Crises, Conflicts Begin to Give Way to Happiness, Hope in Africa

If Africa is dying, the news has not reached this bamboo-fringed village, which has revolutionized itself with a coughing one-cylinder motor and a hole in the ground.

Up the road in Dakar, warfare is the last thing on the minds of well-fed urban middle-class couples in silks and smiles at the African Sunset, who are still dancing at sunrise.

With all the mayhem and misery in Africa these days, there is also happiness and hope. In more than half of the 49 black African states, things are looking up. A few are beginning to boom.

“All you read about Africa is disaster,” said Djibril Diallo, a self-made Senegalese savant with the United Nations. “But most of Africa is something else. I see a whole chain of reasons for hope.”

A fresh look at the once-dark continent revealed similar optimism, from Timbuktu at the Sahara’s edge to the thriving port of Cape Town.

Crises persist, and in some countries festering war and durable dictators block progress. Africa remains the world’s poorest continent, plagued by AIDS epidemics and vulnerable to drought.

Large foreign debts continue to stymie development, and many economies depend heavily on world commodity prices.

But now there is hope for reversing old trends. A majority of Africans are making new headway, whether on a national scale or just in terms of putting a little more food in village cooking pots.

If 7 million refugees are still displaced, they total hardly more than 1% of the population in black Africa. Their number has fallen by a quarter in two years, and it is dropping steadily.

Ethiopia, once the world’s synonym for despair, had a 12.4% economic growth rate in 1996.

Growth should average 5% in sub-Saharan Africa this year, with five countries over 10%, the World Bank says. A majority of economies are doing better than in 1995.

Equatorial Guinea, awash in oil, saw its economy grow by 37% in 1996 and may double that this year. Its growth is so fast that it is left out of Africa’s overall averages to give a realistic picture.

And statistics tell only part of the story in societies where the “informal sector”--undeclared economic activity--can easily equal what is officially on the books.

Because of moves toward democracy, private enterprise and rural development, millions of Africans are living richer, freer lives than many of them thought possible only a few years ago.

Across much of the continent, parents make a similar point. If they can feed and educate their children, and live in relative security, that alone is substantial progress.

Evidence is convincing in places like Fandane, a typical sprawl of thatched huts down a dirt road in Senegal. Some family incomes have quadrupled in a year.

A cooperative diesel-powered mill saves women hours a day of pounding grain. With extra time, they grow vegetables and turn out handicrafts to trade in nearby markets.

With a simple well known as a borehole, women no longer walk miles each day to fetch dirty water. They produce far more food, and most of their children live past the age of 5 now.

By the old rules of African development, motors and pumps were provided by foreign aid workers. Routinely, local authorities and government delegates fought over control until they broke down.

In Fandane, motivated villagers run their own show. When they pay back the few thousand dollars of outside help that got them started, they will invest in new projects.

“My kids will grow up strong and smart,” said Ama Diop, barely 19 herself. To the horror of elders who swore by large families to help with chores, she wants only two children.

Senegalese President Abdou Diouf sees a changing mind-set in much of Africa, not only among leaders but among ordinary people, like those in Fandane, who are taking charge of their own lives.

“Women are the key,” he said in an interview. “With only a little assistance, they can perform miracles to help their families have a better life. And men, by and large, follow their lead.”

On the grand scale, whole countries are turning around.

The Ivory Coast, determined to be an African elephant in league with Asian tigers, is adding oil, minerals, industry and banking to its traditional wealth from coffee and cocoa.

Its capital, Abidjan, looks like a mini-Manhattan plunked down on the French Riviera, a vibrant, glittering metropolis where restaurants serve cheese enchiladas and Korean kim chee.

Prosperity is trickling into the tin-roofed hovels around it. The worst slum--called Washington--was just bulldozed.

Next door, Ghana shows new potential, among other West African states.

Diaspora money pours into Uganda. Neighboring Tanzania, once a write-off, now borders on success. With Kenya, they are renewing the East African Community, which warfare torpedoed decades ago.

South Africa, no longer the enemy, is linked to nearby smaller economies growing on their own. SBC Communications Inc. and Telekom Malaysia just invested $1.26 billion in regional phone systems.

Even in Mali, landlocked with few mineral resources, traditional farmers are proving what they have known all along: With peace and a little outside help, money grows on trees. Fruit is a cash crop.

“Our societies are rich with boundless energy and systems that work,” said Odile Sorgho-Moulinier, the U.N. Development Program director in Senegal. “They only have to be unleashed.”

The principle, economists say, is the same in capital cities across Africa as in remote villages like Fandane.

After nearly four decades of trying to impose centralized systems crippled by corruption and inefficiency, governments are allowing urban businessmen and rural villagers to take the lead.

Foreign donors take pains to support only the most promising large-scale aid projects, focusing instead on what they call “capacity building” and “good governance” at basic levels.

Democracy has softened dictatorial rule in a score of countries. Though often flawed and sometimes fixed, elections allow harsh criticism of leaders who once stifled any hint of dissent.

Guinea, for instance, sank into ruin under a Marxist tyrant, Ahmed Sekou Toure, who was deposed in 1984. The current military leader, Lansana Conte, was later elected president in dubious voting.

But though still hard-pressed, Guinea is attracting investors and developing its bauxite mines. Politicians hold out hope for fair elections soon. And the mood, at least, is decidedly different.

Opposition leader Mamadou Ba, in an interview, excoriated Conte. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he has nothing upstairs,” Ba said. At an earlier time in Guinea, such words could mean death.

“I see quite a few optimistic signs,” said David Berk, a World Bank regional director in Washington. Among them is a new class of leaders prepared to compete for outside capital, he said.

Eric Chinje, a World Bank spokesman, was more direct: “Things are finally starting to click in Africa.”

No one expects miracles. Progress is relative in sub-Saharan Africa, where economic output slipped backward in the 1980s and many countries are worse off than at independence in the 1960s.

The giant nation of Nigeria has huge petroleum reserves, but its refineries are in such disorder that motorists wait hours to fill their tanks. A repressive military government stifles criticism.

Corruption remains rampant, either because of raw greed or because underpaid officials have to feed their families. Crime is frightening in many capitals overrun by jobless men and street kids.

Promise can collapse overnight. The Republic of Congo’s oil fields make it potentially the richest state per capita. But its fragile democracy recently gave way to civil war that killed thousands.

Nonetheless, black Africa is made up of 49 separate countries. As in Asia, they can be as different from one another as North Korea is from Malaysia. Even within sub-regions, few generalities apply.

Sierra Leone emerged from years of bitter fighting to elect a president. Within months, yet another bloody coup plunged the country back into chaos. Diplomacy brought a tenuous truce.

And neighboring Liberia is at peace for a change. Charles Taylor, who never managed to seize power by force, won a reasonably fair election.

As soldiers from Rwanda knifed through Zaire--now Congo--a Zairian named Papa Wemba took the Rwandan capital by storm. A widely loved musician, he packed Kigali stadium with a joyous crowd.

Wemba and four other African artists recorded a rousing song called “Why?” that asks in five languages why leaders choose violence when most Africans want to live peacefully together.

Youssou N’dour, a Senegalese star popular in the United States, sings about traditional African values: family, hard work, spiritual peace, acceptance of hardship.

“It’s a problem of image,” he said in Dakar. “Africans think everything is wonderful in America. And Americans think Africa is all terrible. Both are horribly wrong.”

He was shocked at misery he saw in the United States. Even poor Africans have families and villages to support them, he said. “Americans don’t understand our strongest asset: the smile.”

Wars have ended in Congo, Mozambique, Mali and Liberia, and the wounds can heal quickly.

“Africans have their own ways of solving their own problems if you stay out of the way,” observed Roberto Chavez, longtime World Bank delegate to Mozambique.

After rebels came home from the long civil war, Mozambicans settled 500,000 property claims with only verbal agreement mediated by village chiefs, he said.

Mozambique has no psychiatric care, but local healers cleared up numerous cases of severe post-traumatic stress disorders.

Eritrea freed itself in 1993 after a 30-year war with Ethiopia. Poor but proud, Africa’s newest nation is thriving almost entirely on its own resources.

Rather than accept aid for a new railroad, Eritreans rebuilt the narrow-gauge railway made famous in Evelyn Waugh’s 1930s novel “Scoop.” They dug out sections of track that had been used to fortify bunkers.

Much African optimism is based on a new generation and changing times. Satellite dishes bring Seinfeld to Sahara Desert oases. The Internet links jungle outposts to Wall Street.

In Bamako, Mali, Moktar Thiam’s friends laughed when he set up a computer technology firm a decade ago. Now, despite added staff and partners, he can’t handle all the business.

“Anyone who doesn’t think Africans can make it is out of his mind,” he said. “This continent is bursting with ideas and energy. All we need is some calm and security, and you watch what happens.”

In what President Clinton calls the “post post-colonial era,” old players are ceding what used to be their private territory.

France still looms large in its former colonies, but economic troubles at home and a political shift mean a diminishing role. French troops have retrenched to fewer, smaller bases.

American mining and petroleum companies promote billion-dollar deals from West Africa to Mozambique. Clinton has encouraged a more aggressive approach to investment.

U.S. companies have invested $9 billion in southern Africa alone, comparable to the level in the 15 former Soviet republics, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study.

China is to process chocolate in the Ivory Coast, a partnership that was politically impossible a few years ago. Japan is the largest aid donor.

For the first time, at the Denver summit in June, leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized countries zeroed in on Africa. They pledged more aid to help states attract private capital.

Africans themselves are forming effective regional groupings and investing across borders. And there is a new trend for Africans to tackle their own political problems.

When soldiers took power in Sierra Leone, African heads of state broke their ironclad taboo against internal interference and backed a Nigerian force struggling to turn them out.

President Nelson Mandela of South Africa brought together Mobutu Sese Seko and Laurent Kabila when they were fighting over Zaire. Aides said he shouted at the two until they found some common ground.

Kabila’s victorious blitzkrieg was backed by Uganda and Rwanda, and Mobutu had none of the Western support that had saved him in the past. If allies help Kabila build an economy, Congo’s mineral wealth could benefit a wide swath of Central Africa, diplomats say.

Far below the grander geopolitics, the lessons of Fandane suggest more cause for hope.

Aminata Traore, a Malian restaurant owner with a French doctorate in social psychology, believes village enterprise is the visible tip of something much larger.

She said old-style aid--about $300 billion since 1960--left a graveyard of white elephants and rich leaders. Finally, Africans are adapting their own wisdom to Western technology.

“This will take time,” she said. “It’s not enough for the press to criticize a president. First we have to understand what a good president is. We need to consolidate our own values.”

But Traore is hopeful.

“Africa is rebuilding what the West has destroyed in us,” she said. “We are starting to produce something, and it is not the dreams of others, but our dreams.”