Colorless Green Ideas

Dark Continent Rising

Dark Continent Rising
The Fate of Post-colonial Africa
February 23, 2006

As of this writing, 315 million Africans survive on a single dollar a day – less than half of what European cows are subsidized on. 184 million Africans – a third of the continent’s population – suffer from severe malnutrition, and only 41% have access to basic medical services. Another 300 million are without access to safe drinking water, and only 1 in 5 is fortunate enough to receive a marginal education.

We’ve all heard the statistics a thousand times before, reeled off by six-figure celebrities and imperious rock stars in desperate TV spots. Just like the words “freedom” and “liberty” in a White House press conference, we’ve heard them so many times that they’ve lost any and all meaning. For most Westerners, it’s as impossible to conceptualize 300 million starving people as it is to envision a world without Big Macs, TiVo, and Paris Hilton, but nevertheless, the reality is there, and while changing the channel may make Bono and his Ray Bans disappear, it isn’t doing a damn thing for Africa.

Its gotten to the point where causality is entirely irrelevant, leaving arrogance and blind ethnocentrism to fill in the blanks. “Why don’t they just institute democracy and market reforms? Why don’t they stop proliferating? Why don’t they just stop killing one another?”

Nothing is that black-and-white, and it doesn’t help that Africa’s problems started over 500 years ago.

Near the end of the 15^th century, around the same time that Columbus discovered the Americas, the burgeoning Portuguese Empire established its first trading colony in Africa along the southern Gold Coast, in what is now present-day Ghana. Its vast abundance of untapped natural resources and native slaves soon proved too enticing for the rest of the European imperial powers to ignore, and by the beginning of the First World War the entire continent was conquered and divided among Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Portugal.

The consequences on the native African equilibrium were overwhelming. Over 60 million natives were abducted and forced into the lucrative slave trade to work in mines and on plantations, and millions more died at sea from over-crowding, malnutrition, and disease. The competing colonial powers threw up state boundaries wherever they pleased, paying no regard to local ethnic, religious, and cultural realities, which resulted in centuries of brutal civil war and hopelessly stifled development. They did next to nothing for the welfare of the people, and instead concentrated on strengthening white minority rule and exploiting Africa’s rich resources.

But, as all stout-hearted and proud people eventually do, the Africans united to overcome their oppressors. When India won independence from the British Empire in 1947, a wave of revolutionary uprising swept over Africa, and the imposed governments finally withdrew or were overthrown one after another. By the mid 60’s, when the world’s superpowers were busy putting men into space and playing with nuclear missiles, Africa was just finally emerging from its colonial dark age.

Tragically, Africa’s newest political elite had inherited their only knowledge of state governance from their colonial masters, and most rose to power through inspired tyranny and bloodshed. Their governments invariably fell apart, of course, because once they seized power they quickly realized that they had no idea what to do with it.

Rebel factions and guerilla armies seemed to materialize and multiply overnight, all touting themselves as the “Liberation Armies” and “Patriotic Fronts” that would restore order and justice to their forsaken homelands, but in the end most turned out to be the same child-killers and rapists that they aimed to overthrow. Between 1960 and 1980 alone there were 70 coups and 13 presidential assassinations in Africa, and so it went – another day, another despot.

The economy didn’t have a chance, and functional social services remained quiescent pipe dreams; Western luxuries that had been built on African slave labor. International standards on human rights mattered only when a government needed a faux-platform on which to promote itself, but other than that it was business as usual, with ritual genital mutilation, child soldiering, and summary executions being the norm.

Perhaps the biggest mistake in the collective administration of post-colonial Africa, however, was the preservation of its ridiculous political borders (of the 50 independent countries in modern Africa, all but two have retained their original colonial boundaries). Needless to say, maintaining political stability is a trifle difficult in a country with over 30 different ethnic minorities, an equal number of different spoken languages, and a half-dozen prominent religions – especially when at least one side of the warring population wants to display your head on a pike at the palace gates.

The rest of the world remained blissfully ignorant to the extent of African interethnic conflict until the summer of 1994, when the tiny inland country of Rwanda descended into a horrific genocidal war. Over a period of just 100 days, some 800,000 Hutu Africans were hacked to death by machete-wielding extremists and left to rot in open mass graves. The United Nations failed to preempt the violence largely because of a lack of support from its leading member states, particularly the U.S., who, in typical Western fashion, refused to “waste” troops, and equipment on a country that had “nothing to speak of except human beings.”

While the worst may now be over, it seems that with every conflict resolved, two more arise to take its place. Indeed, war seems to encompass a quarter of the great continent at any given time, with today’s battles being waged in Algeria, Zimbabwe, Chad, Senegal, Uganda, Côte d'Ivoire, Somalia, and Sudan.

Sadly, it’s going to take a lot more than celebrity-endorsed fundraisers and self-indulgent, overtly commercialized mega-concerts to change Africa. At the very least, it’s going to require a serious aid commitment on behalf of the world’s richest countries, or – and how’s this for a crazy idea – on behalf of the original European colonial powers that left Africa in this pitiable state to begin with. If the international community can force Germany to pay reparations for the murder of well over 6 million people during the holocaust, then surely the former colonial powers can be coerced to restitute Africa for its losses, which were exponentially higher, right? Right?

Well, not exactly. It’s hard to get governments to acknowledge their atrocities at all, let alone those that had been ongoing for well over 500 years. There’s also the fact that the UN is somewhat irrelevant without the support of the United States, and Mr. Bush has made it perfectly clear that he no longer cares for a multilateral global community.

Foreign aid isn’t really a viable solution either, given that the current system is little more than a complex web of international back-scratching. For example, the United States, which is the wealthiest country in the world, contributes one third of its multi-billion dollar foreign aid budget to Saudi Arabia, a nation that constitutes just .001% of the world’s population and is already one of the richest and most militarily dominant state in the Middle East. As unjust as it may seem, this staggering imbalance makes perfect rational sense when one considers that Saudi Arabia currently supplies America with 1.72 million barrels of crude oil per day.

It’s a hard fact to admit, but the international system is one of Bismarck’s realpolitiks – a boisterous company of rational, self-interested states engaged in a constant battle to offset – and subsequently equalize – the balance of power. It’s a game in which Africa is perpetually the loser, unless, by some rare stroke of good fortune, it finds itself on the winning team – in which case can be assured that it was picked last.

It has become painfully obvious that Africans are going to have to take matters into their own hands and address their myriad problems from the top down, from some authority above the level of the individual state. Thankfully, they’ve begun to do just that – on July 9, 2002, leaders from all over the continent converged on Durban, South Africa to commemorate the inception of the African Union, an intergovernmental organization dedicated to attaining and securing democracy, human rights, and a common African economy. Sound familiar? It should – it’s the exact blueprint of the European Union. It seems impossible, given the catastrophic levels of African despotism, war, famine, and disease, but the EU grew up under similar conditions – it was first established in 1951, after the Second World War had devastated the European economy and wiped out 10% of its population.

It will surely take generations, maybe even a half-century or two, but Africa is finally poised to make inroads toward a stable political atmosphere and a prosperous economy. It’s an unimaginably ambitious and difficult project, and only the faintest glimmer of hope, but at least it’s something. After all, in a land that has seen naught but pestilence and war for over 500 years, even the slightest shred of optimism can propel men to achieve great things.

posted by Sylpheed @ 1:08 PM