The Africans (5 page)

The people of Djibouti, a pint-sized East African country, speak French; the closest other French-speaking Africans are nearly seven hundred miles away. The nomadic Masai of Kenya and Tanzania speak Masai, which has little similarity to any other tongue used in those countries. The Equatorial Guineans are the only people in black Africa whose national language is Spanish. In the rural areas
of many countries the language barrier makes it impossible for people in neighboring villages to communicate. When President Daniel arap Moi makes one of his infrequent trips to northern Kenya he speaks Swahili, a language introduced by Arab traders, but the people there do not understand much Swahili and Moi does not understand their tribal tongues. Just the same, people gather obediently to hear his speeches and sit nodding their heads in agreement.

Imagine what would happen if the United States had a similar problem. If you were a manufacturer in Milwaukee and spoke only English, you could not communicate with your suppliers in Chicago; if you were a state senator from Los Angeles, you could not understand a legislative debate in Sacramento; if you were a long-distance truck driver crossing Montana, you would have trouble ordering a meal in Butte, Great Falls and Helena. What would happen? You would do exactly what the rural African does: you would stay within the security of your linguistic boundaries.

Only one country, Cameroon, officially uses two European languages, French and English. But the people who come from the old British part of Cameroon speak little or no French, while the people from the old French region speak little or no English. Meetings between Cameroon officials often bog down on the language problem. The government, though, seldom supplies interpreters for such meetings because the country is meant to be bilingual. As a result, few people understand one another until everyone drops French and English and begins speaking pidgin English, a language that developed in the slave depots of West Africa for the same reason that Swahili developed in East Africa: the slave traders needed a language to give orders to the slaves, and the slaves, representing many different tribes, needed a language to communicate with one another. Today pidgin is a written language that combines many English words with African grammar and syntax.

The Reverend M. G. M. Cole, an African who spent several years in Britain, once delivered an eloquent Sunday sermon against the imposition of a single-party system in Sierra Leone: “Teday the country happ. Make dis thing go as ee de go, en den de go. Nor cause any trouble. Nor gee the president headache … Oona nor amborgin am … nor forget two party. We nor want one party.”

Cole spoke the Queen’s English impeccably, but in this case he was just doing what he had to do to communicate—speak Krio, a language that grew out of pidgin English and is understood by 80
percent of the Sierra Leoneans. What he said translates as: “Today the country is happy. Let’s continue things as it is, as they are. Don’t cause any trouble. Don’t give the president a headache … Don’t you humbug him … Don’t forget the two-party system. We don’t want a one-party state.”

The colonization of Africa brought languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian) that enabled Africans to communicate with the outside world and with one another. But the hodgepodge pattern that emerged when the European powers divided Africa did little to unify the land linguistically. Kenya, where about four dozen languages are spoken, is a fairly typical example of how an African country copes with the language barrier.

Swahili (properly known as Kiswahili) is the most widely spoken language in Kenya and, like English, is an “official” language. In 1975 President Jomo Kenyatta remarked casually one day that henceforth Swahili would be the only language used in parliament, as the constitution required. A mild panic ensued, and lawmakers rushed out to buy Swahili dictionaries. Some of them made no headway at all and therefore did not utter another word in parliamentary debate for months. Before long the constitution was amended; English returned as the main language of parliament.

Most Kenyans living in the city speak three languages—English and Swahili, neither of which they may command firmly, and a tribal tongue. Business and the affairs of state are conducted in English. Young children learn Swahili in school with English taught as a second language, but the language of Nairobi University is English. The government runs two radio stations, one in English and one in Swahili, and the six hours of daily television are about evenly divided between the two languages. In the deep countryside, peasant farmers and herders generally speak only their tribal language.

The language barrier is one of the biggest obstacles preventing Kenya and other countries from developing a true sense of national unity. How can Kenyans think of themselves as a national people if they don’t even have a single language unifying them? Language is one of the most important instruments of nation-building, a potentially powerful unifying force.

Demographically, Africa is a young continent: half the population is no more than fifteen years old. And the babies keep coming—one
city hospital alone, Mama Yemo in Kinshasa, Zaire, delivers more than 50,000 babies a year. Kenya has the highest population growth rate in the world (4 percent), and Rwanda is one of the world’s most densely populated countries (444 people per square mile). The rugged, spectacularly beautiful hills and mountains of Rwanda are tiered like giant staircases. On each level, hundreds of feet above the valley floors, a family clan lives and farms. The dirt roads that wind through the valleys and across the hills are as busy as the sidewalks of New York’s Fifth Avenue during lunch hour, a shoulder-to-shoulder procession of pedestrians—most of them barefoot and many of them drunk on homemade banana beer—in constant, seemingly undirected motion.

But Africa’s problem isn’t that it’s densely populated; the problem is that it’s unevenly populated. Zambia, twice as big as California, has only 5.3 million people; Rwanda, the size of Maryland, has 4.5 million. There are 30 persons per square mile in Africa, about the same as in the Soviet Union and North America, and far less than the 170 per square mile squeezed into Europe and Asia. The comparison is deceptive, though. About one third of Africa—or an area twice the size of India—is virtually uninhabitable, and some countries (like Kenya) are already using every inch of cultivatable land. No government except South Africa’s has the resources to feed and provide adequate services for its people.

Population control remains a sensitive issue in black Africa, and few sensible politicians dare speak firmly in its favor. To do so would be to challenge the growth of an individual’s tribe, to deprive parents of the hands needed to till the fields today and care for the elderly tomorrow, to denounce religious and traditional beliefs that have belonged to Africa for generations. Some governments consider birth control morally decadent. Others view it as an imperialistic plot to depopulate the Third World. But every argument ignores the unsettling fact that Africa’s growth rate is more rapid than any continent’s and represents the gravest threat facing Africa today.

If you look ahead and double Africa’s population—which the United Nations predicts will happen by the year 2000—while halving the governmental services, a frightening scenario becomes quite plausible: governments grow weaker and crumble under waves of civil unrest; populations shift across borders as people migrate in search of food, land, goods and jobs; conflict and chaos erupt with
too many people competing for too few commodities; foreign powers step into the vacuum, creating conditions of confrontation that pit the continent against itself, one bloc favoring the West, the other the East.
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Many demographers argue that Africans will not have fewer children until they perceive that to do so is in their economic interest and until they are assured that the children they do have will reach adulthood. This will happen, the argument goes, only after the family’s standard of living improves, along with its security and health. In the developed world it has been well established that population control follows—rather than leads to—improved economic conditions.

Africa as yet shows no signs of following that trend. Kenya, for example, has made as much economic progress as any non-oil-producing black nation since independence. But its population growth rate is four times that of the United States—and growing. In 1960, just before independence, the average Kenyan female had 6.2 children; in 1970, she had 7.2; by 1980, 8.3. There are two possible conclusions: first, that Africa does not fit into the established pattern; second and more likely, that the standard of living has not improved sufficiently, and Africans feel even more threatened economically than they did during the colonial era.

Thirty African countries have growth rates of over 2 percent a year; ten others have over 3 percent. Only Gabon, in West Africa, has managed to achieve population stability—largely because 30 percent of the women have venereal disease. The government’s response has been to build a $10 million fertility center to see how its people can produce more and keep pace with the rest of Africa.

Indeed, few concepts are as deeply ingrained in the African psyche as the need and the desire to produce. In many cultures an infertile man is an outcast; a barren woman is shunned and scorned. “If I cannot give my women children, I might as well be dead,” a Masai cattle herder told me. The late king of Swaziland, Sobhuza II, Master of the Spears (1899–1982), fathered more than five hundred children by his hundred or so wives. In Moslem countries such as Niger and Upper Volta, it is common for men to have four wives and twenty or twenty-five children. Even in capitals that are predominantly Christian, men often have a city wife and a country
wife. The country wife of a Kenyan government minister, for instance, is probably illiterate and plump; she remains on the
shamba
(farm, or garden) to take care of the crops, and he visits her perhaps once a week. The city wife, stylish if not articulate, accompanies her husband to the various social functions he must attend.

In March 1977 Jean-Bédel Bokassa, leader of what was then the Central African Empire (now the Central African Republic), declared a national holiday for the birth of his thirtieth child and heir-apparent, Saint Jean de Bokassa de Berengo de Bouyangui de Centrafrique. The first cable of congratulations came from Idi Amin, then Uganda’s president, who noted that he himself had thirty-two children. Said Amin: “May God bless you and give you more children.”

The social and economic implications of Africa’s preoccupation with virility, particularly when combined with its rampant urbanization, are disruptive and ominous. Unable to support his large family, the able-bodied male leaves the farm to find a salaried job. His wife remains behind to tend the crops and raise the children, debilitating, perhaps permanently, the extended family unit that is ordinarily a source of such strength in Africa.
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In the city the new arrival soon learns that he has no employable skills. He joins the growing legions of urbanized Africans whose aimless existence is spent on street corners and in coffee houses. Because of increased demands on city services, they tend to disintegrate; public transportation breaks down; hospital beds are shared by two and three patients; electrical blackouts occur often; crime becomes a major social problem.
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(In no Christian country today are city streets safe, for African or European, after dark. Interestingly, this is not true of the Moslem countries where people follow their religious teachings more faithfully. You can walk the streets of Zanzibar, Tanzania, or Mogadishu, Somalia, or a dozen other Islamic cities at any hour without the faintest worry of being robbed.)

As the cities become more crowded, African governments are forced to devote an increasingly larger share of their budgets to
urban services and development, to the detriment of the rural areas, where 80 percent of Africa’s people still live. That, too, gives impetus to the urbanization. In Nairobi, for example, there are 452 doctors at Kenyatta Hospital, the city’s largest, but there is only one doctor in Kenya’s desolate northern quarter, a region about the size of Iowa. In the Central African Republic, the country’s only banks are in Bangui, the capital. In Chad, a country twice the size of Texas, there are no paved roads 120 miles outside the capital, N’Djamena.

Seeing the decay of the cities, many Western visitors are startled to learn how potentially prosperous Africa is. Like a closet millionaire, it hides the riches that future generations on distant continents will need to prosper, produce, even survive. It has 40 percent of the world’s potential hydroelectric power supply, the bulk of the world’s diamonds and chromium, 30 percent of the uranium in the non-Communist world, and 50 percent of the world’s gold, 90 percent of its cobalt, 50 percent of its phosphates, 40 percent of its platinum, 7.5 percent of its coal, 8 percent of its known petroleum reserves, 12 percent of its natural gas, 3 percent of its iron ores, and millions upon millions of acres of untilled farmland. There is not another continent blessed with such abundance and diversity.

But youth and wealth have not provided the foundation or momentum for development and progress. I would be hard pressed to name more than four non-oil-exporting countries—Kenya, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and Malawi—where there has been meaningful economic development, political stability and an emerging middle class. Elsewhere the portrait of Africa is a bleak one of chilling consequences, for the continent is not catching up with the rest of the world, it is falling further behind. Africa is no longer part of the Third World. It is the Fourth World.

According to the United Nations Council on Africa, the economics of thirty of sub-Sahara Africa’s forty-six countries have actually gone backward since independence. The real per capita income of the non-oil producers has increased less than 1 percent over the past decade, and 60 percent of the 370 million people in sub-Sahara Africa are malnourished. Seventeen black states and 150 million people entered 1980 facing what the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization called “catastrophic” food shortages.