Documentary : Out of Africa--and Back--Finds Faded Hopes : Three decades later, famine, corruption and terror have replaced optimism as the watchwords of the continent.
A little more than 30 years ago, in the winter of 1962, I flew from New York on a dark night slashed with snow and landed in Dakar the next morning in sun so glaring it pained my eyes. The brightness seemed a fitting metaphor for a first moment in Africa. It was the time of optimism and hope, when African peoples were snapping their shackles to take a rightful place among the world’s independent states.
A few weeks ago, I returned to Dakar to cover U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the 28th annual summit conference of the Organization of African Unity. I had not worked in Africa for almost 20 years. I had last covered an OAU meeting in 1973.
No one proclaims optimism about Africa anymore. Famine, corruption, terror, tyranny are its watchwords now. Africa may not even be at the nadir of its fortunes. It could sink more.
Yet Dakar has barely changed in 30 years. It is still a poor and hectic city of fading grandeur, the colonial capital of all of French West Africa before independence, but only the capital of small peanut-producing Senegal now.
The grand plaza downtown, called the Place de l’Independance, looks exactly as it did in 1962, distinguished by the elegant Chamber of Commerce in grand French colonial style and by parallel rows of dank, lusterless high-rise apartment buildings. These flats still house diplomats, European businessmen and rich Africans.
The city--with a population of more than a million--seems more crowded, more faded than before. The tiny Citroen Deux Chevaux no longer dominates the avenues--cars are larger, though more battered now. Fewer men sport the ample, dignified Senegalese robes known as boubous; there are more trousers and shirts. Perhaps this is a sign of modernity or, since boubous are expensive, a sign of poverty.
The stalls around the fraying downtown market still brim with goods and foods, and the textile shops on nearby streets are as ubiquitous as ever.
Only one change struck me. Senegalese youths jogged along beach paths on the corniche that leads to town. Others lifted weights or did calisthenics. Senegal boasted no visible joggers or weightlifters or gymnasts 30 years ago. News of the Olympic prowess of Kenyans, Tanzanians and Ethiopians had obviously seeped westward.
There is something warm and pleasant in finding a city trapped in time. By any measure of development, it’s true, three decades of stagnation hardly count as achievement. Yet, compared to the doleful statistics from the rest of Africa, Dakar is far ahead by standing still.
The OAU sessions, still prone to posturing and bombast, carried me back to that 1973 summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia--and to a depressing irony.
African leaders were once loath to acknowledge starvation and suffering in their midst. Emperor Haile Selassie’s attempts to hide the shame of famine in upcountry Ethiopia had embittered the university students in Addis Ababa and ensured their implacable contempt for him.
But a breakthrough of sorts occurred at the 1973 meeting. During a closed session, the African leaders voted to call on the world to help the continent’s starving. The OAU press officer announced that decision later, but, when the press corps asked him for copies of the resolution, he had to admit in embarrassment that he didn’t have any. They would be ready in a week or so. It seemed as if Africa wanted to cry out for help, but not too loudly.
That press officer was Mohammed Sahnoun of Algeria, who is now the U.N. official in charge of relief operations in Somalia. By all accounts, he is doing a heroic job in dire, dangerous straits and does not hesitate to cry out loudly for help to a nation crushed by one of the worst catastrophes in African history.
As we talked about Sahnoun in the lobby of the Hotel President on the beach outside Dakar, a U.N. official, who has flown in and out of Mogadishu, despaired of the horror in Somalia and its inanity. “Not only are they from the same tribe,” he said about the warring subclans. “Not only do they speak the same language and have the same ethnicity. There is not one single shred of difference between them ideologically. They are only interested in power, and it cannot be shared.”
The conversation made me recall my first visit to Mogadishu 25 years ago and an interview with then-Somali Prime Minister Abdirazak Haji Hussein. With both the United States and the Soviet Union eager to seduce Somalia because of its strategic location, the country on the Horn of Africa received more foreign aid per capita than any other nation on the continent in 1967--and showed almost nothing for it.
“Our problem is how to make use of the aid we have now, not get more of it,” Prime Minister Abdirazak explained. “It’s easy to receive aid, but it’s not equally easy to make use of it.”
Somalis had a reputation for frankness. No other African leader would say that then.
Of course, no African leader, no matter how frank, could say that now. In this era of neglect, no African state gets more help than it needs.
The public sessions of the OAU summit conference still ring with emptiness. In the old days, leader after leader would take the podium to extol the virtues of socialism without meaning or understanding it. Now, at Dakar, leader after leader took the podium to extol the virtues of democracy without meaning or understanding it.
But not many outsiders care what these leaders say. A couple of decades ago, African leaders had worldwide reputations. Correspondents recorded what Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania and Leopold Senghor of Senegal had to say. Some figures like Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, no matter how unimpressive, came out of history. The ogres like Idi Amin of Uganda were larger than life.
This year, the mantle of celebrity fell only on a pair who did not belong to the club. Neither was a government leader. The first, Nelson Mandela, the head of South Africa’s African National Congress, attracted attention wherever he stepped.
The second celebrity was Jesse Jackson. Some Senegalese and African-Americans want to turn Dakar’s island of Goree, a slave depot a couple of centuries ago, into a monument to the black diaspora. Jackson was there to support the project. Although he mispronounced African names and French phrases, his speech obviously delighted his audience.
Over the years I have often tried to catalogue the reasons why--to borrow a phrase from the title of a Nigerian novel by Chinua Achebe (who had borrowed it from a W. B. Yeats poem)--things fell apart.
There are a host of reasons for Africa’s failure: a colonial system that, by its nature, could not impart democracy; the prevalence of tribalism--the African feeling, often justified, that only the tribe guaranteed security; an ugly elitism that encouraged the newly rich to turn their backs on the masses; the failure by European colonial powers to bequeath American-type federal systems that would have allowed regions and tribes to share power; the penchant by aid givers for grandiose development schemes that overwhelmed small African ministries and usually withered in failure; the neglect that set in swiftly like rigor mortis after the failures, and the overload of humanitarian horror stories that made much of the world shut its eyes almost in self-defense.
But I know this catalogue tells only a small part of the story. At a lecture in a British university a couple of years ago, the novelist Achebe said Africans had been betrayed by their leaders. I am sure that he is right. Yet I am puzzled at how leaders as different as the tyrant Idi Amin and the idealist Julius Nyerere could both fail.
More than 20 years ago, I sat in on a child-care class run by a Peace Corps volunteer for young mothers in upcountry Senegal. After a few minutes, one of the women, looking closely at me, finding me overweight and balding and not very articulate, suddenly stood up and walked across the room. She put a hand on my thigh, squeezed tightly, and announced to the rest of the class, “He looks just like John F. Kennedy.”
I doubt if she had ever seen a photo of him.
Africa had a warmth and innocence then. They were qualities that made you feel that Africa had a chance to solve its problems and forge ahead.
On a trip back for only a few days after so many years, I cannot say I found much of that warmth and innocence around. But perhaps they are still there somewhere.
30 Years of Trauma: Some Key African Events
1962: Algeria and Uganda become independent.
1964: Zambia, Kenya and Tanzania (combining Tanganyika and Zanzibar) become republics.
1965: Revolution in Algeria deposes President Ben Bella.
Rhodesia issues unilateral declaration of independence.
Gambia becomes independent.
1971: Maj. Gen. Idi Amin becomes Uganda’s strongman.
1973: Organization of African Unity meets in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
1974: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie is deposed.
1975: Ethiopian troops battle secessionist guerrillas in Eritrea province.
Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe are granted independence from Portugal.
1976: South African blacks battle police in Soweto anti-apartheid riots.
President Jean Bedel Bokassa crowns himself Emperor Bokassa I in Central African Empire.
1977-78: Zaire’s Shaba province is invaded.
1979: Dictators Amin in Uganda and Bokassa in Central African Empire are overthrown.
1980: Military launches coup in Liberia.
Rhodesia becomes independent as Zimbabwe.
1985: Military coups occur in Nigeria, Uganda and Sudan.
1990: Rebels overthrow Chadian President Hissene Habre.
South Africa frees black leader Nelson Mandela from prison.
1991: Ethiopian President Mengistu Haile Mariam flees under rebel pressure.
Somalia dictator Mohamed Siad Barre driven from power; country wracked by civil war and famine.
Angola and rebels sign peace pact.
SOURCES: World Almanac and Book of Facts; Information Please Almanac; Timetables of History, 1979; The United States in Africa; Political Handbook of the World
