Africa: A Promise for Progress From a Light Switch That Works

There had been a series of arrests in Kenya, a small group of leftists seized for producing pamphlets in dimly lit kitchens. Searches had turned up tattered paperback editions of Karl Marx. In so clear-cut a case, defense attorneys were considered unnecessary and the trials were short.

It was another of those times when rumors loped through the capital like starving dogs, finding scraps of explanation in the refuse of every coincidence.

“I hear the army is on alert for Madaraka Day.”

“All police leaves have been canceled.”

“It’s the Kikuyu, you know. They are very unhappy. My cook was telling me the other day . . . . “

No more than a handful of African capitals are immune to this sort of rumor, in societies where the press is commonly muzzled and most insider information is passed by word-of-mouth, subject to distortion and exaggeration.

After spending years living in Nairobi, I had my own network of sources and sounding boards, so I went to see them.

None seemed particularly upset about the spate of arrests. But a couple of diplomats predicted that Kenya was in for a “major social upheaval” within five years. Pressures were building, one said.

Another observer, an old hand at studying the mysteries of Kenyan politics, discounted these predictions as nonsense. He took what he called the long view that Kenya, while it might have some difficult times, would continue to be peaceful and relatively prosperous.

The older hand was probably right. But who knows? If President Daniel Arap Moi were to be deposed overnight, no one would be surprised. One could look back and point to ominous signs.

This unpredictability still holds sway more than a quarter of a century after most of Africa became independent. In the history of nations, 25 or 30 years is not much time, and it has not been time enough for Africa to develop institutions that take precedence over the cult of personal, chief-like power.

In Africa, personality counts, the man at the top, not the constitution and not the party and certainly not the “people,” over whom so much fuss is made by autocratic leaders.

Nigerians believed they had recorded a major achievement when, in 1979, they promulgated a new constitution based closely on the American model. Nigerians like to think of themselves as the pre-eminent people of Africa--the most sophisticated, the most powerful and influential--and their new constitution seemed to give them added swagger.

This document, this new “institution,” with its separation of powers, its guarantee of basic freedoms, would set Nigeria still further apart. The constitution lasted four years; then the army came back to power and swept it aside.

And yet, while constitutions and the courts and the African press remain weak in the face of so much presidential authority, some positive changes have gradually become evident in the past six years, mainly in economic affairs.

The leading economic influence in Africa during the 1980s has been Western, represented by the International Monetary Fund. As the bringer of largely bad news, the IMF is not much liked . African presidents have lashed it for years as a tool of “imperialist” or “neocolonialist” exploitation, and presented themselves as the unwilling victims of IMF dictates.

As the lender of last resort--in effect, the doctor called to the emergency room when the patient is bleeding on the table--the IMF does in fact exact stiff conditions.

But the IMF’s free-market philosophy seems to be steadily gaining ground , if not with African presidents then certainly with post-independence economists who see free enterprise as a return to something far more “authentic” to African culture than the Marxist or socialist ideologies imported 30 years ago when the New Africa was regarded as a sort of proving ground for political visionaries.

The most famous of the visionaries failed grandly. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, left his country in such political and economic ruin that it has taken nearly 20 years to begin (with IMF help) to repair the damage.

The other leading visionary is Julius Nyerere, who stepped down last year as president of Tanzania. His great legacy will not be the African socialism of his dreams but, rather, the lesson that the theory would not take root in the real soil of his country--or the continent--despite the deep appeal of his early writings.

Nyerere’s influence in Africa was, in fact, massive. With mwalimu (the teacher) as a guiding light, many African governments tried to do too much for their people--Zambia is a good example--and went broke in the effort.

African economies are in bad shape for many reasons, but foremost among them is government obsession with control--control of the exchange rate, of imports, of exports, of the issuance of licenses for any economic activity. The IMF argument, that such control works against a healthy economy, competes against 25 years of orthodoxy or corruption or both. But here and there, in countries like Zaire and Ghana, the argument is being felt.

Will the argument take hold in time? But what does in time mean? In 1980, in Somalia, a resident expert predicted that if such-and-such didn’t happen, and soon, it would be (with a shake of the head) “down the tubes for Somalia.” It was the kind of quote a reporter new to Africa was bound to write down in his notebook.

Down the tubes for Somalia. I waited, but nothing happened.

What the expert in Somalia meant, of course, was that things would simply get harder and harder for Somalis, and he was right. The land endures, even in its depletion. And Ethiopia will not go away, nor will its gloomy, oppressive government, though millions have fled its borders and millions more would like to flee. According to the United Nations, half the world’s 10 million refugees are African.

Millions more, not officially counted as refugees, are wanderers displaced in their own countries. The sidewalks on River Road in central Nairobi are covered at night with sleeping people, wrapped in plastic sheeting. All over Africa, ragged shantytowns around the capitals continue to grow.

Hunger and malnutrition will not go away either, at least not soon, not even with bumper crops of food stored in Africa’s larders. For as long as any expert can predict, there will be corners of Africa where the rain doesn’t fall, where the crops fail and the animals die--and where the roads are too poor or the trucks too few for relief to reach the hungry.

It is hard to imagine Africa’s future as anything worse than it has already endured. But it is possible. The Biafran civil war in Nigeria took the lives of more than half a million Nigerians. Africa’s magnificent capacity for forgiveness has healed most of those old wounds, but there are some who see Nigeria headed for more trouble in the years ahead. A renewal of the civil war in Sudan, exploited to the fullest by its Libyan and Ethiopian neighbors, promises to keep that country in tatters for the near future.

Uganda is the prime example of what happens when chaos reigns. In the worst of times, wholesale murder, human degradation and deprivation go on in a kind of black hole because no one gets in to see the horror at first hand. It is simply too dangerous. In the last three years of the Ugandan civil war, not a single journalist--nor any other foreign observer--was allowed into the bush with the Ugandan army to see what it was doing. Reports came out piecemeal, second- and third-hand, from survivors.

There is a new government in Uganda now, with a new chance. The leader, Yoweri Mouseveni, shows promise of bringing real peace . But it remains a fragile promise and people already worry about the future of the country should something happen to Mouseveni. Assassination can never be discounted as a real danger, and if something happens to Mouseveni it could plunge the country into another round of killing.

Now, in the aftermath of war, a fraction of its terror is visible in the human skulls stacked up along the Ugandan roadsides. A woman in a small village recently led me beyond the stacks of displayed bones, through the towering elephant grass, to look at the killing grounds. The flesh was gone, but the clothes remained, stiffened with rot, still in the shape of the men who wore them when their heads were split by a machete blow.

Moving through the glistening grass, putting one foot in front of another on the soft mud of the path, I tried to imagine that walk for condemned and killer, also thinking vaguely that it would be raining again soon, and farmers would plow these fields.

I remember a young Nigerian man in Lagos, discussing, with high hope, the eventual return of a civilian government in his country. I asked him what he wanted of it. He answered quickly that he wanted no more skyscrapers, no more billion-dollar steel mills.

“I want to go to that light switch, and turn it on, and get electricity,” he said. “I want every Nigerian, in every village, to be able to go to a tap and turn it on and get clean water. I want every farmer to be able to raise his crop and get it to a road and get it to market.”

He stopped and looked at me.

“That’s all?” I asked.

“That’s all.”

There are more and more men and women like him in Africa. Their day will come. That is progress.