The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

  During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans rediscovered the great works of classical literature and philosophy and hauled themselves back up to the level of civilization their ancestors had enjoyed in Roman times. A trickle of technological advances over the next two centuries turned into a stream in the 1800s and a torrent in the 1900s. In mid-century, communism and fascism slew millions and threatened to halt the continent’s progress, but both ideologies were eventually vanquished.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, life in Europe and most of its offshoots, particularly America, is peaceful and prosperous. East Asia, which started industrializing later but had the advantage of being able to learn from the West’s example, is catching up fast.

  In all these places, change has been traumatic. Mass affluence has shaken up the old social order. British plumbers can earn more than professors or archdeacons. Mass mobility has loosened family ties. Religious faith has waned in much of the rich world, with the striking exception of America.

  In Africa, too, as progress comes, it will involve pain. New technologies will kill old industries; cost-cutting governments will lay off legions of un-needed employees. As Africa grows less poor, its people will probably become more individualistic, for money allows individuals to make more choices for themselves. A peasant typically spends his whole life farming the strip his chief allocates to him. But if he hops on a bus, moves to a city, and learns a skill, he has a much wider range of options as to what kind of work he will do, where he will live, who he will marry, and so on.

  Some Africans already fret that modernization will mean the Westernization of their culture: that television will kill traditional songs and festivals or that the empty materialism of American soap operas will infect their children. It is a worry. African folk tales, if not written down, may be lost. Some of Africa’s many languages will disappear, too. People find it easier to communicate if they speak tongues that many others speak, which is why billions learn English, whereas Khoi will probably go the same way as Cornish.

  But a glance at the rich world suggests that the new does not necessarily drive out the old. Japanese teenagers watch American movies, but they watch more Japanese ones. Television has not killed kabuki theater; it has projected it to a wider audience. People tend to preserve the traditions they value and quietly ditch the ones they do not care about. People are not usually forced to join the modern world, although the modern world’s bulldozers do sometimes destroy the forests where traditional hunter-gatherers live. For the most part, the drift from traditional to modern ways of living is voluntary. People migrate to towns because they prefer the greater material well-being, the greater freedom, and the greater variety of opportunities that an industrialized society offers.

  Which is why the vast majority of Africans are striving, step by step, to get richer. For some reason, the African go-getter who sticks most in my mind is a young man I met on a hill in rural KwaZulu-Natal. This South African province used to be riven by political violence: as apartheid crumbled, followers of the African National Congress fought a sporadic guerrilla war against Inkatha, a Zulu tribal party. The apartheid security forces sent arms and agents provocateurs to stir things up: between 1985 and 1994, some 12,000 people were killed.

  Many young men dropped out of school and spent their adolescence burning down neighboring villages. Tens of thousands endured such a bloody upbringing that they are now emotionally damaged and practically unemployable. But despite this tough start many are straining diligently to lift themselves out of poverty.

  The one I spent the longest talking to was a veteran of the local war, a nineteen-year-old who had seen more deaths than he had worn neckties. When the conflict ended, he started raising chickens, which he slaughtered, cooked, and sold. He had big plans: he had been studying basic accounting and wanted to expand his business, save, and put his children through university. He told me that if South Africans worked hard, the country could grow rich, like Japan.

  I cautioned, pedantically, that the Japanese had labored for a century before they caught up with the West. He shrugged. “We can do it, too,” he said. “And besides, raising chickens is better than fighting.”

  NOTES

  Introduction: Why is Africa so poor?

  1. World Bank, Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? Washington, 2000, pp. 6–17.

  2. Jeffrey Sachs, “Helping the World’s Poorest,” Economist, 14 August 1999.

  3. C. Meillassoux, (ed.), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa, London, 1971, cited in John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998, p.291.

  4. World Bank, 2000, p.14.

  5. For an account of the more gruesome aspects of Japanese colonial rule, see George L. Hicks’s The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, W.W. Norton, New York, 1995.

  6. Address to UN university, Tokyo, 1998, reprinted in Thabo Mbeki, Africa: The Time Has Come, Tafelberg/Mafube, Cape Town, and Johannesburg, 1998, p.248.

  7. Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, Heinemann, Oxford, 1984, p.1.

  8. George Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1992, pp. 168–9.

  9. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Basic Books, New York, 2000, pp. 35–7.

  10. UNAIDS, AIDS Epidemic Update, December 2002, www.unaids.org.

  11. “Stop denying the killer bug,” Economist, 21 February 2002.

  12. Everyone agrees that Uganda has done well in curbing AIDS, but Justin Parkhurst of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine argued, in an article in the Lancet in July 2002, that the miracle was exaggerated. HIV prevalence was never quite as high as 30 percent, he said; the data were taken chiefly from testing women in urban antenatal clinics, which was not a fair sample of a population that is half male and 87 percent rural.

  13. Achebe, 1984, p.19.

  14. John Murphy, “Making a Splash in South Africa,” Baltimore Sun, 13 November 2000.

  15. In 1993, when I was living in Seoul, a gallery there displayed a piece of installation art called Have you ever seen the president? It consisted of dozens of little black loudspeakers, arranged against a blank white wall in the shape of the South Korean president’s silhouette. Through the speakers were played grunts, moans, and expletives; the soundtrack of a porn film. If the artist, Hong Sung Min, was expecting to get a rise out of the president, Kim Young Sam, he was disappointed. The president ignored him. Artists are a little less bold in North Korea. In 1995, I visited a gallery in Pyongyang. In the entrance hall was a masterpiece of socialist realism, Kangson Twilight, a painting of a steelworks against a fiery sunset. Someone had clearly decided that, although this was ideologically correct, there was something missing. So they ordered the artist to add a large image of Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” in the foreground.

  16. Santi Chakrabati, Botswana finance ministry, author interview, March 1999.

  Chapter 1. The vampire state

  1. Some Africans disagree. George Ayittey (who coined the phrase “vampire state” to describe the typical post-colonial African government) points out that Africans have traded enthusiastically with each other for centuries and that the continent’s marketplaces prospered better before modern African governments tried to regulate them. See George Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1992.

  2. Some bakers tried to dodge this rule by, for example, putting raisins in their dough and calling the result “raisin bread,” which was not price-controlled. So the government kept lengthening the list of price-controlled goods.

  3. The government denied that it had fixed the prices either of gasoline or of the Zimbabwe dollar. (Interview with Simba Makoni, the Zimbabwean finance minister, 6 March 2001.) The official line was that banks voluntarily agreed to deal in currency only at or around the rate recommended by the central bank. But the banks knew
full well that if they failed to toe the line “voluntarily,” the government would formally oblige them to. So they all but stopped dealing in foreign currency. If important customers came to them asking for American dollars, they would put them in touch with other customers who were exporting and leave the two parties to work out a deal in private. Fuel prices, meanwhile, almost made sense if you believed that the official exchange rate reflected reality, which it didn’t. Supplies were further constrained by the fact that NOCZIM, a state-owned firm, had a monopoly over the import of gasoline into Zimbabwe. Being state-owned, it set prices as the government dictated, even if that meant that it could not pay for further imports.

  4. IMF estimate, 2001.

  5. Mugabe’s government had not, at the time of writing, got round to seizing mines and factories. But the regime did pull off some more stealthy heists. Pension funds, for example, were forced to invest a large part of their portfolios in ten-year government bonds that paid only 15 percent annually. At a time when inflation was over 200 percent, this was simple theft. Forcing pension funds to buy worthless paper is not quite the same as hitting grandma over the head and stealing her handbag – it leaves fewer bruises – but it had the effect of robbing many more present and future pensioners than any gang of muggers could, no matter how well organized. And each pensioner was robbed of much more than she usually carries in her purse.

  6. In 1999, an independent MP, Margaret Dongo, managed to obtain a list of those who had received land under the land reform program. In the late 1990s, most land was given to rich, well-connected people, including cabinet ministers. See Land, Housing and Property Rights in Zimbabwe, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, Geneva, 2001, p.16, www.cohre.org. An idea of what happened after the stolen election in 2002 can be gleaned from a secret audit, commissioned by the government itself and leaked in 2003, which described a thuggish free-for-all as Mugabe’s closest allies assembled vast country estates for themselves on land seized from white farmers. Black peasants who took the government’s promises of free land at face value were sometimes violently evicted to make way for generals and ministers. See Africa Confidential, 21 February 2003.

  7. A figure often incorrectly given as 70 percent, or misleadingly given as “70 percent of the most productive farmland.” Commercially farmed land in Zimbabwe is productive largely because it is commercially farmed.

  8. In 2000, there were about 70,000 whites in Zimbabwe and 75,000 elephants.

  9. “The mess one man makes,” Economist, 22 April 2000.

  10. Ayittey, 1992, p.65.

  11. George Ayittey, Africa in Chaos, St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1999, p.52.

  12. The best-written, though tongue-in-cheek, account of why Tanzania is so poor can be found in Eat the Rich, P. J. O’Rourke, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998.

  13. World Bank, Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? 2000, p.53.

  14. Ayittey, 1999, p.114.

  15. Ayittey, 1999, p.246.

  16. Cited in International Crisis Group, Zimbabwe: The Politics of National Liberation and International Division, Harare/Brussels, 17 October 2002, p.4, www.crisisweb.org.

  17. Ibid., p.4.

  Chapter 2. Digging diamonds, digging graves

  1. This chapter draws on the work of a former World Bank economist, Paul Collier, who was the lead author of, among other studies, Breaking the Conflict Trap; Civil War and Development Policy, World Bank, Washington, 2003. A conversation I had with Collier in May 2003 was also very helpful.

  2. World Bank, Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? Washington, 2000, p.55.

  3. World Bank, 2003, pp. 53–91.

  4. World Bank, 2000, p.57.

  5. One study found that a country whose exports of primary products (i.e., unprocessed ones, such as minerals, oil, and coffee) accounted for as much as 28 percent of GDP was more than four times as likely to be at war than a country with no primary exports. Paul Collier, Justice-Seeking and Loot-Seeking in Civil War, World Bank, Washington, 1999. Unpublished manuscript, cited in Jakkie Cilliers and Christian Dietrich (eds.), Angola’s War Economy: The Role of Oil and Diamonds, Institute for Security Studies, Johannesburg, 2000, p. 41n.

  6. This marvelous phrase was coined by Declan Walsh, an intrepid Irish scribbler. Declan Walsh, “Expensive but Never Boring Hotel Is Centre Stage for Kinshasa’s Unfolding Story,” Sunday Independent (South Africa), 11 February 2001.

  7. Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro), editorial cartoon, 4 May 2000. Reprinted in David Philip, The Devil Made Me Do It, Johannesburg, 2000, p.91.

  8. The Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources, UN Security Council, April 2001. Cited in Financial Times, 18 April 2001.

  9. Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UN Security Council, 16 October 2002.

  10. Human Rights Watch, War Crimes in Kisangani, Washington, August 2002, p.4, www.hrw.org. Some observers put the figure even higher. In April 2003, the International Rescue Committee (www.theric.org.) estimated that the death toll was between 3 and 4.7 million. Even the lower of these numbers would make Congo’s war the most lethal since the Second World War. The true scale of the calamity will probably never be known. As one UN worker put it: “Congo is so green, you don’t even see the graves,” “Africa’s Great War,” Economist, 4 July 2002.

  11. In January 2003, at least twenty-six alleged conspirators, including Colonel Eddy Kapend, a former aide to Kabila, were convicted of plotting the assassination and sentenced to death. The trial was grotesquely unfair, however, so the mystery is far from solved.

  12. Fred Bridgland, Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa, Mainstream Publishing, London, 1986, p.30.

  13. Angola Country Report, Economist Intelligence Unit, third quarter, 1998, p. 16f.

  14. Ibid., p.14.

  15. George Ayittey, Africa in Chaos, St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1998, pp. 313–14.

  Chapter 3. No title

  1. For a longer account of this process, see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997.

  2. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Basic Books, New York, 2000, pp. 35–7.

  3. Government of Malawi, Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Land Policy Reform, March 1999, pp. 54 and 116.

  4. de Soto, 2000, pp. 18–20.

  5. Personal communication, March 2003.

  Chapter 4. Sex and death

  1. The AIDS statistics in this chapter are largely taken from Epidemic Update reports issued by UNAIDS, www.unaids.org.

  2. The best account of this under-reported horror is Jasper Becker’s book Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine, John Murray, London, 1996.

  3. Steven Swindells, “Mogae warns Botswana faces extinction from AIDS,” Reuters, 14 March 2001.

  4. Some of these quotes appeared in “Stories of the People,” an article by Emma Guest in African Decisions, July–September 2000. My wife and I visited Beitbridge together.

  5. UNICEF, Orphans and HIV/AIDS in Zambia, Lusaka, 1998, p.2.

  6. Ibid., p.17.

  7. AIDS has also led to a dramatic increase in the number of homeless children: perhaps 90,000 live on Zambia’s streets or in the bush, scratching a living by recycling broken bottles or through petty theft (UNICEF, 1998, p.2). Too poor to afford glue to dull the evening chill, they sniff “jenkem” – fermented sewage. A British aid worker in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, predicts appalling social consequences: “We will have a generation of illiterate kids whose only formative experience has been one of sickness, death and marginalisation. We’re not talking about individual children. We’re talking about a group mentality, and their own nurturing ability in the future as parents, if they’re not seeing positive role models and being parented.” (Quoted in Emma Guest, Children of AIDS: Africa’s Orphan Crisis, Pluto Press, London, 2001, p.158.)
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  8. Console Tleane, “Racist Ideology Lurks Behind AIDS Research,” City Press (South Africa), 28 July 2002.

  9. Human Rights Watch, Scared at School: Sexual Violence Against Girls in South African Schools, New York, 2001, www.hrw.org.

  10. UNAIDS, Report on the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic 2002, pp. 25–6.

  11. Robert Thomson, “A Rebel with a Capitalist Cause,” Times (London), 2 January 2003.

  12. World Bank, African Development Indicators 2001, Washington, 2001, p.320.

  13. As mentioned above in a note to the introduction, although everyone agrees that Uganda has done well in curbing AIDS, some think the miracle was exaggerated. Justin Parkhurst of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine argued, in an article in the Lancet in July 2002, that HIV prevalence was never quite as high as 30 percent. The data were taken chiefly from urban antenatal clinics, which were not representative of a population that is 87 percent rural.

  14. This figure is from the Human Sciences Research Council’s Study on HIV/AIDS, December 2002, www.hsrc.ac.za, which puts adult HIV prevalence in South Africa at 16 percent and total prevalence at 11 percent. Previous estimates based, like other African AIDS data, on tests in antenatal clinics were much more alarming.

  15. Chenjerai Hove, Shebeen Tales, Baobab Books, Harare, 1994, p.52.

  Chapter 5. The son of a snake is a snake

  1. Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden; Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1992, p.12.

  2. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998, pp. 147–9.

  3. It is hard to say exactly which individuals gave which orders. Some of the alleged ringleaders are still on trial, others are on the run, and most claim they are innocent. At the time of writing, an international tribunal for the most important génocidaires had secured only sixteen convictions, including that of Jean Kambanda, a former prime minister. The alleged mastermind of the genocide, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, was facing twelve charges, all of which he denied. The director of Radio Mille Collines, Ferdinand Nahimana, was on trial, while the alleged moneyman behind the massacres, Felicien Kabuga, had been sentenced to life in prison. The international tribunal, which is in Arusha, Tanzania, hands down maximum sentences of life imprisonment; middle-ranking génocidaires, tried in Rwanda, face execution.