Can a New Africa Emerge After Decade of Decline?

Historians may one day look back on the 1980s as Africa’s Decade of Decline, yet from the string of disasters, culminating with Ethiopia’s famine, there appears to be a new realism emerging in black Africa. For the first time, African leaders have admitted in public forums that although some problems are inherited and some are beyond their control, many have been aggravated by--to use the words adopted at a summit in Addis Ababa last year--”some domestic political shortcomings.”

Next March will mark the 30th anniversary of colonialism’s death in black Africa. On March 6, 1957, the British left the Gold Coast after 113 years and that prosperous West African colony became the independent nation of Ghana, the first of 48 African colonies that eventually would break the yoke of European rule.

Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, had studied in the United States in the ‘30s and ‘40s and when he left New York after World War II to lead the movement that would free an entire continent, he wrote: “I saw the Statue of Liberty with her arm raised as if in personal farewell to me. (I said silently) ‘You have opened my eyes to the true meaning of liberty. I shall never rest until I have carried your message to Africa.’ ”

Nkrumah, who was overthrown in 1966 and later died in exile, remains a legendary figure in Africa, even though many of his repressive, socialistic policies laid the foundation for the political instability and economic deterioration that helped propel Ghana--and black Africa as a whole--into today’s steep and steady decline. Sadly, for the legend-builders, it was always easier to dwell on the romance of Africa than to confront its realities.

And the realities of Africa in 1986 are cruel; what has happened there in recent years is tantamount to the effects of a world war. In terms of economic collapse, environmental loss, inadequate leadership and rampaging birth rates, Africa’s crisis is unique, and now, three decades after so much was promised and expected, it seems appropriate to ask a troubling question: What went wrong?

That, in an indirect way, is one of the questions the nine-part TV series, “The Africans,” sets out to answer on the Public Broadcasting Service. To hear Ali A. Mazuri, the documentary’s writer and sole commentator, tell it, Africa has only the exploitative West (from the slave-traders and colonialists of the past to the multinational corporations and arms merchants of the present) to blame for its disastrous condition.

Although Mazuri’s perceptions of Africa are very different from the ones I gathered during eight years traveling the continent, his comments make an important contribution to our understanding of a region that seems to catch our attention only during times of famine and revolution and superpower confrontation. First, we are seeing Africa through the eyes of an intelligent, articulate African, a perspective all too often missing in Western media; second, we are well-reminded that Western policies, like those of the Eastern bloc, are often self-serving, narrowly focused and, yes, exploitative.

But distancing oneself from the West--and thus, from the legacy of colonialism--is not in itself a significant yardstick of achievement, as Mazuri seems to imply it is. The revolutionary Algeria he points to as “one of the few post-colonial successes” was, I found, a weary, economically crippled country whose youth viewed the 1962 victory over France as an increasingly irrelevant platform of policy. The decay of Zaire has as much to do with the corruption of the Mobutu regime as with a decline in copper and cobalt prices. And the execution of former President William Tolbert’s aides in Liberia--I was in Monrovia that day--was not so much an example of “Western carnage” as it was the vindictiveness of the semiliterate army sergeant who had overthrown Tolbert and disemboweled him in his bed.

Certainly, the West must share responsibility for Africa’s failure, but so must the Africans themselves. As for the Europeans: They carved up Africa with artificial boundaries and left a parliamentary system that simply did not work in the tribally oriented politics of young, struggling nations. They left economies based on a single cash crop that were intended to help Europe, not Africa. And they left--after 500 years, dating back to the Portuguese settlements in Mozambique and Angola--a continent dreadfully unprepared for the burdens of nationhood. Zaire, for instance, had only a dozen university graduates among its 25 million people; Guinea-Bissau (formerly Portuguese Guinea) had not a single African doctor, lawyer or accountant; Mozambique had an illiteracy rate of 90%.

Yet the argument that the West is the major purveyor of Africa’s misfortunes leaves important questions unanswered. Why are Liberia and Ethiopia, the only two black African nations never colonized, still among the very poorest, most undeveloped lands on the continent? Why have some countries in Asia been able to achieve astonishing economic growth despite their own colonial heritage?

Part of the answer lies in the policies espoused by Nkrumah, who believed Africans would never win their real freedom until they moved from an agricultural to an industrial economy. When Ghana launched the independence era, Africa produced 95% of its own food; today every country except South Africa is a food importer, and the continent faces no more ominous threat than its inability to feed itself.

That inability is exacerbated by Africa’s fearsome population increase, an issue that leaders have not sufficiently addressed because to do so is to challenge the growth of the tribe and to deny the social-security safety net the elderly need. Africa is looking at a population of 1.6 billion by the year 2025; the continent’s fragile infrastructure will clearly not be able to sustain it.

Perhaps most disturbing is the caliber of African leadership, which has passed to a second-generation of presidents and generals seemingly less distinguished than the Kenyattas, Netos and Senghors who were at the forefront of independence. With few exceptions, their prime concern has been the perpetuation of their own power. In this pursuit they have muffled dissent and silenced the honest debate any free nation needs to apply creative solutions to tough problems.

Yet, in a forum that would have been implausible just a decade ago, representatives from 29 countries gathered recently in Zimbabwe to discuss ways of curtailing population growth. In Tanzania, Madagascar and Somalia, government leaders are accepting the failure of their nationalization policies and are moving toward the free marketplace to reward individual incentive. The Ivory Coast and Cameroon continue to enjoy political stability and economic expansion, and Ghana has used Western-inspired economic reforms to cut inflation from 123% to 10%.

This is a significant transformation and it underscores the thesis that the time is now past when Africa can blame its failures on the injustices of another era. If Africa is to truly develop and fulfill the dreams of self-sufficiency, its modern heritage must be based on the pride of national achievement, not on the flush of victory over colonialism.