ALSO BY WANGARI MAATHAI
Unbowed: A Memoir
The Green Belt Movement:
Sharing the Approach and the Experience
TO ALL THE PEOPLES OF AFRICA
Contents
Introduction: On the Wrong Bus
One The Farmer of Yaoundé
Two A Legacy of Woes
Three Pillars of Good Governance: The Three-Legged Stool
Four Aid and the Dependency Syndrome
Five Deficits: Indebtedness and Unfair Trade
Six Leadership
Seven Moving the Social Machine
Eight Culture: The Missing Link?
Nine The Crisis of National Identity
Ten Embracing the Micro-nations
Eleven Land Ownership: Whose Land Is It, Anyway?
Twelve Environment and Development
Thirteen Saving the Congo Forests
Fourteen The African Family
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
ON THE WRONG BUS
FOR THIRTY YEARS, I have worked in the trenches with others to find ways to break the wall that separates the peoples of Africa from justice, wealth, peace, and respect. We have searched for a route out of poverty, ignorance, ill health and early death, violations of basic rights, corruption, environmental degradation, and many other problems associated with Africa. I have done this work through the Green Belt Movement, helping communities plant trees, and so improve their livelihoods, protect their environment, and, in the process, increase their commitment and persistence. It is these experiences at the grassroots level, coupled with my service in the Kenyan government and participation in numerous international efforts to assist Africa and protect the environment, that have shaped my worldview and inform the approaches, examples, analyses, and solutions that I offer in this book.
In the three decades since the Green Belt Movement began its work, some Africans have left the trenches to pursue their own interests and ambitions; others have become disappointed and tired. Some are languishing in their homes or jails; others are homeless or in refugee camps. Some are hoping for leadership to deliver them; others are waiting until it is clear to them that they must save themselves by, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, being the change they wish to see in the world.
Yet as I seek to show, the challenges before Africa not only stem from national and international policies (although these play an important part in determining Africa's future, as they have its past), but are also moral, spiritual, cultural, and even psychological in nature. As I also illustrate, the condition of Africa is bound to that of the world. We all share one planet and are one humanity; there is no escaping this reality.
I have written The Challenge for Africa for all those with an interest in the fate of the African continent, from the general reader to advocates, researchers, development specialists, and government officials, including heads of state. In its pages I hope to explain, elucidate, engage, and, perhaps most important, encourage all concerned to grapple with the challenges facing Africa today.
The Challenge for Africa is divided into five sections: the contemporary face and cultural and historical background of the challenges (chapters 1-2); the economic, political, and international context and dimension of these challenges (chapters 3-5); the challenge of leadership and good governance at the top of society and at the grassroots (chapters 6-7); the complex and problematic relationship of ethnic identity to the nation-state in modern Africa (chapters 8-10); and the centrality of the environment to Africa's development challenges and solutions to them (chapters 11-13), followed by a final chapter on the challenges before individual Africans, at home and abroad.
In chapter 1, I reflect on a woman I saw in Yaoundé, Cameroon, whose subsistence farming techniques were causing soil erosion and water loss. Subsistence farming is how a large majority of Africans make a living, and I consider how the challenges facing that one farmer are, in many ways, a microcosm of the myriad challenges facing the African farmer in particular, and Africa in general.
In chapter 2, I uncover some of the challenging legacies facing Africa, including colonialism. My aim is to show that while colonialism was devastating for Africa, it has become a convenient scapegoat for conflicts, warlordism, corruption, poverty, dependency, and mismanagement in the region. Africa cannot continue to blame her failed institutions, collapsed infrastructure, unemployment, drug abuse, and refugee crises on colonialism; but neither can these issues be understood fully without acknowledging the fact of Africa's past.
In chapter 3, I offer what I believe is a useful metaphor to describe a functioning society and contrast it with the history of Africa after the Cold War.
In chapters 4 and 5 I look at how aid, trade, and debt foster an imbalance in the relationship between Africa and the industrialized world, while in chapter 6 I discuss the deficit of leadership that exists in Africa and what can be done to change it. My concern in chapters 4 and 5 is not simply to criticize the international community for unfair trade practices and the heavy debt burden under which Africans still labor; it is to challenge all Africans to escape the culture of dependency that leads to passivity, fatalism, and failure. Likewise, my aim in chapter 6 is not to shame or blame, but to challenge all of African society, especially its leadership, to break free of the corruption and selfishness that exists, from high offices to the grassroots. Every African, from the head of state to the subsistence farmer, needs to embrace cultures of honesty, hard work, fairness, and justice, as well as the riches—cultural, spiritual, and material—of their continent.
In chapters 7 and 8, I describe in more detail the loss of culture I touch on in chapter 2: the lack of respect for some of the cultures in Africa, and the consequent devastating loss of self-confidence in many ethnic groups—what I call “micro-nations”—throughout the continent. As I investigate in more detail in chapter 8, my personal recognition of the importance of culture led me to create the Civic and Environmental Education seminars as part of the Green Belt Movement's work. Through the seminars, I developed a concept that I call “The Wrong Bus Syndrome.” Like travelers who have boarded the wrong bus, many people and communities are heading in the wrong direction or traveling on the wrong path, while allowing others (often their leaders) to lead them further from their desired destination. It is my analysis that much of Africa today is on the wrong bus.
Chapters 9 and 10 delve more deeply into the challenges of the African nation-state, or what I term the “macro-nation.” For decades, Africans have belittled or ignored the fundamental cultural and psychological importance of micro-national identity, instead using ethnicity for political gain. I call for Africans to rediscover and embrace their linguistic, cultural, and ethnic diversity, not only so their nation-states can move forward politically and economically, but so that they may heal a psyche wounded by denial of who they really are.
Just as cultural diversity is essential for healthy human societies, so, too, is biological diversity. In chapters 11, 12, and 13 I argue for the centrality of the environment in all discussions of, and approaches to, addressing the challenges Africa faces. I look at the issues of land, agriculture, and conservation, particularly of forests. I then explore the enormous task, and necessity, of preserving central Africa's Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem.
Finally, in chapter 14, I reflect on the challenges facing the African family—both in the continent and in the diaspora. I urge Africans to support each other in their efforts to forge their own ways forward, and to believe that they can.
As I write, the world is in a financial crisis, caused in part by lack of oversight and deregulation in the industrialized world. The poor have long experi
enced the fallout of such greed and selfishness. For decades, Africa has been urged to emulate this financial system and practices acquired from the industrialized world. While this structure has enriched the West, practicing it without caution has only impoverished Africa. The current crisis offers Africa a useful lesson and its greatest challenge: nobody knows the solution to every problem; rather than blindly following the prescriptions of others, Africans need to think and act for themselves, and learn from their mistakes.
THE FARMER OF YAOUNDÉ
THE CHALLENGES Africa faces today are real and vast. Just as I began work on this book, my own country of Kenya was plunged into a pointless and violent postelection political conflict and humanitarian crisis that claimed more than a thousand lives and left hundreds of thousands homeless. As I write, internecine fighting still wracks the Darfur region of Sudan, Chad, southern Somalia, the Niger Delta, and eastern Congo. Zimbabwe's most recent election was marred by violence and a failure to tally the vote properly and reach a negotiated political settlement. Meanwhile, a series of violent attacks in South Africa against immigrants from other African countries left more than forty dead and forced tens of thousands to flee from their homes.1 South Africa, a political and economic beacon in the region, appeared in peril of facing the conflicts many other African nations have experienced.
Drought and floods affect many countries in both western and eastern Africa. Natural resources are still being coveted and extracted by powers outside the region with little regard for the long-term health of the environment or poverty reduction; desertification and deforestation, through logging and slash-and-burn agriculture, are decimating species, water supplies, grazing grounds, and farmland, and contributing to recurring food emergencies. Shifting rainfall patterns, partly as a result of global climate change, directly threaten the livelihoods of the majority of Africans who still rely on the land for their basic needs. At the same time, sub-Saharan African countries are falling short of the benchmarks for health, education, gender equality, and environmental sustainability, which are among the eight Millennium Development Goals agreed on by the United Nations in 2000.
Although poverty rates in Africa have declined over the past decade, they remain stubbornly high.2 HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis—all preventable diseases—still take too many lives. In sub-Saharan Africa, one in six children dies before his fifth birthday, comprising fully half of the world's child deaths.3 Conflicts ravage too many communities as rival groups vie for political and economic power. And the importance of Africans' cultural heritage to their own sense of themselves still isn't sufficiently recognized.
Nevertheless, in the half century since most African countries achieved independence and in the nearly two decades since the end of the Cold War, the continent has moved forward in some critical areas of governance and economic development. More African countries have democratic forms of governance, and more Africans are being educated. Debt relief has been granted to a number of African states, and international trade policies are now subject to greater scrutiny to assess their fairness, or lack of it. South Africa has made a successful, and peaceful, transition to full democracy from the time of apartheid. In 2002, Kenya held its first genuinely representative elections in a generation. Decades-long civil wars in Angola and Mozambique have ended. Liberia has emerged from a devastating series of internal and regional conflicts. In 2005, it elected to the presidency Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman to head a modern African state, and the process of reconciliation and reconstruction is under way. Rwanda, a decade and a half after the 1994 genocide, has a growing economy, and Rwandan women constitute almost half of its parliament, the highest percentage in the world.4
After decades of dictatorship, instability, and extreme poverty, and a conflict that has claimed upward of five million lives, in 2006 the Democratic Republic of the Congo held elections overseen by the United Nations that were judged largely free and fair. A fragile peace holds between northern and southern Sudan, and efforts continue to bring an end to the civil war in northern Uganda. Since the early years of this century, a number of African economies have grown at more than 5 percent a year (and some at twice this rate), and African civil society—nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, civic associations, community-based groups, and ordinary citizens—is becoming bolder in speaking out in support of human rights and good governance. These are real achievements, and they belie the idea that Africans cannot take charge of their own affairs.
Of course, throughout the continent there are instances where forward motion and stasis are occurring simultaneously: efforts to battle corruption have been waged, but often incompletely; principled and visionary leaders are still too few in number; and while the world increasingly recognizes that Africa will be hit hard by climate change, the transfer of “green” technology from industrialized nations to the continent is slow, and forests in Africa continue to shrink.
MOVING BEYOND SUBSISTENCE
One morning in early September 2007, I stepped through the front door of my hotel in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. I was there because the ten governments of Central Africa had appointed me the Goodwill Ambassador for the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem in 2005, and I had come to familiarize myself with the secretariat of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP) and the Commission for the Forests of Central Africa (COMIFAC), headquartered in Yaoundé, and to meet the governments' ministers responsible for the economy and management of the forests.
Yaoundé is a metropolis whose 1.4 million people live among seven hills between the Nyong and Sanaga rivers in the south-central part of the country. The hotel was beautiful, modern, and clean; its location was similarly attractive, perched on one of those hills overlooking the city, with a view of Mount Cameroon, West Africa's tallest peak.
As I stood outside, I happened to look across from the hotel and saw a group of farmers on one of the hills, which was covered in thick vegetation except where the few men and women were working. It looked like they had planted a few banana and what appeared to be cassava trees, and were preparing the ground for more crops. As a light rain fell, I noticed that the farmers were making small depressions in the soil and then molding it into rows that were parallel to the gradient of the hill. I thought to myself, Those people should not be working on such a steep slope, because they are very quickly going to lose all that soil when it rains. Anxiously, I turned to ask the guards at the gate of my hotel why one of these farmers—a woman on whom my eyes had settled—was cutting the furrows downward, instead of against the gradient. “That way, when the rains come the water will run along the furrow and not disturb the crops,” one of the young men replied, without hesitating.
Seeing the women and men on the hillside in Yaoundé didn't surprise me. Such a sight is not uncommon in many other cities and towns throughout the vast African continent. Whether it is in the middle of a big city like Yaoundé, Johannesburg, Dar es Salaam, or Nairobi, or in the countryside, the story is the same: slash and burn, plant, harvest once or twice, and move on to new land to repeat the same unsustainable process.
What amazed me, though, was the guard's response, al though it could have come from any African in any country south of the Sahara. Yet this method of farming directly contradicted every principle of soil and species conservation I knew. Instead of making furrows across the gradient of the hill so the rainwater would pool in the small depressions and sink into the ground, where it would replenish belowground reservoirs, this farmer was doing just the opposite. She was guaranteeing that the soil, one of her most precious natural resources and one she'd so carefully formed and so desperately needed to make her crops grow, would be swept down the hillside when the rains fell—in the very furrows she had just dug! Not only was the woman making it easier for what she had planted to be washed away; she was also creating the perfect environment for the erosion of precious topsoil and loss of rainwater, making it less likely that anything would grow on the hillside in the future. And the hotel g
uards had no idea of the damage she was doing; they assumed that this was how farming was done. The tragedy is they are not alone.
I was struck by the irony of the situation. I was in Cameroon, a guest of the state, sleeping in a luxurious hotel and waiting for a car to take me to meetings to discuss how to safeguard the Congo Basin forests—an ecosystem of seven hundred thousand square miles in Central Africa. It is the second-largest intact expanse of forest in the world, after the Amazon rainforest, and is often referred to as the world's “second lung.” I would be visiting government ministers, international donors, and officials of COMIFAC. All of us are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that the forests are sustainably managed for the benefit of everyone, including those subsistence farmers on the hill.
Whatever the outcome of our discussions, I knew one essential fact: no matter what else we were doing, unless those of us assembled at the COMIFAC headquarters could work with that farmer—multiplied by several million in Cameroon, and several million more in the ten countries of the Congo Basin region and, indeed, throughout Africa—not only would we not save the Congo forests, but we might also be unable to halt the rapid desertification under way across the continent.
Of course, the farmers I observed, and others like them, aren't the primary threats to the Congo Basin forests. Mining and timber concessions that feed the seemingly insatiable global demand for raw materials, as well as residual conflict and ongoing illegal logging in the eastern part of the region, are more directly destructive. But once the timber trucks and mining companies have literally made their inroads into the forests and cleared the trees, it is people such as these farmers who follow. They carve out small plots and cut the remaining vegetation for charcoal or small-scale subsistence agriculture, engage in poaching and the trade in bush meat, and complete the destruction.
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