The Pangs of Africa’s New Birth

Africans have been dying this summer on the battlefields of Congo. They have been dying at the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province and in simmering conflicts in Angola, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda.

It took South African President Nelson Mandela, the continent’s premier statesman, two weeks just to get Africa’s leaders to sit at the same table to talk peace in Congo. In the meantime, neighboring countries took sides--and injected guns and soldiers--in the brutal civil war there.

Less than six months after President Clinton’s historic tour of Africa touting “the beginning of a new African renaissance,” many Africans worry that their continent’s vaunted rebirth may be stillborn, or at the least, precariously premature.

These Africans now speak of an age of lost--rather than new--opportunities. Others, still upbeat about Africa’s prospects, fear that the litany of recent setbacks is nonetheless exacting a costly public relations toll that could slow the momentum for change. The bad news, they complain, comes just as the world appeared ready to give Africa the benefit of the doubt for the first time since the continent’s wave of independence in the 1960s.

The promise of the new era was born in this decade, which has been marked by unprecedented progress toward democracy and economic reform. But now, age-old scourges--wars and bloody political divisions, economic crisis and disease--are once again dominating discourse from the Red Sea to the Cape of Good Hope.

“The children of Africa, from north to south, from east to west and at the very center of our continent, continue to be consumed by death dealt out by those who have proclaimed a sentence of death on dialogue and reason,” Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s deputy president, scolded in a speech last month.

“The call for Africa’s renewal, for an African renaissance, is a call to rebellion,” Mbeki said. “We must rebel against the tyrants and the dictators, those who seek to corrupt our societies and steal the wealth that belongs to the people.”

The consternation and hand-wringing extends to policymakers at the U.S. State Department. U.S. officials say Washington remains bullish on Africa, but the mood is noticeably subdued as the notion of a bona fide renaissance--crucial to the remaking of American perceptions of Africa--becomes a harder sell from Capitol Hill to Wall Street.

“There is this debate outside Africa about Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism,” said Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. “Once on the continent, you can’t afford to be either. In the worst situation, you have to see a way out, and in the best situation, you have to be aware of the dark spots.”

In a stunning indication of how the situation has worsened, Mandela has found it easier to encourage the new military dictator of Nigeria, which until a few months ago was a pariah state, to commit to democratic, economic and social reforms than to sway his democratically elected neighbors in Namibia and Zimbabwe to refrain from warmongering in Congo.

When the South African president and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan finally convened peace talks on Congo last week, Namibian President Sam Nujoma--whose troops are defending the government of Congolese President Laurent Kabila--didn’t even show up. At the end of the breakfast meeting, it was Mandela who capitulated, suddenly endorsing the military intervention in support of Kabila.

“There was some confusion before,” Mandela told reporters.

The regional talks resumed over the weekend without Mandela, and there were reports Monday that a tentative peace deal had been reached.

Embassy Blasts’ Effect

Even last month’s terrorist attacks at the U.S. embassies here and in neighboring Tanzania, in which Africans were innocent bystanders, fueled an image of a continent once again not in control of its destiny.

“The consequence of the bombings is that Africa could again become the battleground for ideological conflicts that originate outside the continent and where the majority of victims are in fact Africans,” said Salih Booker, chief Africa specialist at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. “It heightens the negative aspects of current perceptions of Africa.”

Even with success stories in places like Uganda, AIDS is exacting a toll on the continent that health officials predict will grow far worse in the next few years; already, according to the United Nations, one in four adults in some parts of Africa is infected with the virus that causes the deadly disease.

Meanwhile, the continent’s much-heralded economic and political turnaround, which followed the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, is beginning to sputter in many countries. There are still shining lights in Africa--Mozambique, for example, after years of civil war now ranks No. 1 on an African “optimism index” compiled by the World Economic Forum--but the continent taken as a whole is struggling to maintain the momentum, economists say.

Estimated economic growth across Africa last year was 3.25%, well below the 4.5% rate posted the year before, according to the International Monetary Fund. Moreover, the World Bank warns, the statistics should be viewed in the sobering context of an annual population growth rate of nearly 3% and the daunting task ahead: About 40% of Africans, the bank says, live on less than $1 a day; without sustained economic growth of at least 6%, it predicts, poverty will remain intractable.

Old-Style Leadership

And in scenes reminiscent of days gone by, some old-style leaders--from Nujoma in Namibia to Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe--are clinging to their offices despite much-talked-about democratic reforms and celebrated examples of democratic succession elsewhere. Most notably, former Botswanan President Ketumile Masire stepped down in April after 18 years, and Mandela has announced that he will retire next year.

In another flash from the past, opposition protesters in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho last month took Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili hostage in Parliament before they were dispersed by police with rubber bullets and water cannons. It appears that the ruling party, unwilling to give up power, may have tampered with recent election results after winning only a fraction of the vote. In another incident, last week outside the Royal Palace, one person was killed and more than a dozen wounded when gunmen opened fire on several hundred protesters.

“The major weakness of the African renaissance is that democracy does not figure too high up on the list for most African leaders,” said John Githongo of the African Strategic Research Institute here in the Kenyan capital. “The biggest problem Africans face is, a majority of our populations still live in fear--not of external powers, but of their own governments.”

The creeping sense of pessimism couldn’t have come at a worse time for Africa’s economic rebirth, which politicians and independent analysts agree is essential for the continent to make a clean break with the past.

With the world economy in turmoil because of crises in Asia, Latin America and Russia, Africa was poised to benefit from the phalanx of international investors scouring the globe for safer emerging markets. According to the World Bank, sub-Saharan Africa receives just $12 billion of the $300 billion in annual foreign private capital flows to the developing world, and less than a quarter of that comes in the form of direct investment.

During his visit in March, Clinton talked up new trade partnerships with the continent, and an entourage of U.S. Commerce Department officials and businesspeople traced his steps--spinning a web of hope and optimism wherever they ventured.

“Too often in my country, there is an unfair gap between the actual opportunities and problems and the perceived opportunities and problems in many African nations, to the detriment of investment and trade for those African nations,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin said during a visit here in July. “This gap is a consequence of not recognizing the differences among nations, and the tendency to see all nations through the prism created by the most troubled.”

For example, Luanda, the Angolan capital, and Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, may be far from Johannesburg, South Africa, on the map, but in the minds of many Western businesspeople, they might as well be nearby suburbs.

One business organization in Johannesburg recently received an inquiry from a U.S. investor requesting information about Nigeria, a country nearly as distant from Johannesburg as New York is from Los Angeles. Such ignorance of geography, say officials in South Africa, is not uncommon--but more important, they say, it reflects a general mind-set among many foreign investors.

U.S. Investors’ Myopia

Luanne Grant, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in South Africa, said U.S. investors in particular tend to view Africa as a continent, not as individual countries. About 90% of chamber members use South Africa mainly as a base for operations elsewhere in Africa, meaning events in places such as Angola and Congo can be crucial to their investment decisions, she said.

“People can get around such things as bad roads by making other arrangements,” Grant said. “But it is very difficult to make other arrangements to establish political stability.”

Officials say there is no evidence of a mass exodus of investment from Africa, but some government and business leaders here and abroad admit to holding their breath.

“It is too early to really tell what will happen,” a U.S. official said. “We all have our fingers crossed.”

The stakes in the still-hoped-for renaissance are huge, particularly in South Africa, where Mandela’s government has spent much of the past four years trying to change negative perceptions of his country and the continent as a whole.

“The call for an African renaissance is really a claim to political leadership on the part of South Africa,” said Mamdani, the Ugandan scholar. “South Africa claims to be the dynamic impulse in terms of African development but also claims to be more than that. . . . It is making a claim to define new horizons for Africa.”

Democracy, foreign investment and export growth have become the mainstays of South Africa’s vision for the continent, with democratic South Africa and a peaceful and oil-rich Angola serving as cornerstones in the south, and a stable and mineral-rich Congo anchoring the center.

But with the peace accord in Angola in shambles, rebellion afoot in Congo and crime and political violence plaguing South Africa, the foundations of “Africa’s second independence”--as the Ford Foundation characterized the encouraging developments in the continent--have been profoundly shaken.

“You cannot have growth in Africa if people are killing one another; you cannot have growth in Africa if societies are crumbling; you cannot have growth in Africa if people are living frightened, fragile lives,” James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, said in a speech to African leaders earlier this year in Ethiopia. “What we have got to do is stop the fighting. And when the fighting stops, we must replace it with economic development, with opportunity, with hope, so that it does not start again.”