by David Lamb
One of his early moves, after relegating Nkomo to a minor cabinet post, was to convene a conference of thirty-six nations in Zimbabwe to raise money. The scene was similar to a TV telethon in the United States in which viewers make pledges to combat various diseases or to finance political parties. But this one was a bonanza and Mugabe netted $1.4 billion for Zimbabwe. The United States, recognizing that a successful multiracial Zimbabwe could influence the future of South Africa and diminish Soviet pressure in all of southern Africa, pledged $225 million over three years. Even the impoverished West African nation of Sierra Leone kicked in $90,000. No Communist countries were invited, although a Soviet delegation flew into Salisbury and cooled its heels for two days at a local hotel, waiting for an invitation that never came.
The creation of Zimbabwe was in itself a rare achievement and the government’s accomplishments have not been insignificant. It has paid fair-market prices to whites who sold their farms and left the country, unable to tolerate a place where black cabinet ministers called each other “comrade.” Majority rule has seen the school enrollment more than double, from 800,000 to 1,760,000, and the reopening of 2,000 schools closed by the war. The minimum wage has risen 50 percent, and health care is now free for anyone earning less than $235 a month, which covers the majority of the 6.8 million blacks. The government has subsidized food prices by $385 million to make staples cheaper for the poor. Black employment has increased by 100,000.
Under the constitution, whites are guaranteed twenty of the hundred seats in parliament until 1987. No other African colony has entered independence with similar assurances for the minority race. About half of the original 270,000 whites chose to stay in Zimbabwe, but by the summer of 1983 events had taken a decided turn for the worse in Africa’s youngest country, and Mugabe’s dream for a prosperous, multi-racial society had been derailed by tribalism and was in jeopardy.
Joshua Nkomo, the father of independence who had been cheered by thousands when he made a triumphal return to Rhodesia in January, 1980, had been thrown out of the cabinet and had slipped across the border to Botswana one night, making his way back to London—and another home in exile.* What he left behind was an army from the Ndebele-speaking minority, which represents 17 percent of Zimbabwe’s people.
Nkomo had fallen from favor after arms caches were discovered in his tribal district of Matabeleland, where there had been much banditry and terrorism, including the killing of white farmers. Mugabe dispatched the government’s North-Korean-trained elite unit, known as the Fifth Brigade, there with vague instructions to restore order and apprehend deserters who had fought in Nkomo’s liberation army. The Fifth Brigade undertook its assignment with enthusiasm, killing several hundred unarmed civilians in a matter of weeks.
The fragile fiber of society seemed to be unraveling around Mugabe, a member of the Shona-speaking majority that comprises about 80 percent of all Zimbabweans. The economy had been scorched by drought and the world recession, and the departure of whites had reduced productivity. South Africa appeared intent on doing what it could to ensure that there would be no black success stories in next-door Zimbabwe. Mugabe, however, did not overreact as most African presidents do in time of crisis and personal challenge. He continued to preach that blacks and whites, if they worked together, could still create the Zimbabwe that was promised during the war of liberation.
Zimbabwe’s future is far from settled, but a nation of great economic potential has emerged from the ashes of war and racial inequality—a feat that seemed impossible just a few years ago. I would like to think that South Africans will learn from the lessons of what Mugabe has tried to do in Zimbabwe—and what other leaders have done in Kenya, the Ivory Coast and a handful of former colonies. The Afrikaner has only to look across his borders to see the advance of history’s tide. The black nationalism that led to the birth of Ghana in 1957 and the death of Rhodesia in 1980—and in between the freeing of an entire continent—is now at South Africa’s doorstep. There is no buffer zone left. The Afrikaner stands alone, and in doing so, he has made his country a destabilizing, isolated force on a continent that South Africa ought to dominate politically and economically.
But however shameful his system is, one cannot ignore the fact that the Afrikaner has built the most remarkable country in Africa. “Everyone knows that if you took away apartheid, South Africa would be the best place around,” a black Kenyan friend told me. I suspect most Africans would agree, and perhaps it is time for other African governments to take a fresh look at their southern neighbor. They already know what South Africa has done wrong. Now they ought to start considering what it has done right. The farms, industries and mines that produce so bountifully, the cities that function so smoothly and efficiently, the government officials who work without the incentive of bribes and thievery—these are achievements that should be examined, not dismissed out of hand. If the Organization of African Unity spent as much time studying South Africa’s agricultural sector as it did drafting resolutions to condemn apartheid, the fifty member states might eventually grow strong enough to pressure Pretoria into changing its internal policies.
In 1978 a poll taken at the University of Stellenbosch showed that 54 percent of the students “would die if necessary” to uphold white rule. They may have that chance unless meaningful reform starts dismantling the structures of apartheid. But the Afrikaner is not going to change voluntarily for the sake of being a humanitarian. Black urban terrorism will probably come first. The whites will respond with increased repression. Blood will be shed. The whites of English origin will start leaving South Africa (as, in fact, they already are in small numbers). The blacks’ strength will grow, and so will their population, to a projected 35 million by the year 2000.
It is not a cheery scenario, and the sane world should pray that the inevitable violence can be kept limited and controlled until the South African whites come to understand—as did the Rhodesians—the futility of fighting. Given a choice between relenting or perishing, the white man in Africa has always relented. The Afrikaner is now confronted with that same choice. He must soon make his decision because for South Africa, time is running out.
* The prison population figures were provided by the National Institute for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation in Johannesburg. Although many people might not consider South Africa part of the “Western world,” the term refers broadly to all non-Communist, industrialized countries.
* The 20 million blacks are African descendants of the Sotho and Nguni people who migrated southward centuries ago. The 3 million “coloureds” are the progeny of the earliest white settlers and the indigenous people or Malay slaves from Dutch West India. The 1 million Asians, mostly from India, were first imported in 1860 as contract laborers for the sugar plantations. These three groups are officially lumped together and classified as “non-white.”
* The most significant antigovernment group is the outlawed African National Congress, founded in 1912 to seek peaceful change through reform. Its philosophy became revolutionary only when the whites’ intransigence made reform impossible. The ANC’s titular head is Nelson Mandela, who has been in prison on terrorist charges since 1964 (when he was 46 years old). The ANC, with 6,000 guerrillas based in neighboring black African countries and thousands of clandestine supporters inside South Africa, is credited with eighty acts of sabotage that killed eight persons between 1981 and mid-1983.
* Voor means “forward” in Afrikaans, thus voortrekkers translates as the forward trekkers, or pioneers. The trekkers and their descendants are known today as Boers.
* In 1976 Transkei became the first “independent” homeland. It was followed by Bophu-thatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979 and Ciskei in 1981. The other six homelands are Kwa-Zulu (the eight splintered parts of the once powerful Zulu nation), Qwa Qwa, Lebowa, Gazankulu, Kangwane and South Ndebele.
† Western entertainers and athletes had refused to perform in the homelands on the premise that to do so would give them—and South Africa
’s scheme—credibility. But in 1981 Frank Sinatra provided Bophuthatswana with a much needed sense of legitimacy by giving nine concerts at the Sun City, a Las Vegas-style gambling resort, for a reported fee of $1.6 million. The $85 top ticket price ascertained that the audience would be mostly white, though Sinatra insisted he was in no way supporting segregation. “I play to all—any color, any creed, drunk or sober,” be said. President Lucas Mangope was so delighted that he awarded Sinatra the “nation’s” highest decoration, the Order of the Leopard, and made him an honorary tribal chief.
* Nkomo returned to Zimbabwe after 160 days in exile when Mugabe assured him that his life would not be in danger.
SUMMING UP AND LOOKING AHEAD
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
WE LEFT AFRICA on a midnight flight to Rome, not quite believing that four years could have passed so quickly. I do not like goodbyes, thinking that partings are only temporary when you leave people and places you care about, so Sandy and I slipped out of Nairobi rather quietly, without farewell parties or airport send-offs. The packers had cleared out our home on Riverside Drive, and I stood briefly in the living room, near the empty bookcases by the fireplace, remembering all the friends who had gathered there, hearing the voices that at some point each evening always seemed to turn to a discussion of Africa, about how it was doing and where it was going. It was, we had found, impossible to live in Africa and consider it as just a place to work. Africa had become an obsession, a state of mind. You can love it or hate it but you cannot be indifferent to it.
Lloyd’s of London had, at my request, insured the huge carton of research material I had collected in my travels through Africa for $20,000. It was, of course, unlikely that anyone would want to steal a cardboard box full of notebooks and maps and articles and photographs, but I did not rest easy until I saw the container being unloaded in Los Angeles. The other day I dug out the first notes I had taken in Africa. They were of Kenya’s president, Jomo Kenyatta, addressing a crowd on Kenyatta Day, a holiday that marked his imprisonment in 1952 by British colonial authorities. I had jotted down: “Crowd silent, mesmerized … JK in leather jacket … fly whisk in right hand … penetrating eyes, powerful voice … great presence, sort of magical.” And I noted him saying, “ ‘Throughout history there has been no stronger weapon to fight for the equality of human rights than unity,’ ”
Kenyatta is dead now, as are most of the other men who led Africa out of colonialism and into independence, representing what surely was one of man’s greatest triumphs over human injustice. But the unity of which Kenyatta spoke remains an elusive dream on a wounded continent, and the equality of human rights has proved easy to preach and difficult to practice. So much remains to be done. Three decades ago, when Kenyatta was in prison as the alleged Mau Mau leader and the colonial empires were first showing signs of cracking, John Gunther wrote in Inside Africa: “The two things Africa needs most are development and education.” The same is still distressingly true today. Coming back to the United States, back to the affluence and abundance that Americans accept so unquestioningly, one is overwhelmed by the widening chasm that separates the industrialized nations of the First World and the hoe-farming nations of the Third World. Here in the United States I have become more convinced than ever that the West must close this gap, that the one global competition that really matters is the race to develop all men’s abilities. To ignore black African countries, instead of aiding them, is to let them slide into the Soviet camp. To be oblivious to the problems of Africa is to promote more international misery, hunger, instability—and to increase the threats to peace in the world.
I have written at length during this long journey about the obstacles Africa must overcome if it is to develop and realize its almost unlimited potential: an out-of-control birth rate, declining food production and primitive health conditions; inadequate leadership whose prime concern is the perpetuation of its own power; a rural exodus that strains urban social services to the point of collapse, and sometimes beyond; an untrained, unskilled population and a lack of opportunities for the educated; political instability, official corruption and an unequal distribution of national wealth, jobs and authority, all of which take root in tribalism.
Some countries, notably Kenya and the Ivory Coast, have been able to cope with these problems and have at the same time provided their people with political stability and growing economies. It is no coincidence that both nations had strong central leadership in Kenyatta and Félix Houphouët-Boigny, both relied heavily on expatriate assistance and both adopted a free-enterprise system. They are among the few luminaries on a continent that will, as the World Bank has noted, require a great deal of effort “simply to stand still” in the 1980s.
One reason that so many countries—and again, Kenya and the Ivory Coast are exceptions—have been unable to meet the economic challenge of nationhood is that there are no incentives for the individual to produce. Trying to separate themselves from everything left behind by the European colonialists, government after government embraced socialism, and sometimes Marxism, believing that people were willing to work for the community rather than for themselves. Economies were nationalized and individual incentives were eliminated.
Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, once put it this way: If underdeveloped countries “do not choose socialism, they will continue in a state of weakness, they will be maltreated, oppressed, exploited. We are fighting against capitalism.”
Though he still clings to his doctrine, Nyerere’s experiment has been one of the great failures in independent Africa, and one that should be a lesson for other countries. Half the 330 companies he nationalized went bankrupt within a decade. Worker productivity, the Tanzania Investment Board admitted, dropped by 50 percent between 1969 and 1979. The government’s bureaucracy grew at the rate of 14 percent a year, and government expenditures increased twice as fast as the gross national product. What Nyerere overlooked was that people in Africa do not have to work to feed themselves, and in that setting socialism is a bad alternative. The rich soil and tropical climate provide ample food for subsistence. Take away the monetary rewards for increased production and people are perfectly content to live as they always have, growing just enough food for themselves and their families.
Each of the United States’ 5.5 million farm workers produce enough food and fiber to care for 68 people (compared to 45 people a decade ago), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Africa has an estimated 200 million farmers, and they produce, in the best of times, barely enough to fill their own stomachs. I am not suggesting that Africa rush out and abandon socialism in favor of American-style capitalism. But I do think that Africa must improve its economic health before it can restructure its political and social systems, and a first step in this direction would be the creation of mixed economies that offer inducements for working harder and producing more.
The West needs to play a major role in altering the self-destructive course on which Africa seems headed. And not just for humanitarian reasons. Africa’s mineral wealth, its agricultural potential and strategic location thrust the continent into the likely position of influencing the events of tomorrow. For self-serving reasons alone, it is to the West’s advantage to share its knowledge and monetary resources with the poorest of the poor in order that Africa can become a contributor to, rather than a drain on, the global community.
Western aid should focus on vocational training in the cities—Africa needs mechanics and medical technicians at this point, not architects and open-heart surgeons—and on rural development. It is nothing less than a crime for the West and East to “assist” Africa by building airports and donating weapons when 30 percent of the food grown on the continent is lost because of faulty storage facilities and inadequate transportation systems. Granted, most of the aid that pours into Africa today is wasted or stolen and
accomplishes little other than massaging the consciences of the donors. The United States, for instance, spent $4.6 million for a cereal-production project in Senegal that did not increase grain output by a single bag. It spent another $13 million on a livestock scheme in Mali and later admitted that nothing whatsoever had been achieved. Somalia once refused to accept a $12 million crane from West Germany until the donors paid the importation customs duties. “But this is a gift,” said Bonn’s representative. “That has nothing to do with it; you haven’t paid the duty,” replied the Somali. West Germany paid up. I could cite dozens of similar examples, but nevertheless, the concept of international aid remains a good one. Aid is both worthwhile and essential for Africa’s development. Its failure is that the money is often dispensed and used in the most senseless manner.