The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

  Long after slavery was abolished, most of Africa remained subject to European colonial rule. Since most African countries were still colonies until the 1960s or 70s, it is easy to find colonial roots for modern problems. If the rulers of Congo today treat their subjects as a leopard treats a herd of impala, one can argue that they learned the habit from the Belgians. If the rulers of Sudan and Burundi manipulate ethnic grievances to stay in power, they probably learned that from their former colonial masters, too.

  The colonists left deep scars. But they also left behind some helpful things, such as roads, clinics, and laws. If colonialism was what held Africa back, you would expect the continent to have boomed when the settlers left. It didn’t.

  Perhaps, then, the problem is that the legacy of colonialism remained, even after the colonists had gone. Up to a point, this is true. Africa’s borders are still a source of trouble. Arbitrarily penciled onto inaccurate maps when European powers carved up the continent in the nineteenth century, today’s national boundaries split tribes in half and lump mutually hostile ethnic groups together. This often causes tension and sometimes bloodshed. But African countries have themselves determined not to tamper with the colonial borders, for fear that this might spark new conflicts rather than end old ones.

  Some Africans argue that their continent has been crippled by what Steve Biko, a South African revolutionary, called a “colonization of the mind.” White rulers thought their black subjects inferior. The fact that the more technologically advanced European powers conquered most of Africa with relative ease doubtless led some Africans to wonder whether this might be true. Even today, some argue, Africans’ lack of confidence prevents them from fulfilling their potential. There may be something in this, but over 70 percent of Africans alive today were born after independence.4 And examples from other countries suggest that unpleasant colonial experiences need not doom a country to eternal penury.

  Korea, for example, was annexed by Japan in 1910 and freed only when America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While they ruled Korea, the Japanese colonists tried to destroy the local culture and to cow the population into servitude. They banned the Korean language, barred Koreans from universities, and systematically desecrated the country’s most sacred hilltop shrines. They shipped young Korean men to Japan to provide forced labor in mines and munitions factories or conscripted them to serve in the Imperial army. They drafted more than 100,000 Korean women, some as young as twelve, to serve as sex slaves in military brothels. And the ordeal did not end with liberation. Soon after the colonists left, Korea was plunged into a civil war that cost a million lives and split the country in two.5

  With such a traumatic history, Korea would have every excuse for failure. But the southern, capitalist part, which was as poor as Ghana in 1953, is now twenty times richer. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore – all ex-colonies – are all now affluent and peaceful. So are Ireland, Australia, and Massachusetts. Africa’s colonial legacy, though influential, cannot explain all that is awry today.

  Another problem with blaming the legacy of colonialism for Africa’s current woes is that it gives little clue as to how these woes could be ended. History, like geography, cannot be changed. Grieving for past wrongs is natural and human, but it can also provide an excuse for despair. If today’s problems are the fault of the West, the obvious thing to do is to demand that the West should solve them. The trouble with this approach is twofold. First, today’s Westerners do not feel particularly guilty about the sins of dead people who happened to come from the same country. Second, efforts by rich countries to solve Africa’s problems have, over the last few decades, been spectacularly unsuccessful.

  Put differently, countries that prosper tend to do so by their own efforts. Outsiders can help, but only on the margins. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president, has predicted an “African renaissance” but says that this renaissance will only succeed “if its aims and objectives are defined by the Africans themselves, if its programmes are designed by ourselves and if we take responsibility for the success or failure of our policies.”6

  Countries grow wealthy in much the same way that individuals do: by making things that other people want to buy or by providing services that others will pay for. There are exceptions. Just as some individuals inherit wealth, so some countries are rich simply because they have a lot of oil and not many citizens. But by and large the route to prosperity is through thrift, hard work, and finding out what other people want in order to sell it to them.

  Britain first grew rich, in the nineteenth century, by using newly invented industrial techniques to produce cheaper and better textiles, steel, railways, and other goods, which both locals and foreigners were keen to buy. Japan grew rich in the twentieth century by adopting and improving manufacturing techniques invented elsewhere, in order to make better and cheaper cars, semiconductors, and fax machines. America is the world’s richest country today because so many people crave American movies, medicines, airplanes, and banking services. Africa, by contrast, hardly produces anything that the rest of the world wants to buy. With a tenth of the world’s population, Africa’s share of world trade is a miserable 2 percent. The continent exports minerals, such as oil and copper, and crops, such as cocoa, coffee, and tobacco. But few African countries turn their minerals into manufactured goods, and hardly anyone buys African software or insurance. To understand why Africa is so poor, we must first ask why Africa is so unproductive.

  The great African novelist, Chinua Achebe, said of his homeland: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”7

  Substitute “Africa” for “Nigeria” and this is a pretty good summary of what holds the continent back. Since independence, Africa’s governments have failed their people. Few allow ordinary citizens the freedom to seek their own fortunes without official harassment. Few uphold the rule of law, enforce contracts, or safeguard property rights. Many are blatantly predatory, serving as the means by which a small elite extracts rents from everyone else. Predatory governments usually make their countries poorer, as in Nigeria and the Central African Republic. Worse, when power confers riches, people sometimes fight for it, as in Congo and Liberia.

  The shackled continent

  Nowhere exemplifies how an authoritarian government can stifle a nation’s ability to create wealth better than Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Mugabe is interesting because he is one of the last reigning members of the first generation of post-independence African leaders, and he rules in a way that suggests he has not learned much from his contemporaries’ mistakes. He seizes private property, thus sending a deafening warning to foreign and local investors alike: “Do not put your money into Zimbabwe.” He also tries to alter the laws of economics by decree. He fixes the price of gas at below what it costs to import it, so the pumps run dry. He tries to create money by printing it and so causes hyper-inflation. These policies have failed as utterly in Zimbabwe as they have everywhere else they have been tried and have made Zimbabweans much poorer than they were at independence. But although most of his people would love to get rid of Mugabe, they have not been able to because he rigs elections to keep himself in power.

  Mugabe governs like the guerrilla commander he once was. He gives orders and expects them to be obeyed. He regards his opponents as enemies to be crushed. The details of how his people earn their daily bowl of cornmeal mush do not interest him in the slightest. He thinks the economy is like the land he once fought for. There is only a fixed amount to go around, and if you want a bigger share, you have to take it by force.

  For most of the time since independence, the majority of African countries have been ruled by men with sim
ilarly authoritarian ideas. Kwame Nkrumah led the way, imposing a one-party state on Ghana, the first colony to win independence after the Second World War. Other African leaders followed suit, declaring that their own irremovable governments would henceforth control everything of importance. They nationalized everything from mines and factories to bicycle-repair shops, staffed them with ruling-party cronies, and then ran them into the ground.

  For a while, they were able to disguise the fact that they were not producing much by borrowing huge sums of money from foolish Western banks and governments. This created a temporary illusion of prosperity. Some of the borrowed cash was spent on free healthcare, education, and loans to farmers, but much of the money was wasted on prestige projects: dams, conference halls, steel mills erected far from the nearest port and over budget, and so on. Little of the money was invested in such a way that it actually produced a return, so African governments eventually found themselves unable to service their loans, let alone repay them.

  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, some things have improved. Marxism is out of fashion, democracy is in. Almost all African countries have held multi-party elections, and many have attempted free-market economic reforms. But old attitudes persist. In many African countries, reforms have been pursued fitfully and without enthusiasm, which may explain why they have so rarely succeeded.

  Laissez-faire is not popular in Africa. Nkrumah is still a hero to most Ghanaians, who remember his generous spending but not the fact that he used the accumulated surplus of the colonial period to finance his social programs, which collapsed when the money ran out.8 Robert Mugabe enjoys a curious popularity too, at least among Africans who do not live in Zimbabwe. Many see him as a strong black leader standing up to intimidation by Western governments, which refused to recognize his stolen election victory in 2002. They cannot fail to notice that Zimbabwe has grown poorer under his rule but swallow his line that this is the fault of a Western conspiracy.

  Unchecked power is a swift route to riches, especially in countries with abundant natural resources. Africa is fabulously well endowed with precious minerals, which is one reason why so many people are prepared to fight for a share of power. In Congo, for example, half a dozen armies and several rebel factions have been battling for control of some of the world’s richest deposits of diamonds, cobalt, and tantalum. In Angola, a four-decade-long scramble for loot ended only in 2002, when the rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, was shot and killed.

  In both these cases, and several others besides, minerals have provided not only the motive but also the means for war. Governments use oil revenues to buy helicopter-gunships. Rebels capture diamond mines, sell the stones, buy weapons, and carry on fighting.

  That such struggles make Africa poorer than it would otherwise be is obvious: armies marching through your cornfields are bad for your harvest. What is not so obvious is how such wars can be stopped and Africa’s mineral wealth turned from a curse into a blessing.

  Even in African countries where men with guns do not routinely plunder villages, property rights are rarely secure. Most African peasants do not own the land they cultivate. In some countries, the state owns all the land. In others, individual ownership is allowed, but because of an over-prescriptive and under-competent bureaucracy, it can take ten years and untold hassle to obtain formal title. The same is often true of the houses where the urban poor live.

  This matters enormously. Lack of clear ownership means that poor Africans cannot use their property as collateral in order to obtain loans. Without access to credit, farmers find it hard to afford the tools and seeds that might make them more productive, and would-be entrepreneurs find it hard to get started.

  A Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, estimated that the value of “dead capital” in poor countries – that is, property which cannot be capitalized because of the lack of a title deed – is roughly forty times the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Africa, the unexploited value of informal urban shacks and informally owned fields is almost a trillion dollars, which is about three times the annual GDP of all the countries south of the Sahara.9

  Another obstacle to African prosperity is AIDS. Despite all the advances of modern medicine, life expectancy has fallen in much of Africa in the last two decades; in some countries it is less than forty. The main reason is the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV), which destroys the body’s immune system. Thirty million Africans are infected with HIV. Three quarters of the world’s AIDS deaths occur in Africa: nearly five Africans die of the disease every minute.10

  Poverty speeds the epidemic’s spread. Those who cannot afford television find other ways of passing the evening. Many Africans cannot afford antibiotics and so cannot cure other sexually transmitted diseases, which leaves them with open sores through which the virus can pass.

  Migration and war help the virus to cross borders. Laborers and traders flock from the poorest African countries, such as Mozambique, to the richer ones, such as South Africa. Migrant miners often live in single-sex hostels for eleven months of the year, surrounded by prostitutes. At Christmas, they go home and infect their wives. Truck drivers carry the virus for thousands of miles, from one rest-stop brothel to another. Africa’s wars create surges of refugees, some of whom have no other means of support but sex work. Soldiers, with their regular pay and disdain for risk, are more likely to contract HIV than civilians and horribly prone to spread it, forcefully, when they march through enemy villages.

  Most important, the virus is spread through sex, something which most Africans do not wish to discuss. This is part of the problem. In Kenya, Christian and Islamic groups have burned sex-education pamphlets and condoms in protest at what they see as the encouragement of promiscuity. South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, has suggested that foreigners who say Africa has a big AIDS problem are in fact hinting that Africans are immoral savages: “We are blamed as criminals and seen as human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its passions to reason … as natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, doomed to a mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.”11

  There is a simpler explanation. People who worry about AIDS in Africa do so because the disease threatens to kill more people than all the continent’s wars put together and multiplied by ten. And in countries where a quarter of the adult population is infected, it is clear that someone has been having unsafe sex. Without frank discussion of what exactly people are doing in bed and behind bushes, it will be impossible to curb the epidemic.

  There are myths that must be rebutted: some young African women believe that without regular infusions of sperm, they will not grow up to be beautiful. In parts of southern Africa, men believe that they can cleanse themselves of the virus by passing it on to a virgin. In Kenya, some think they can achieve the same effect by having sex with a madwoman.

  AIDS has devastated African families. The disease strikes people in their productive prime. Breadwinners sicken, so households lose their income just as their medical bills soar. Daughters drop out of school to help nurse their parents. When the virus kills, millions of orphans are left behind. And yet there is hope. A few countries, notably Uganda and Senegal, have fought the epidemic with great success. In Uganda, after a loud and inventive anti-AIDS campaign, adult HIV prevalence crashed from 30 percent in 1992 to 5 percent in 2002.12

  Even the most stable societies would find it hard to cope with African rates of HIV infection. African societies, however, are often chronically unstable. Most Africans still feel more loyalty to their tribe than to the young nation-states of which they are citizens. Because tribal loyalties are so strong, wily politicians can often stir up conflicts between tribes as a means of cementing their hold on power. This phenomenon is not unique to Africa, of course. From the pogroms of medieval Europe, through the rape of Nanjing, to the Balkans and the Middle East today, unscrupulous politicians have often inflamed tribal passions, usually with vile consequences. But in recent y
ears the worst ethnic clashes have been disproportionately African. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was probably the worst tribal massacre since the Holocaust. On a smaller scale, ethnic violence is common in Burundi, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and several other African countries.

  Ethnic conflict is not inevitable in Africa. Tanzania has dozens of tribes, but Tanzanian politicians have not sought to inflame their differences, and the country has been peaceful since independence. The Rwandan genocide is usually portrayed as the result of ancient and implacable tribal hatreds, but I would argue that without predatory politics, it would not have happened. Members of the Hutu tribe did not spontaneously slaughter their neighbors, the Tutsis. The genocide was meticulously planned by Hutu politicians, who sought thereby to keep themselves in power and Tutsis out of it. Their radio station urged Hutus to fear, hate, and finally kill their neighbors. A secretly organized militia coordinated the bloodletting, arming Hutus who took part and slaughtering those who refused. Roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in six weeks, making it the swiftest genocide on record. Rwanda is an extreme example, but the same problem – the tribalization of politics – afflicts most African countries.

  In Nigeria, home to at least 250 ethnic groups and split between Muslims in the north and Christians and animists in the south, politicians look to their kith and kin for support, often by reminding them of how much they detest the tribe next door. Once in power, Nigerian politicians tend to put as many people as possible from their own tribe onto the public payroll. This is nice for them but not quite so good for Nigerian public services, which suffer from what Chinua Achebe calls a “cult of mediocrity.” In Nigeria, he says, “it would be difficult to point to one important job held by the most competent person we have.”13