exacerbated the corruption, and the socialism led to—well, the bad economies to which socialism tends to lead. Both choices (if you can call them that) almost certainly made things worse in Africa than they would otherwise have been.
Here’s one discussion of these phenomena (which I think is far too simplistic, by the way; the problem with Africa certainly doesn’t have “nothing to do” with this author’s list of things):
What I have done is give you, in a nutshell, why Africa is in a mess today. The reason why is has nothing to do with colonialism. It has nothing to do with the slave trade. It has nothing to do with the African people. It has nothing to do with lack of resources for Africa. The basic reason is that the leadership adopted two defective systems. The first one is a defective economic system in which a great deal of power is concentrated in the hands of the state. Socialism as an economic policy was wrong, totally wrong and alien to Africa. This I condemn very strongly.
The second mistake they made was adopting a defective political system that had no democratic accountability and a passive state system that gave the leader maximum power. The combination of these two, the concentrated economic and political power in the hands of one leader was what led to the ruin of Africa.
Because these leaders, once they had that power in their hands, discovered that they could do literally anything they wanted with their countries. They could throw anybody who opposed them in jail. They took over and gagged the press. They took over and padded the judiciary with their own cronies. They declared themselves President for life. You couldn’t run elections against them.
Another theme that runs through these articles is the idea that conditions on the continent are so very desperate that even those who despise colonialism think Africa might be better off if the system came back:
Things are so bad that many people remember with nostalgia “the good old days” of colonial rule when they could at least afford basic necessities and even freely express their views without fear of being locked up for simply speaking up. Colonial rule was oppressive and exploitative. There is no question about that. And it did not allow Africans to have the kind of freedom they normally would have under democracy. But when a leader like Archbishop Desmond Tutu says he had more freedom of speech under apartheid than other Africans do in independent African countries under the leadership of fellow Africans, as he said in Nairobi, Kenya, in the early nineties; then one gets a pretty good idea of what kind of mess we are in as a people across the continent.
Many older people also remember that during colonial rule, in spite of its curtailed freedom, they were allowed a degree of freedom they don’t enjoy today in most countries even in this era of democratization that was introduced across Africa in the early nineties following the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. Whether we like to admit it or not, it is true that there was a degree of freedom during colonial rule. That is why African nationalist leaders were able to organize and form political parties and campaign for independence right under the nose of our colonial masters. It is the colonial rulers who allowed them to do that, although within prescribed limits to stifle nationalist aspirations. But they did allow our leaders to continue mobilizing the masses for the nationalist cause. Yet, after we won independence, many of our leaders went on to deny us this very basic human right, freedom of expression, they claimed to cherish so much.
Country after country is rich in resources but is bled dry by its leaders, and aid from the West mostly flows to them, too:
One of the strange paradoxes about Africa is that some of the richest countries on the continent are also among the poorest. Therefore most of the poverty in those countries cannot be attributed to lack of natural resources but to bad leadership, wrong economic policies, rampant corruption, and sheer waste and mismanagement including well-meaning incomptence. And no case better illustrates the utter waste of such potential than that of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, under Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the most brutal, and most corrupt, dictators on the entire continent.
…The idea of recolonizing Africa is highly inflammatory because it implies that Africans, especially black Africans, are nothing but a bunch of idiots incapable of managing their own affairs…
…[R]ecolonization schemes are either racist or paternalistic, or both. Few, if any, are altruistic. And they all provoke furious responses, especially being labelled racist…
Looking at Africa today, one can’t help but think of a line from Dante’s Inferno: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”…
AIDS by itself is bad enough. Throw in rotten dictatorships, Marxism, corruption, iliteracy, racism, genocide, tribal and national wars, and the term “utter hopelessness” is inadequate to describe Black Africa’s plight. For years we’ve counseled investors to avoid sub-Saharan Africa, saying it was headed down a corrupt one-way road to collapse. It’s arrived. Black Africa teeters on the edge of a yawning abyss, and at the bottom lies total anarchy and chaos. Many say it can’t get much worse. We say: it can and it will.
The above excerpts are from a book entitled Africa is in a Mess by Godfrey Mwakikagile, a Tanzanian scholar of African studies, whom I assume is a black African (from his name and biography, although I can’t find a photo). The above passages were apparently written in the first few years of the 21st century. In the time that has passed since then, has Africa already fallen into that abyss? Or it still only poised on its edge?
[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on the classic book Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. I’ve written about the book before, in this comment thread, and in my opinion it’s a poetic and tragic masterpiece.
Here’s a very sobering article written in 1998 by Paton’s widow, explaining why she is leaving South Africa.]
