Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  International assistance and political support for Africa has, to me, always borne more than a passing resemblance to horse racing, with Washington and its Iffys both playing and controlling the bank. In the 1990s three generations of horses were still on the track. Venerable old stars like Mobutu were being put out to pasture, and bets on recent “winners” like Ghana were shifting to Uganda, the shiny new horse, ridden by a not quite new but suddenly hot jockey named Museveni.

  At the very moment when democracy was dawning across Africa, external assistance to the continent was drying up. With lots of democratic horses to bet on, the question that nagged was, Why were Western powers still placing most of their money on corrupt, authoritarian regimes held in the iron grip of charismatic dictators?

  Leaders like Konaré, who were interested in providing electricity and clean drinking water to villages instead of building monuments to themselves, called for a New Deal with the West. What they got in reply was a clever new watchword, “Trade, Not Aid,” whose catchiness could not conceal its mean spirit. In fact, there were few offers of better terms of trade. The United States and Europe stubbornly remained closed to the kinds of simple industrial products, like textiles, that classical economic theory says undeveloped countries should develop as the first rung in their climb out of poverty. Instead, in the guise of charity, the West was dumping cheap used clothes on African countries, badly undercutting local attempts to develop viable textile industries. The same was often true of food “assistance,” with surplus American supplies of everything from grain to butter knocking the bottom out of African markets.

  Without substantial bilateral assistance, Mali’s leaders, like the leaders of all of Africa’s other new democracies, were sent rapping on the doors of the Iffys, begging bowls in hand, and forced to swallow their economic medicine, which consisted of little more than austerity packages. Western powers, led by the United States, have always pretended that these programs promote economic growth and development, but those governments would be very hard pressed to prove it, which perhaps is why they have never bothered trying to. In this game, compliance with the prescribed treatment trumped everything else— even the survival of the patient.

  Wherever I went in Bamako, ordinary people reminded me that the national debt, assumed during thirty years of Western-supported dictatorship, had surpassed the meager gross national product. Why, they often asked, did Washington and Paris cluck approvingly about Mali’s political evolution, and then withhold the kind of sweeping debt forgiveness and other financial assistance the country desperately needed in order to dramatically improve its circumstances?

  “We service our foreign debt on time every month, never missing a penny, and all the time, the people are getting poorer and poorer,” said Amadou Toumani Touré,8 the founder of Malian democracy. “For years and years, the West supported dictatorships like the one we had here for its own strategic reasons. Now that we are stuck, struggling with the enormous burden of the debts the dictators left behind, it seems that nobody is interested in considering the responsibility the West shares for our situation.”

  Such feelings of abandonment and despair were not Mali’s alone. The misfortune of Africa’s newly pluralistic countries like Congo-Brazzaville, Benin, Zambia and Niger was to have had their democratic moment at the very same time that communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe. Timing is everything. Now the West rushed in financial and political support to foster new democracies in Europe, and Africa drew nothing more than a long, indifferent shrug.

  In the months after the fall of the Berlin wall, I occasionally tried to persuade colleagues in the press to cast the changes under way in Africa in the same epochal light that Europe was now bathing in. Africa’s dictators had been supported for decades by East and West, and were often handpicked by outside powers. Their misrule had placed the continent in the deep hole it now found itself in, not some congenital incapacity for modern governance, as decades of shallow analyses about Big Men and “ancient tribal animosities” often insinuated.

  Amid talk of a “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War, I argued that the West had every bit as much of a moral obligation to try to undo some of the damage we had wrought in Africa as it did to help the Eastern Europeans. Needless to say, my arguments were ignored.

  A senior editor I knew, a former Africa correspondent who had subsequently worked in Eastern Europe, told me bluntly that my ideas were a pipe dream. “Come on, Howard, we are talking about Africa, not real countries,” he said. And with that, I was reminded that the roots of Africa’s dilemma were far deeper than the mere fact that its democratic revolution was happening simultaneously with Europe’s. Indeed, Africa’s misfortune, where the West is concerned, has always been much deeper. How else to explain the ability of Europeans to rationalize the centuries-long slave trade, decades of forced labor for rubber and cotton, colonization on the fly and finally their abandonment of the continent to the very tyrants Africans were struggling to throw off? The answer lies partly in the fact that for Europeans, Africa has always been an irresistible “other.” This may sound like a tautology, but that does nothing to diminish its truth. Like the indelible taint of original sin, the problem with Africa in the minds of Westerners is that it is Africa.

  During an October 1996 visit to Mali by Warren Christopher, Clinton’s secretary of state, I asked Christopher’s top deputy for Africa, George Moose, why America had become so much less generous toward the new democracies than it had been toward the old dictatorships. Moose, an African-American whose tepid advocacy on behalf of the continent was typical of the few high-level blacks one found in the State Department, offered no apologies. “Virtue is its own reward,” he told me unsmilingly.

  It was a typical March day in Bamako, meaning incandescently hot. A small dune’s worth of fine Sahara sand was borne on each feeble breeze, giving the sky the consistency of runny, cream-based soup. The sun’s power was relentless, though, and it not only shone through the atmospheric sea of dust, it positively irradiated the city, making even late afternoon, when the heat is expected to abate in most climes, bleakly suffocating.

  My taxi creaked slowly all the way up the long, gentle ascent of Koulouba, la colline du pouvoir, or the hill of power, as one of the five hills that rise above the city is known. I had taken Boubèye’s warning about punctuality a bit too seriously, reaching the presidential palace almost twenty minutes early. Having time to kill, I asked the driver to park in the comforting shade of an acacia tree, and I listened to my little Sony shortwave.

  Eventually, Boubèye emerged. He conducted me through the palace’s cool white hallways and up a flight of stairs, past a huge wall-mounted map of Mali and, finally, into the office of the president.

  The man who greeted me was tall and dressed splendidly in a voluminous, dark green boubou, but somehow he seemed shrunken and unmoored in his cavernous office, with its hand-me-down 1960s décor. Konaré’s three years as head of state had been anything but a picnic. He wore something of a look of disappointment, frustration mingled with defensiveness, as he sat down to discuss African democracy with what seemed like a slightly forced casual “Mon ami French, comment vas-tu?”—using the familiar, not the formal, pronoun—spoken in his ever-hoarse basso.

  He spoke like a battlefield commander reporting to headquarters about the tightening grip of a siege. “I am confronted with problems everywhere I look,” he said grimly. “For the last two years, all I’ve been able to do is play fireman. Everywhere I look, there is a crisis.”

  The catalogue of troubles began with the low-level rebellion by the semi-nomadic Tuareg ethnic group in the north of the country, where the arid savannah of Mali’s center gives way to the infinite dunes of the Sahara. Locusts had begun to hatch in the millet fields that hug the Niger River along its lazy arc northward, threatening the food supply and reviving fears of another great infestation, like the one that devastated the Sahel in the mid-1980s. The government was having trouble meeting its pay
roll. And lately, there had been signs of restiveness among the country’s soldiers, who lived among the people in towns all over Mali; the government could not afford to billet them properly in barracks.

  Konaré complained bitterly, too, about the opposition that he had once promoted. In his eyes, they were trying to manipulate the soldiers in the hopes of fomenting a coup. “I am practically in the position of the driver who must keep swerving to avoid running people over,” he said. “I am trying to move the country forward, but the more I try to avoid colliding with the opposition, the more they throw themselves in my path. They pretend to act out of principle. They resemble crazy people, for whom power is everything.”

  No matter how difficult they had made life for him, though, Konaré distinguished himself by resisting the temptation to crush his antagonists, in the manner of so many other African leaders. “I have no illusions about the difficulties implicit in governing democratically, but there are no exemptions from the effort required to build pluralism,” he said, speaking from the heart, but in the slightly wooden tongue he had developed as a student in the Eastern Bloc.

  Rare for an African head of state, Konaré was also willing to openly criticize his presidential peers, people like Museveni, who had no patience for democracy. He did so in order to chide the West for its hypocrisy in Africa, and in the hopes of somehow persuading the rich world to reconsider the way it engages the continent. “I have lots of respect for Museveni, but I am not sure what value the Museveni experience will have for Uganda after Museveni is gone,” he said in a carefully measured dig. “I am quite certain, though, that the experience of pluralism that we are living today will survive Konaré. And if I am correct, Mali will be a lot better off because of that.”

  Whatever Konaré’s criticisms of African authoritarianism, though, his greatest disappointments involved the West. “They once spoke of providing a premium to assist young democracies, but we haven’t seen anything remotely like that,” he said, slumping low in his leather armchair. “Based on the patterns we have seen, it is not so difficult to predict the behavior of the aid givers. Rather than help us now, they will wait until the crickets have finished off our crops, and then they will send us food. They have promised to help finance a new power plant to replace the one that we have now, which is broken half the time. But they say the money won’t be available for three more years.

  “Three years might not seem like a very long time to people dressed in expensive suits who sit around conference tables and discuss the fortunes of countries like ours, but for Malians, three years makes all the difference in the world. The price of just one of the expensive airplanes that your country is always buying for its military could make a huge difference to Mali.

  “Half of my population is unemployed. Democracy must be able to deliver some material progress in their lives, and to give them hope for a better future.”

  Hope still eluded the official statistics in Mali, as Konaré was painfully aware. Democracy had clearly not made the people appreciably richer in any measurable material terms—at least not yet. But like any people who have won their own independence through revolution or struggle, rather than having it simply granted to them, Malians exuded a feeling of ownership of their democracy. It was their baby, and while some people could already be heard to groan that the politicians of the capital were caught up in an Athenian fantasy, divorced from the everyday reality of the country’s abject poverty, even among the most hard-bitten skeptics there was pride in the fact that the country’s system was not a gift from any other quarter.

  The living connection that Malians felt with their past was just as critical. “Our people have produced great empires,” Konaré told me in parting. “Djenné and Timbuktu are there for all to see. People who know their own history, as we Malians do, develop a strong personality. That, more than anything else, is why I am confident in our struggle for democracy.”

  In sharp contrast to the Malian experience, for most Africans colonization had obliterated memories of self-government and cultural achievement alike. In places like Zaire and Nigeria, huge, populous countries that should have been the crossroads and anchors to entire regions, the confusion sown by arbitrary borders, by the abrupt and haphazard imposition of alien political systems, by deliberate Western destabilization and finally by the economic turmoil that logically ensued, had further undone any sense of hope or self-determination. The hasty amalgamations left behind by colonialism rendered the citizens of “independent” countries like these just as alienated from their governments and from their past as black America’s urban underclass, and with similarly crippling consequences.

  With a tolerant form of Islam nearly universal, and a dominant African lingua franca—Bambara—Mali, though, had become one of a select group of African countries that had succeeded in cobbling together its own cultural space, independent of Europe’s colonial intrusion. And with the exception of the northern Tuareg, and a few other small minorities that hewed closer to the Arab-speaking Maghreb, Mali’s ancient architectural treasures, still largely preserved in the country’s arid vastness like dinosaur bones in the desert, remained a source of psychic strength for all its citizens.

  Eager to see for myself what Konaré was talking about, I, together with Robert, drove to Djenné, setting out north along the same narrow strip of highway I had taken years before to Mopti. A few minutes after crossing the bridge that leads from Bamako’s administrative heart to open countryside, the city vanished from view, as suddenly as the popping of a flash bulb. The immediate signs of change since my first, memorable visit to Mali were few, save for the expansion of the bidonvilles, sprawling squatters’ camps that hugged the dusty edge of town like a tattered canopy.

  Once we were clear of this wretched sprawl, though, the first thing I noticed was that the roadblocks, so common under the dictatorship, had disappeared. We sped along in our Toyota Land Cruiser on the open, single-lane national highway for what seemed like an eternity, only stopping a couple of times for gas. For hour after hour, the landscape was unrelieved flatness. Occasionally, a village popped up over the horizon, all circular, brown mud-walled houses with peaked thatched roofs that, from their appearance, might have been the inverted caps of some gigantic species of mushroom.

  Anthills, baroque stucco structures the height of a tall man, were the only sign of animal life on these scorched plains. But the winner of the evolutionary race in these parts, hands down, appeared to be the giant baobab trees, whose stripped trunks and arthritic branches towered mightily over an emptiness of tortured bushes and dry, rough grasses. The trees mocked the termites with forms even more gnarled than the insects’ mounds. They had resisted millennia of bushfires, and the cycles of drought, plague and pestilence that had emptied the Sahel’s villages too many times to count meant absolutely nothing to them.

  We arrived in Djenné late in the afternoon, and our exhaustion melted away at the sight of the great mosque, whose earthen walls glowed orange in the mellowing sunlight of the town’s nearly deserted market square. It was the world’s largest earthen structure, and although I had often seen pictures of it since standing in its shadow two decades before, I was floored by the creative genius that went into its design. The mosque wore its skeleton on the outside, like some huge, sculpted insect. Palm-wood pegs protruded outward in a geometric pattern of scaffolding so neat and regular that its function, which was to allow maintenance men to clamber up its sides every spring to spackle the walls with fresh mud, had been harnessed in the creation of extraordinary form.

  At the summit of the rectangular structure, serrated panels with spiky peaks reminded me of the wooden Scripture boards carried around by young Islamic students, or talibé, to help memorize their prayers, which were written in Arabic. Three massive towers rose up from the facade, peaking into spires, with the wooden pegs projecting outward here, too, almost all the way to the top, lending the building the appearance of a proper mosque. Each of these peaks was capped with an ostr
ich egg, a symbol of fertility and purity.

  The sight of the mosque brought to mind a dinner I had many years before in El Salvador, in a gathering of reporters and UN officials. After a couple of drinks, a colleague began to boast about his travels to India, Nepal and Tibet, and then sneered upon hearing that I was about to be assigned to West Africa.

  “Has Africa ever produced anything memorable?” he asked. “Most cultures distinguish themselves through architecture. Have Africans ever produced anything more than mud huts?”

  As the only African-American in the crowd, the comments came not just as an affront to the land of my ancestors and of my wife and children, but as a direct personal assault as well. But as feelings of resentment welled up inside, I was momentarily at a loss for a reply, and I let the conversation drift in another direction, after only a mild rebuke about his ignorance.

  As I stood before the giant mosque, the shame I had felt at not answering this challenge more forcefully was replaced by a feeling of pity and anger at the arrogance of a Western world that has always denigrated Africa, ignoring its accomplishments and constantly emphasizing its ills. The building before me could comfortably stand comparison with virtually any of the world’s great cultural monuments. It was an esthetic jewel, and at the same time, a functional masterpiece, made entirely from locally available materials, which were easily and perpetually renewable. The towering spires cleverly concealed ventilation ducts that carried away hot air. Its walls, sixteen to eighteen inches thick, depending on their height, absorbed the sun’s blistering heat only gradually, keeping the interior cool by day and comfortably warm even on the chilliest of nights during the harmattan, or cool season.

  Mali had its own cathedral at Lourdes, its own Taj Mahal on the Niger, a Pentagon made entirely of mud bricks, and yet the outside world failed to take notice of the very existence of this fantastic building. What is even more remarkable, I learned later, is that this great mosque is perhaps the least impressive of the three religious structures that have stood in the heart of this ancient city.