A Continent Gone Wrong
By Russ Hoyle
After a generation of independence, Africa faces harsh facts and hard choices
Our ancient continent is now on the brink of disaster, hurtling towards the abyss of confrontation, caught in the grip of violence. Gone are the smiles, the joys of life.
--Edem Kodjo, former
Secretary-General of the Organization for
African Unity
A quarter of a century after the nations of sub-Saharan Africa began to gain their independence, that bleak view is shared by increasing numbers of Africans and non-Africans alike. The New Year's Eve coup in Nigeria was only the most recent recurrence of a pattern of failure that has gripped the continent. Black-ruled Africa is suffering today from a political and economic malaise that few could have imagined when British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke eloquently in 1960 of the "wind of change" then sweeping the continent.
Uhuru!, the Swahili clarion call for freedom from the European colonial powers, has brought independence but little liberty for millions of black Africans. The rallying cry "One man, one vote" has been transformed into reality, but it has suffered an ironic distortion. Many Africans now have one vote, but often it can be cast for only one man. Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda was the sole candidate in his nation's presidential elections last October, when he was elected to a fifth four-year term. In Kenya, long a showplace of African democracy, President Daniel Arap Moi faced no challenger in elections last September.
All too frequently, fledgling African democracies have become hostage to leaders intent solely on gaining and holding power. In the past 25 years, more than 70 leaders in 29 African nations have been deposed by assassination, purges or coups. Among the 41 major independent black African nations, only seven allow opposition political parties. Seventeen are single-party states. Another 17 are ruled by military regimes.
Economically, the picture is no brighter. In nation after nation, independence has been followed by a steady decrease in per capita food production. Such essential government services as education, health care and transportation are in disarray. African countries are so riddled by foreign debt, estimated at a total of $100 billion annually, that they are rescheduling loans by arguing that they are near bankruptcy. In the meantime, sub-Saharan Africa's population of 210 million in 1960 has grown to 393 million. It continues to increase by 2.9% annually, the fastest growth rate in the world.
Almost without exception, African governments have allowed a crucial part of their colonial inheritance--the infrastructure of roads, railways, cities and towns built by Europeans--to deteriorate. In Dar es Salaam, the once attractive capital of Tanzania, years of post-colonial neglect have left their ravages. Pavements are cracked and unrepaired. Manhole covers have disappeared and not been replaced. Buildings are unpainted and grimy. In many areas, garbage is no longer collected; thin wisps of pungent smoke curl up through the palm trees from burning piles of refuse.
Roads built by European engineers are being gradually swallowed up by the bush. When Zaire, then known as the Belgian Congo, gained its independence in 1960, it had 58,000 miles of good roads; now only 6,200 miles are passable. The Ivory Coast, a model of economic development and relative prosperity under President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, is now beset by a troubled economy and uncertainty about who will succeed him.
Sub-Saharan Africa is burdened with half the world's 10 million refugees, partly as a result of the drought that has held the Sahel region in its arid grip for more than a decade. As nomadic herdsmen wander thousands of miles in search of food and water, some 14 million acres of potentially productive grasslands are destroyed each year by their livestock. At least 20% of the continent is desert; experts believe that the process of "desertification" could encompass 45% of Africa in 50 years if current patterns of land use are allowed to continue. Famine and pestilence plague hundreds of thousands of Africans. Livestock diseases like rinderpest, a fatal viral infection known as "the cattle plague," and human maladies like malaria, cholera and bilharziasis, a water-borne urinary-tract disease, are on the rise.
Political oppression has taken its own savage toll. Early last year Nigeria expelled 2 million Ghanaian workers to ease the mounting problems it faced trying to provide work for its own population. Some 700,000 ethnic Somalis, victims of a protracted war with Ethiopia, live in refugee camps within Somalia. The Sudan shelters another 637,000 refugees, including secessionist Eritreans who have been forced to flee Marxist-oriented Ethiopia, as well as 200,000 Ugandans. The Ugandan refugees have fled in two waves: those escaping the brutal policies of former Dictator Idi Amin in the '70s and those who have recently left Uganda to avoid President Milton Obote's military "cleanup" operations. Zaire supports another 335,000 refugees from upheavals in Angola, Rwanda and Burundi.
Africa's blight and decay also extend to projects and equipment built or financed by well-meaning foreign countries. In rural Senegal, a $250,000 U.S.-made solar-powered irrigation system lies idle, mainly because of maintenance problems. Just outside Lusaka, in Zambia, hundreds of government vehicles sit abandoned in a parking lot. Some are wrecks, but many others are almost new, missing only a clutch plate or a windshield. Desperately short of foreign exchange, the government of President Kaunda prefers to import new vehicles through aid programs rather than buy the spare parts necessary to repair the old ones. In Zambia and Tanzania, locomotives badly needed to haul copper and agricultural produce sit on railroad sidings because no one can fix their hydraulic-brake systems.
In scores of countries where small, labor-intensive projects are needed, technological white elephants have proliferated. In Tanzania, Zaire and Somalia, glass-and-steel airport facilities, built in anticipation of air traffic that has not materialized, have been allowed to fall apart. Escalators do not work; electronic flight-schedule boards have been replaced by blackboards; automatic sliding glass doors have to be operated manually. In Uganda and Angola, some high-rises lack glass panes and running water. In 1975 Canada built a $2.5 million semi-automated bakery in Dar es Salaam, but often there is no flour to make bread. Moscow's aid efforts have fared no better. A Soviet-built cement factory at Diamou, Mali, was designed for a capacity of 50,000 tons a year. Beset by regular breakdowns, it produced five tons last year. In accepting such largesse, African leaders have mortgaged themselves to outside interests. Observes a Nigerian film maker: "We build palaces but can't run them, we import cars we can't repair, we are attracted by everything that glitters. We are slaves to another culture."
One of the major exceptions to the litany of failure is South Africa, which has become sub-Saharan Africa's premier economic and military power. But this has been achieved at an unacceptable price: the disenfranchisement of its 21 million blacks, who account for 70% of the population. They are allowed to work, but cannot vote in central-government elections. They have little freedom to choose where they work or live. Many are forced to settle in bantustans, or black homelands, that the white government has set aside to segregate blacks while exploiting their labor. The elaborate canon of apartheid laws means that activist blacks who speak out against the government too forcefully, or who are simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, can be detained, jailed or fined at the whim of South African authorities.
Independence, paradoxically, has not freed most of Africa from the yoke of foreign domination and meddling. Cuban soldiers act as proxies for the Soviet Union in Angola and Ethiopia; East German military advisers are present in Mozambique and Ethiopia. The regime of Ethiopian Chairman Mengistu Haile Mariam has paid homage to Moscow by erecting a statue of Lenin in Addis Ababa. Mengistu allows the Soviets to maintain a naval base on the Dahlak Islands in the Red Sea. Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, often with Moscow's backing, has emerged as the continent's chief troublemaker. Gaddafi has been behind unsuccessful coups in at least half a dozen nations from Gambia to the Sudan.
Of the former colonial powers,
France maintains the most visible presence, stationing troops and dispensing both military and economic aid to more than 20 countries. Some 300,000 French now live and work in Africa, more than twice the number during colonial times. Last summer, President Francois Mitterrand dispatched 2,000 soldiers and eight Mirage and Jaguar jets to forestall Soviet-and Libyan-backed insurgents intent on overthrowing the government of Chad's President Hissene Habre. The U.S. provided AW ACS planes and antiaircraft missiles to Chad; it has also negotiated the use of port facilities and airstrips in Kenya and Somalia. "We are undergoing a second colonialization," protests a Tanzanian academic. "Our present leaders are just like the old tribal chiefs who signed pacts with colonizers for a few beads. Friendship and military pacts are now penciled up in return for guns, aid or cash loans. Africa is up for grabs."
One result of growing foreign influence has been a debilitating loss of confidence among Africans themselves. "What kind of people are we?" asks one African leader. "Are we not forced to admit that our continent lives in absolute poverty?" Such questions underscore a painful truth. "The years of freedom have mounted up, mocking the plausibility of the excuses for failure," British journalist Ian Smiley wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. "Africa is back where it was 50 years ago."
Perhaps no single factor is more frequently blamed for Africa's ills than the legacy of 80 years of colonialism. This year will mark the centenary of the Berlin Conference, at which Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Portugal, among others, agreed to divide Africa into "spheres of influence." Borders were established without regard for traditional tribal boundaries and loyalties, thus setting off fierce antagonisms between rival groups within the same country. Once the domain of powerful kingdoms such as Dagomba in western Africa and Matabele in central Africa, the land was carved up in the intense competition for natural resources and cheap labor.
However irrational, the new boundaries were inherited by African leaders when the Europeans departed. In all but a few instances, African leaders themselves all too willingly reproduced and perpetuated the worst aspects of the mismanagement, greed and elitism bequeathed to them by the colonial powers. Even so, Africans blame their former colonial masters for instilling a taste for Western-style material goods, corruption and the pursuit of power. '
No group has lavished more treasure on grandiose schemes, and has less to show for it, than Africa's leaders and the bloated, inefficient bureaucracies that serve them. Nigeria's Shagari, for instance, began the construction of a new capital city about 300 miles northeast of Lagos, at an estimated cost of $16 billion. Yet hundreds of thousands of Nigerians in the slums of Lagos lacked running water, adequate sewage systems, medical care and educational facilities. President El Hadj Omar Bongo of Gabon, an oil-producing country with a foreign debt of $1 billion, built a $27 million conference center with a facade of imported Italian marble for the 1977 summit meeting of the Organization of African Unity in the capital of Libreville.
Even in the poorest African capitals, such as battle-scarred Ndjamena, Chad, government officials can be seen in convoys of Mercedes-Benz limousines, scattering cyclists and pedestrians as they pass. Owning a Mercedes is so potent an African status symbol that in East Africa a Swahili word was coined to describe the elite that drives them: wabenzi, literally, men of the Mercedes-Benz.
Last year President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire was accused by his former Foreign Minister of embezzling $1 billion in Belgian currency from the state treasury. Western sources estimate Mobutu's personal fortune at nearly $4 billion, most of it in Swiss banks. In 1976, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, not content with being President-for-Life, declared himself Emperor and staged a $20 million ceremony for the occasion. Bokassa crowned himself with a gold-and-diamond diadem that cost $2 million. (Nearly two years later, with covert assistance from France, Bokassa was deposed.)
Osusu ("corruption" in Ashanti) is ubiquitous both in government and in the commercial sectors. Gambian police are currently investigating the mysterious disappearance of about $1 million, apparently caused by a syndicate of bank clerks who systematically defrauded the accounts of illiterate farmers. "The figures are coming at us so fast," said a police officer, "that sometimes we think our investigators are making them up." In 1980, a Gambian bank clerk tried to telex $2 million to an overseas account; he was caught before the money was actually transferred.
As often as not, large amounts of foreign food, cash and equipment never reach their intended destinations. A "transportation operator" in Sierra Leone received more than $2,000 from the government to distribute 150 tons of rice; investigators later discovered that the only vehicle he owned was a Honda motorcycle. During the '70s, badly needed relief supplies for Chadian refugees were routed through Nigeria. But the shipments never made it because the wife of a high government official in Chad demanded huge bribes from the Nigerian drivers.
With hard currency in short supply, black markets are booming. In Marxist Mozambique, drivers of the People's Taxi Service will happily switch off their meters and cruise all day for payment in dollars. No wonder: the black market pays up to 1,000 Mozambican meticais to the dollar, compared with the official exchange rate of 42. "To Africa's sickness, pestilence and disease, add corruption," says Senegal's President Abdou Diouf. "It is endemic to this continent."
Bribes, known variously as dash, chai or bonsella--the traditional palm greasing for services rendered or anticipated--have become a way of life. They now take the form of a carton of razor blades, a case of Scotch or the latest in digital watches. Smugglers make a killing in African marketplaces. Recently police raided a privately owned store along Pugu Road in Dar es Salaam and found a cache of spare vehicle parts large enough to fill the cargo hold of a ship. Says former Tanzanian Police Chief Ken Flood: "Africa has always attracted con men and carpetbaggers. But they were almost always whites from Europe. Now the blacks themselves have learned the game."
African leaders regularly order crackdowns on profiteering and corruption. Declared President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania last year: "[Economic saboteurs] will have their ill-gotten property confiscated and will be given hoes to work on the land for a very long time." Several hundred suspects are now being held in Tanzanian prisons under the country's Preventive Detention Act. Mozambique's President Samora Machel has publicly berated and fired corrupt government officials, as has Zambia's Kaunda. In Zimbabwe, the four-year-old government of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe has ordered stiff new penalties for corruption, including fines of $5,000 and five years' imprisonment.
Still, widespread opportunities for fraud have raised doubts that such measures will have much beneficial effect. Notes the London-based weekly magazine West Africa: "It, is open season for any racketeer with the capital and contacts to acquire sole control of some consumer product." A cartoon in another publication depicts a soldier talking to a village woman. "There is no food," he explains, "because we have shot the black marketeers."
But perhaps the most disturbing trend in Africa's postcolonial experience has been the continuation of tribal conflicts that have bedeviled the best-intentioned efforts at nation building. Kenya's Moi, a member of the minority Kalenjin tribe, calls modern Africa's tribal strife "the cancer that threatens to eat out the very fabric of our nation." From the beginning of the postcolonial period, arbitrary violations of traditional boundaries by European administrators set blacks against blacks. Kenya's 1952 Mau Mau uprising began as a rebellion against British colonial'rule, which had designated fertile highland areas for white settlement. The struggle quickly turned into a civil war between Kikuyu rebels and loyalists. In the ensuing four years, more than 11,000 blacks were killed, most of them Kikuyu. By contrast, only 95 whites died. A little more than a decade later, when it seemed possible that a young Luo labor leader named Tom Mboya could succeed Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, the younger man was assassinated. His killers were widely assumed to be hard-core Kikuyu loyalists.
In all but a handful of African countries, tribal loyalties still predominate, especially in rural areas where nationalist sentiment has not penetrated. Zaire has 200 different tribes speaking some 75 languages, from the Pygmies in the east to the Baluba, Batetela and Bassongo-Meno in the interior. In Burundi, the minority Tutsi tribe had subjugated the majority Hutu (85% of the population) for centuries. During three months in 1972, an estimated 200,000 Hutu were slaughtered after being blamed for an abortive coup. More than a decade earlier, in neighboring Rwanda, the Hutu (89% of the population) had overthrown their Tutsi masters, killing 100,000. The bloodiest war in postcolonial Africa was fought from 1967 to 1970, when the predominantly Ibo region of southeastern Nigeria seceded and formed the independent state of Biafra. The civil war cost at least 1 million lives before Biafra was brought back under Nigeria's control.
Such explosions of tribal violence are often cited as justification for the frequent emergence of one-party states in Africa. The latest example may be Zimbabwe. After a bloody seven-year civil war that ended white rule in what was then Rhodesia, majority Shona tribesmen loyal to
Robert Mugabe and Ndebele fighters led by Joshua Nkomo reached a shaky accord to rule independent Zimbabwe. But not long after Mugabe was elected Prune Minister in 1980, tribal enmity resurfaced. Since then the Shona-dominated army and security police have killed an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Ndebele. Nkomo fled to London last March, although he returned to Zimbabwe in August.
Riven by tribal factionalism since independence, Nigeria established a deliberate policy aimed at breaking down old tribal hostilities. Before the U.S.-style Nigerian constitution was suspended following General Buhari's coup, a presidential candidate needed to win a plurality in national elections and at least 25% of the vote in two-thirds of the country's 19 states. The system was imperfect, but in two free elections Nigerian voters cast their ballots across tribal lines.
Rapid urbanization has hastened the process of detribalization, but this has created an entirely new set of problems. Attracted by the often spurious promise of wealth in Africa's burgeoning cities, hundreds of thousands of Africans have deserted their native villages. In 1950, only three African cities had populations of more than 500,000; now there are 29. Many African sociologists see the phenomenon as a primary cause of social disintegration; young Africans in particular discard tribal values and disciplines for an urban-centered culture of Coca-Cola and transistor radios. For many Africans there is a growing awareness that tribal life was the source of tradition, of social and spiritual values. "In the transitional society in which we live," says Eddah Gachukia, a Kenyan legislator, "there is an urgent need to establish alternative ways and means of reaching our children effectively."
Kenya's urban population, typically, doubled between 1969 and 1979. In August 1982, many Kenyans were jolted into recognition of the new reality when an apparent coup attempt by a handful of air force noncoms and some officers, assisted' by university students, degenerated into a mindless rampage through Nairobi. Youngsters smashed windows and shot up the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, a ready symbol of Western affluence. After taking over the radio station, the rioters were unable to find suitable martial music for the occasion. They ended up broadcasting the lilting strains of Bob Marley's Caribbean reggae.
Surveying a street scene in Nairobi, Trinidadian Author Shiva Naipaul (brother of V.S.) was struck by a sense of unreality among young city dwellers. In his book North of South: An African Journey, Naipaul describes meeting a modishly dressed student who claimed he was studying literature, but declined to name a favorite author. His reason: "I don't care much for reading." Jn another encounter, an aggressive shoeshine boy tried to charge him $6 for "deluxe special" treatment. Wrote Naipaul: "The tribal world was real. The new world, lacking definition and solidity, fades away into the dimmer reaches of fantasy. The greed of my shoeshine boy did not ... recognize any limits. He had lost touch with reality."
Reality may be closer for the approximately 75% of Africans who have remained in smaller towns and villages. But their awareness of their economic plight is sharp. Joshua Kweka, 28, earns $100 a month as a clerk at a small factory that manufactures mosquito-repellent coils in the Tanzanian town of Himo (pop. 5,000), just across the border from Kenya. He shares a room near the factory with his sister, while his wife and child live with relatives on a five-acre farm 6,000 feet up the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. Kweka and his sister usually eat ugali, cooked maize meal, for lunch and dinner. Only rarely can they afford to add tomatoes, which cost $1 per Ib. With stewing beef at $1.50 per Ib., they are lucky if they can afford to eat meat once a week.
For recreation, Kweka listens to his transistor radio, unless the batteries die. Then, he says, "you have to wait until there are batteries in the shop." That can take several months. On weekends he exchanges gossip and talks politics with friends in one of Himo's bars. He drinks locally brewed banana beer rather than factory-produced lager, mainly because at 50-c- a pint it is one-quarter as expensive. Occasionally someone at the bar will produce goods smuggled in from neighboring Kenya and sell them for five times the Kenyan price.
Kweka and his family are the victims of a well-intentioned experiment that has gone awry. Tanzanian President Nyerere was one of the few African leaders who recognized early that agricultural development was the key to economic growth in Africa. In the late '60s and early '70s, he nationalized farms in an effort to boost agricultural productivity. But his socialist approach failed, in part because Tanzanian farmers lacked incentives to cooperate. As a result, production of Tanzania's key export crops (coffee, cotton, tea, pyrethrum and sisal) is 40% lower than it was in 1970. The manufacturing sector, which was also taken over by the state, has fared no better. Mainly because of a lack of foreign exchange to buy raw materials and spare parts, many factories are now operating at less than 20% of capacity. That has sparked a vicious circle of economic decline. Without consumer goods to buy, farmers produce only enough food for themselves, which in turn means even less foreign exchange to keep Tanzanian factories running. Says Venance Chaka, a Himo farmer: "Africans are just like Europeans or Asians. They want to live better, and they don't really care which system provides the better life."
In most other countries, the problem has been outright neglect of agriculture in favor of more glamorous industrial development. As population growth and urbanization have surged out of control, the plight of rural areas has worsened. Often the state pays artificially low prices for farm commodities in order to finance urban-development schemes and to lower prices for people in the cities. One result: the importation of food has tripled in Africa during the past decade. Nigeria, which was once largely self-sufficient, spends $2 billion a year on imported food. In terms of per capita income and the availability of food, the citizens of many sub-Saharan countries are worse off now than they were at independence.
The solution, according to most experts, is to stress the development of agriculture. Elliot Berg, who was coordinator of the African Strategy Review Group for a 1981 World Bank report, argues, "No continent or region or country is going to modernize itself and develop its resources unless it begins with agriculture." The problem, says the World Bank report, is not financing alone. It estimates that aid earmarked for agricultural projects in sub-Saharan Africa totaled some $5 billion between 1973 and 1980. Berg holds Western governments partly responsible for approving expensive and inappropriate projects in the first place.
As the situation has worsened, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have begun to impose stricter conditions on countries receiving aid. These include devaluation of inflated currencies, realistic exchange controls, scaled-back development projects and more efficient administration of loans.
Wila D. Mung'omba, executive president Wila D. Mung'omba, executive president of the Abidjan-based African Development Bank, believes that additional changes are necessary if Africa is to manage an economic recovery successfully. Among them: aid recipients must curb nonessential imports, end policies tailored to deliver cheap food to the cities, and begin giving greater incentives to farmers.
The response thus far has been mixed. Zimbabwe has taken steps to reduce food subsidies from $200 million annually to $58 million. It has raised the price of bread 25% and milk 50%. In addition, the government has raised taxes and devalued the Zimbabwe dollar in order to qualify for $375 million in IMF and World Bank loans to improve railroads and roads. Before General Buhari's coup, Nigeria had hoped to receive a threeyear, $2 billion IMF loan. But like the Shagari government, the new military rulers are uncertain whether to abide by IMF preconditions and devalue the naira. So far, Tanzania has staunchly refused to observe the strict guidelines of the international lending institutions. Scoffs President Nyerere: "The IMF is a device by which powerful countries increase their power over poor nations."
Much of black Africa has no choice but to depend on foreign aid to pull out of its current economic difficulties. After decades of independence, many African leaders, once seduced by the promises of doctrinaire socialism, have accepted the advantages of private initiative and the free-market system.
Though the Organization of African Unity is torn by internal dissension, joint economic efforts on the continent are under way. Kenya, Uganda and
Tanzania are attempting to revive cooperative agreements on trade, customs and transportation that collapsed when Kenya pulled out of the East African Community in 1977. Says U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker: "There are signs on the economic front of agonizing reappraisal. There is a climate of realism that wasn't there five years ago."
The new willingness of Africa's leaders to confront their parlous economic circumstances has eroded the appeal of Soviet Marxism. Except in Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique, Moscow's attempts to play on the anticolonialist sentiments of Africans have foundered. For one thing, Africans have discovered that education, customs and trade still tie them more closely to Western Europe. They have also observed that experiments in Marxist socialism have largely been unsuccessful. One of the best examples is resource-rich Ghana, where the four-year-old government of Flight Lieut. Jerry Rawlings, 36, now faces an economy teetering on the brink of collapse. The Soviets have demonstrated skill at selling arms to poor African nations, often for hard currency, but they have even been less generous than the West with their economic aid. Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov has made it plain that the Soviet economy cannot afford to give substantial assistance to Third World countries. Most African nations have taken notice.
Some Western experts acknowledge that they have contributed to African woes by failing to address the specific problems of individual countries. That too is changing. Says a British diplomat: "Situations vary from country to country and call for the development of Western relations with Africa on a bilateral basis." For its part, the U.S. accounts for 10% to 15% of total bilateral aid to Africa for security, economic development and humanitarian purposes. "We're going to see some difficult times ahead," says Crocker. "We should try to help those who are doing the most to help themselves, to create some success stories."
Still, a panoply of difficulties will have to be faced and overcome. Many African countries do not tolerate a free press. Indeed, they favor the adoption of UNESCO-proposed guidelines that Western critics claim will submit reporters to greater regulation. Many African countries lack independent judiciaries, or blatantly disregard the ones they have. Authorities in Zimbabwe, for example, recently ignored a high-court decision to acquit six white air force officers who had been accused of sabotage. The officers have since been released, but the episode caused an outcry in the West.
Indeed, the Reagan Administration has sliced its aid to Zimbabwe from $75 million to $40 million, partly out of concern about Mugabe's increasingly undemocratic and anti-Western policies.
Some experts contend that the proliferation of authoritarian governments in Africa represents a stage in the political development of what are still very young nations. "We have to recognize that the constitutions we bequeathed to our former African colonies don't work in some places," says a British official. "It is not a mortal sin for these countries to adapt them to their own particular circumstances.
When one looks at the reality, it is remarkable that Africa is as stable as it is."
According to Wole Soyinka, a well-known Nigerian playwright and essayist, Americans and Europeans should not measure democracy in Africa by their own standards.
"When Westerners speak of a democracy," he says, "they think of specific structures: a legislature or parliament, elections conducted by secret ballot, certain formalities of debate -- in short, the rituals that were bequeathed to the ex-colonies in the hope they would remain house-trained." Soyinka argues that "the veneer of democracy" bestowed by the former colonial powers "has badly peeled." Its worst manifestation, in his view: the one-party states that have too often become en trenched civilian dictatorships.
Many thoughtful Africans believe that, given time, some sort of home-grown democratic system will take root, although few are able to describe what form it will take. In Africa, as everywhere, economic growth requires a stable political environment.
The evidence so far suggests that countries such as the Ivory Coast, Botswana, Senegal, Cameroon and Kenya have achieved political stability through a mixed economy, a strong, pragmatic central government, and evolving democratic institutions, however imperfect.
A quarter-century after Uhuru!, African leaders must recognize that anticolonial rhetoric may win votes, ,but it will not solve problems. However they may feel about the colonial era, it cannot be expunged from history. The positive legacies of the past must be emphasized, while new ideas are tested to deal with the problems of the present and future. A high priority will be to chip away at divisive tribal enmities. Finally, Africans must accept the essential requirement of political stability: the orderly, peaceful transfer of power in the best interest of the governed. Without that resolve, nationhood in Africa will too often be, as it has been in the past, a sad parody of itself. --By Russ Hoyle. Reported by John Borrell/ Senegal, Marsh Clark/Kenya and Peter Hawthorne/Mozambique
With reporting by John Borrell/Senegal, Marsh Clark/Kenya and Peter Hawthorne/Mozambique