The Challenge for Africa

by Wangari Maathai

  Undoubtedly, the cultures that existed in the past had problems: an overdependence on an elite who determined what was acceptable and what wasn't; and an attitude that assigned every setback to God's will. Some of what occurred, and continues to this day, was and is cruel and ignorant. As we've seen in recent years in Kenya, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, and other countries, Africans are still maiming and killing each other in senseless conflicts, as well as forcing vast numbers of people from their homes to live in misery in unsanitary and overcrowded encampments.

  However, there is nothing particularly African about human beings preying upon one another, or people attacking each other because of their religious affiliation or ethnic or racial background, or women being discriminated against. Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that because the precolonial societies were mostly intact and had a robust cultural life, the African cultures that were demonized by the colonizers and the missionaries had some sense of kwimenya that allowed them to survive the vicissitudes of the weather, the occasional wars between other groups, and cultural upheavals. Kwimenya would have enabled them to open up to the progressive ideas of human rights and self-determination without the jettisoning of everything their culture valued. And, surely, one attribute these societies possessed was a recognition that there was no one else to whom they could turn to solve the problems that affected them—no international donors or agencies, no government beyond their own immediate council, no big brother to look after them—apart from the resources found within their own culture. Consequently, they were forced to embrace their challenges and seek solutions for themselves.

  One resource for precolonial Africans that is sorely missed is the traditional healer or medicine man or woman, which in Western terms would be defined, at least in part, as a psychiatrist. Both provide a similar service, in that they attempt to plumb the psyche in ways that cannot ordinarily be reached by either surgery or drugs. They possess a natural ability to listen and empathize, and are skilled in responding to emotional trauma and suffering. As repositories of the wisdom gathered over generations, traditional healers served an important function in indigenous societies. If the colonial administrators had not demonized them—as they had their own traditional healers—they might have been introduced to reading and writing and thus been able to share, in written form, their knowledge as it evolved with the times.

  Today, genuine medicine men and women could play an important role in helping contemporary Africans understand the problems they face as they straddle modernity and tradition, the West and their native cultures, and as they try to meet the challenges of determining their identity in relation to other communities. But, because Africa has few psychologists in the Western sense, the choices for Africans are stark: they are either mentally sound or in a mental hospital. Of course, people can seek counsel from their priests or imams, but because it is generally still believed in Africa that one cannot be either a good Christian or a good Muslim while being open to traditional healing, the individual's turmoil may not be fully acknowledged or addressed. It will take many years for African authorities to accept the presence of traditional healers again, just as it has taken many years for them to concede that traditional mid-wives can fill certain gaps in the nursing profession, so that all women are provided with basic hygiene and assistance when they give birth.

  It is within this context that reports, for instance, of older women in Kenya being burned alive because they have been accused of practicing witchcraft, or of children in Angola and Congo who have been cast onto the streets because their families believed them to be possessed by the devil, should be interpreted. This persecution expresses a dichotomy common to many Africans caught between tradition and modernity.

  Behind these phenomena lies a trauma sadly familiar to many of the world's poor. As in other regions, many African societies are in tumult, only just emerging from years of civil war and with economies, communities, and families fractured or decimated. When calamities follow one upon the other—disease, war, poverty, or famine—it is not surprising that the reactions can become outsized and extreme. In such circumstances, a desperate people may turn on their own, hoping they will have one fewer mouth to feed by demonizing a family member, or ridding themselves of what they perceive to be a “cursed” existence.

  As I have suggested, the transition Africans underwent from indigenous practices and worldviews to imposed spiritual and cultural systems from elsewhere was rapid, and in many cases incomplete. Consequently, while many Africans want to say they don't believe in the traditional way of life, their understanding of, say, the Christian doctrine of suffering and redemption is often nonexistent or only skin deep. For many Africans, Christianity is as full of devils and good and bad angels as their “old” religions were. They believe they can hear and communicate with God, speak in tongues, and prophesy. These facets of religious expression remind them of the supernatural elements in their own traditions. As I see it, in both cases people are torn between belief systems they don't fully understand.

  As Pope John Paul II also recognized, cultures are dynamic, changing with time and place, interacting with other cultures and evolving and adapting: people should not have to become walking museums. Progressive cultures help their peoples survive and pass their wisdom and a sense of destiny to the next generation. African cultures, of course, cannot return to where they were. Too much has been lost, and reverting to a pre-colonial mind-set—even if it were possible—would not serve contemporary African peoples well as they struggle to move forward. What Africans need to do, as much as they can, is recapture a feeling for their pasts that is not solely filtered through the prism of the colonialists. This will not be easy, because five hundred years is a long time to struggle against all forms of oppression. Nonetheless, just as Africans can honor sacredness beyond that contained in the Bible or the Koran, so they should not be embarrassed that, for instance, their languages were not written down or that their weapons against the colonial forces were spears. Even the British, who perfected stainless steel and the Gatling gun, once discovered themselves faced with an enemy—in this case, the Romans—who possessed greater technological skills and superior weaponry, and whose cultural achievements dominated their own.

  Traditional technology and artifacts reflect the creativity inherent in those societies. When that sense of creative potential is lost, the innovative part of the brain is left dormant, making it more difficult to think in new or pioneering ways. The latent creativity lacks a medium for expression. This is why Africans should honor and record, in written form for current and future generations, the fact that their communities once knew how to make spears, and take the ingenuity and skill employed in forging these weapons and apply them to developing products that are more relevant to today's needs.

  Culture could be the missing link to creativity, productivity, and confidence. Ultimately, it is critical that Africans dispense with what might be called the culture of forgetting that has enveloped Africa since colonialism and re-collect their history and culture, and the kwimenya that comes from both. Without them, Africans lack a foundation on which to build for the future.

  THE CRISIS OF

  NATIONAL IDENTITY

  THE MODERN African state is a superficial creation: a loose collection of ethnic communities or micro-nations, brought together in a single entity, or macro-nation, by the colonial powers. Some countries include hundreds of micro-nations within their borders; others, only a few. Kenya has forty-two; Nigeria, two hundred and fifty; Cameroon, at least two hundred; Mozambique, more than ten; Gabon, more than forty; Zimbabwe, fewer than ten; and Burundi and Rwanda, three. The largest of the micro-nations can have populations in the millions; the smallest usually number only in the thousands. With a few exceptions, it is these numbers that determine political power.

  Most Africans didn't understand or relate to the nation-states created for them by the colonial powers; they understood, related to, and remained
attached to the physical and psychological boundaries of their micro-nations. Consequently, even today, for many African peoples, a threat to their micro-nation or those they consider their leaders within their micro-nation carries more weight than a threat to the nation-state. At the same time, each community hopes to have access to the resources of the nation-state should someone from their micro-nation assume political power (particularly the post of president or prime minister). In this way, the community will have, as is said in Kenya, its “time to eat.”

  In turn, the elites know that to acquire and maintain power they need the support of their micro-nation and therefore must demonstrate loyalty to it. The result has been a kind of political schizophrenia. While expressing allegiance to the nation-state, African leaders have repeatedly used their identification with a micro-nation to divide their citizens from each other and control them, to the detriment of the larger macro-nation. They have downplayed the role of micro-nations' traditional cultures in a modern society, even as they have used ethnicity to maintain their hold on power. In doing so, they have mirrored the colonial era's tactics of divide and rule with disastrous effects. Consequently, what the leaders and some politicians in the rest of the world call “tribal conflicts” have almost nothing at their root to do with “tribes.”

  (It is general practice in discussing micro-nations in developing countries to refer to them as “tribes,” although this is not the case in developed regions of the world when ethnic communities are being described. In my view, the word “tribe” is not really a pejorative, but it has taken on negative connotations. “Tribes” are generally seen as primitive or backward, comprised of people who have not completely realized the concept of the nation. The use of the word “tribe” becomes a way of looking down on some communities, pushing them to the margins rather than seeing them as part of a larger whole. In the Yugoslav wars, by contrast, the term “tribe” was never used to describe the ethnic factions. Micro-nations may be very small, but they have all the characteristics that define nationhood, notably shared common customs, physical boundaries, origins, history, and language. Calling micro-nations “tribes” suggests, falsely, that they have not yet arrived at nationhood.)

  When conflicts arise in Africa, they are almost exclusively over governance, corruption, poverty, and a perception that national resources are not distributed equitably. It is true, of course, that when a micro-nation is aggrieved, it naturally calls upon its own for support. This is probably no different from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, when Serb leaders rallied Serbs, and Albanian, Croat, and Bosnian leaders did the same with their ethnic groups. For those who share the same ethnic heritage but need to differentiate themselves even further, there are smaller groupings, like clans, as in the case of Somalia.

  Some scholars of modern Africa have suggested that keeping the ordinary people focused on the interests of their micro-nation, and fomenting suspicion and competition between them, prevents them from perceiving the stark class and wealth divides that characterize African societies, with a small elite at the top and large numbers of poor at the bottom. This reality is obscured from the people to the advantage of political leaders who incite hatred and violence between micro-nations and facilitate the violence through armaments and logistical support. Even if the conflicts temporarily give the members of the micro-nations some sense of power, in the long run they are marginalized, experiencing neither progress in development nor self-knowledge, as their leaders and their cronies bleed their nation dry.

  What tends to happen is that one micro-nation judges itself worthier and therefore more entitled to power and the wealth that goes with it, and claims that the other micro-nations are less entitled to both. The colonial authorities are responsible for some of these self-perceptions by favoring one group over the other and, when they left, putting power in the preferred group's hands. In much of independent Africa, the leaders of micro-nations, who often form a ruling clique, are constantly competing for power and privileges. If they are not included in the sharing of these, conflicts can easily develop when they mobilize their often poorly informed communities in the name of their micro-nation and become, in effect, warlords. The mass media, both nationally and internationally, however, usually report such conflicts in Africa as arising from ancient tribal animosities. Such misconceptions and misrepresentations obscure the real source of the violence.

  Two examples that perhaps encapsulate the challenge of the micro-nation within the nation-state, the complex relationship between micro-nations and their leaders, and the possibility of African solutions to African problems, are the ongoing conflicts in Chad and Sudan and what occurred in Kenya in the run-up to, and immediately after, the 2007 general elections.

  THE CASE OF CHAD AND SUDAN

  In August 2008, I traveled to Ethiopia, Sudan, and Chad as part of a delegation organized under the auspices of the Nobel Women's Initiative, which I and five other women Nobel peace laureates founded in 2006. Our mission was fivefold: to highlight and bring further awareness to the massive violations of women's human rights, especially with respect to displacement, rape, and destruction of homes; to reinforce efforts to bring about participatory governance in Sudan; to give encouragement to women's groups working for peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction in southern Sudan; to stand in solidarity with all those working at the front lines to bring about peace with justice in Sudan and the region; and to call upon citizens throughout the world to take individual and collective action to build a sustainable peace and to insist that the international community implement existing commitments to peace and justice in Sudan.

  The delegation included 1997 U.S. Nobel peace laureate Jody Williams and the American actress and activist Mia Farrow, both of whom have been diligent in trying to bring the situation in Darfur and Chad to the world's attention; Gloria White-Hammond, an American pastor and cofounder of an NGO, My Sister's Keeper, which is supporting girls' education initiatives in southern Sudan; Qing Zhang, a Chinese labor advocate; and a small group of other colleagues.

  During the mission we met with government officials; the staffs of international relief and development organizations working on the ground in Sudan and Chad, including the office of the UN high commissioner for refugees and the World Food Programme, the staff of which are doing a heroic job in refugee camps under extremely harsh conditions with limited resources (including food) and at considerable risk to their own safety; local women's groups in Juba, southern Sudan; and refugees from Darfur, living in camps in Chad—some of them for years.

  In Ethiopia, it was clear that senior leadership in the African Union was troubled by the political and humanitarian situation in Darfur, as well as the International Criminal Court's 2008 indictment for war crimes of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir. AU officials were concerned that the ICC was applying indictments only in Africa, because of the perceived weakness and vulnerability of its leadership. At the same time, an impasse had been reached over the composition of a larger, better-equipped, and more effective peacekeeping force for Darfur.

  The African leadership wanted the force to be fully African in character, while the international community insisted that, if it offered logistical support, equipment had to be accompanied by personnel who could operate and maintain it. The standoff had left the force on the ground in Darfur ill-equipped and vulnerable to attack by armed militias. Civilians have suffered further, as villages and even camps for displaced people continue to be invaded by the Janjaweed, the militia on horseback, increasing the number of Darfurian refugees.

  Here again, Africa faces a challenge in leadership. The ICC is not a “kangaroo court,” so if President al-Bashir does not have anything to hide, he should not fear it. Even though the African leadership cannot itself provide the necessary logistical support, the AU is demanding that the peacekeeping force be 100 percent African. This could be interpreted to mean that the leadership in Khartoum does not wish to have the conflict in Darfur resolved, except on its own te
rms. Unfortunately, in all of this, the plight of the citizens in Darfur is seemingly ignored.

  The Sudanese government has the primary responsibility to protect all of its peoples, including those in the Darfur region. If the government fails to do so, then the responsibility falls to the African leadership in general, through the AU. However, when such leadership falters or fails, the international community has a moral responsibility to assist Sudan and Africa to save lives. In recognition of such situations in Africa and elsewhere, in 2005 the United Nations General Assembly unanimously agreed that when governments anywhere in the world do not protect their own peoples from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or ethnic cleansing, then other nation-states have a responsibility to provide this protection. Unfortunately, the actions to make the words real have been insufficient, and a culture of impunity persists.

  While some of the political and social problems in Sudan, Chad, and Africa in general are the legacies of colonialism—arbitrary borders or the favoring of one micro-nation, which then has access to more resources at the expense of other communities—after more than forty years of independence, none of these excuses justify poor governance or leaders committing crimes against their own people. It is inexcusable for African leadership to fail to protect its own citizens and then complain or respond defensively when these citizens seek help or redress elsewhere.

  Military power will not resolve the crisis in Sudan, any more than it has in Somalia or elsewhere in Africa—especially if all parties continue to invest in arms, soldiers, and militias. Only dialogue and a willingness to share power and resources more equitably can produce lasting peace and the opportunity to utilize those resources (specifically oil, land, and water) for the benefit of all of Sudan's micro-nations.