The Africans (53 page)

Shortly before Limann took office, an American diplomat asked
the president-elect what he was going to do to encourage the foreign investment Ghana so desperately needed. “Encourage it?” Limann asked. “We won’t have to. As soon as we have a civilian government, foreign investment will pour into Ghana.”

It didn’t. Admirable as Ghana’s return to civilian rule was, by 1982 the country had slipped so far backward that no one, least of all the Ghanaians, had any faith left in its future. Ghana’s national debt at the time was nearly $2 billion; it was eighty-nine months behind on its loan repayments; its inflation rate topped 100 percent a year. Shortages of essential commodities were so severe that, as a Christmas present, nearby Nigeria sent Ghana twenty-three truck-loads of food and medicine. Even Limann was not sure that he could hold the place together. “I am sitting on a time bomb,” he said.

On New Year’s Eve 1981, the bomb went off. Jerry Rawlings, who had been scuttled into retirement by Limann’s civilian government, stepped from the shadows with gun in hand and the support of the army. Within six hours Limann had been placed under house arrest, accused of corruption and mismanagement, and Rawlings had taken power for the second time in twenty-seven months. Ghana’s overjoyed soldiers promptly went on a looting rampage in Accra, cleaning out the shops of anything that wasn’t nailed down. “We are asking for nothing more than proper democracy,” Rawlings said somewhat inexplicably in a broadcast to the nation.

Like every African country, Ghana pays a stiff price today because it still trades principally with the developed world, not with its neighbors. This is another legacy of the one-commodity economies introduced by the colonialists and another retardant to Africa’s economic growth. Only 4 percent of Africa’s total trade is with Africa, the smallest intracontinental trade in the world. To understand the obstacles this creates, imagine what would happen to the American economy if each of the fifty states traded with the world but hardly ever with one another. California and Nevada might not do business, so Nevada would buy its lettuce from Mexico and its beef from Australia. Maine would sell fish to Italy and canoes to Brazil and nothing to Massachusetts. New York and North Carolina would buy all their manufactured goods from Europe and Asia. If the New York apple crop failed one season, the state would have to borrow money from England because it would have no other commodities to cushion the loss of revenue.

To break this dependence on foreign markets, each U.S. state would then try to develop its own light industries, but with no regional coordination, would never know what its neighbor was doing. Soon every state would have its own brewery, cement plant, tobacco industry. Most would be too small to turn a profit and would have to be subsidized by state governments and protected by high interstate tariffs. Recognizing the absurdity of the situation, the New England states—each with its own international airline—would establish a regional economic community. They would merge their six airlines into a single carrier, remove trade barriers and eliminate immigration formalities at the borders. A single tobacco factory in Vermont would supply cigarettes to the entire region, New Hampshire would produce beer for its five neighbors. But there would be problems right from the start. The states would speak different languages and use different currencies, which would not be honored next door. To complete the scenario, let’s say that Vermont and New Hampshire were fighting a border war; Maine was governed by the national guard and had decided to pursue a Marxist philosophy; Connecticut had a new civilian government oriented toward capitalism; Rhode Island was ruled by a former police chief who had declared himself governor-for-life; and Massachusetts had foiled an attempted coup and asked Canada to send troops to protect its territorial integrity.

Ludicrous as all this sounds for the United States (which did, in fact, have interstate economic rivalries early in its history), it is the reality of trade and regional relations in Africa. Trapped by its colonial past, divided by political and cultural differences, isolated by the absence of an intra-Africa highway or an intra-Africa communications system, each country is little more than a haphazardly placed economic pocket, neither related to nor dependent on its neighbors. As a group of three or four major regional communities, Africa could have great economic strength. As fifty-one separate entities, it has virtually none.

The colonialists’ introduction of export-crop farming had moved the African peasant from a barter to a cash economy. But the countryside could not provide the wages and jobs families needed, so men left their farms—and their wives and mothers—and drifted into the cities where the money and the work were. There they found that the promises of the cities were mostly an illusion. Governments nationalized private enterprises, resulting in economic stagnation, and presidents preached a doctrine of economic socialism
without understanding socialistic theory or daring to give workers control of state power. Economies could not expand fast enough to absorb the job seekers and many young, talented Africans went off to Europe and the United States to study and work, depriving Africa of some of its brightest minds. Factories were set up, but they chugged along in the red because, although African wages are low, African labor is expensive. The high cost stems from inefficiency that is related to lack of discipline, absenteeism and lack of skills. Production declined and population soared. Everything was run by trial and error, and no one seemed to worry that Africa was producing less and less food.

“Twenty years ago, the farmer had real status in the community,” said B. N. Okigbo, deputy director of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria, where 90 percent of the farmers work no more than five-acre plots. “Today farming is an old person’s profession and farmers don’t have much status unless they have material possessions to show for their work.”

Africa has one other great natural resource that has not been mentioned—its wildlife. And that wildlife translates into big money because wherever there are well-maintained national parks there are tourists, and tourists leave behind precious foreign currency. In Kenya alone, tourism brings $150 million a year into the country, making the industry nearly as valuable as Kenya’s coffee crop. But the wondrous herds that once roamed free across the continent are today part of a drama for survival that is unfolding on the dust-red, powder-dry plains. The drama pits the cunning and endurance of the beast against the greed of man and the ravages of nature; in the nearly unanimous view of conservationists, the wildlife is losing, its very existence threatened. “Simply put, one of the real treasures of Africa is disappearing,” said Sydney Downey, a white Kenyan and retired professional hunter.

Many conservationists believe that Africa is destined to become a graveyard of wildlife. Theodore Roosevelt rode a train through Kenya’s Athi Plain in 1909 and wrote: “As we sat over the train’s cowcatchers it was literally like passing through a vast zoological garden.” Today a traveler on the same route would be lucky to see a score of zebra or wildebeests, and game lodges along the way have been forced to install waterholes, salt licks and floodlights to lure animals within camera range of cocktail-sipping guests. The herds of
elephant and rhinoceros that once moved across the continent have all but vanished, and only within the sanctuary of national parks do they wander with any degree of safety.

The reason is money, for a new currency has been introduced to Africa that is far more valuable than all the sylis and cedis combined. It is ivory. In 1970, ivory was bringing $2.30 a pound on world markets in Brussels, Hong Kong and Tokyo. A decade later it was fetching $70. The rhino horn—made of compressed hair and gelatin—is even more valuable.
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It sells for up to $300 a pound in the Middle East, where it is carved into handles for traditional Arab daggers, or in Asia, where it is ground into a fine powder for use as an aphrodisiac. Thus enter a new predator, the poacher. Using poisoned arrows, machine guns and Soviet AK-47 assault rifles and operating in well-organized groups, the poacher can kill an elephant, cut off its trunk, gouge away the mouth and hack off a pair of six-foot-long ivory tusks in a matter of hours. The booty he receives is more than he could make in five or six years of honest labor.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a Nairobi-based British scientist who in 1980 completed the first continental study ever done on elephants, concluded that there were about 1.3 million elephants left in thirty-five African countries. But they are being killed at the rate of 50,000 to 150,000 a year, far faster than they can reproduce. Kenya had 70,000 elephants in 1973 and probably has half that number today. Its rhino population has fallen from 10,000 to 2,000 in the same period—and in some parks rangers are assigned to guard individual rhinos twenty-four hours a day. The southern district of Uganda’s Kabalega Falls National Park had 8,000 elephants in 1966. Systemic slaughters carried out by president Idi Amin’s soldiers reduced them to a panicked herd of 160, which since has been exterminated. For the Europeans and Americans preaching wildlife conservation—the missionary-style campaign, unfortunately, is handled almost exclusively by whites—the message seemed clear enough: in another generation or two, the African elephant may be as rare as the American buffalo.

With international pressure mounting, Kenya banned hunting in
1977 to protect its wildlife and tourist industry and formed an anti-poaching unit (whose seventy rangers “patrol” an area twice the size of Great Britain).
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It was a good public relations gesture but had little practical effect because, as in most African countries, the people who hired the poachers, bought the ivory and used bogus documents to export it were top government officials and senior game wardens. For years, the biggest illegal ivory exporter in Kenya was the United African Corporation (UAG), which operated out of a posh suite on Kimathi Street, a downtown Nairobi boulevard named for a Mau Mau general. The chairman of UAC and the holder of 49 percent of its capital was the mayor of Nairobi, Margaret Kenyatta, none other than the daughter of President Jomo Kenyatta. In 1975, according to government figures, Kenya exported to Hong Kong 106 tons of ivory (which meant the killing of about 1,010 elephants). Hong Kong figures, however, show that it
imported
148 tons from Kenya that year. The difference—46 tons, then worth approximately $2 million—was presumably smuggled out of Kenya. In the late 1970s, the World Bank gave Kenya $3 million to train and equip an antipoaching unit. Kenya instead used most of the money to form a paramilitary force that was stationed along its border with hostile Somalia, a desert area where there is no wildlife.

Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands—president of the World Wildlife Fund, the influential conservationist group—flew to Kenya in 1973 and gave President Kenyatta a check for $40,000 to enlarge the great bird sanctuary around Lake Nakuru in the Rift Valley. When Bernhard urged in private talks that Kenya take firm steps to halt elephant poaching, Kenyatta responded by promising to ban all ivory dealings. He set up a study group to assess the problem, then promptly fired the author of the resultant report, who implied that the problem was close to home. Poaching continued unabated and the Kenyatta Royal Family, as it became known, continued to prosper. Nonetheless, Bernhard returned to Kenya the next summer to bestow on Kenyatta—patriarch of the world’s most important ivory-dealing family—the “Order of the Golden Ark” for services to wildlife.
Conservationists were so aghast that Bernhard, after receiving a series of eleventh-hour long-distance phone calls, agreed to rewrite his presentation speech and ended up thanking Kenyatta for little more than his donation of some animals to West Africa.

It would, of course, be a noble accomplishment if Africa could protect and save its wildlife. But to condemn the Africans for not doing so is to impose Western standards on a situation in which they are irrelevant. The African sees no more beauty or mystique in an elephant than an American does in a porcupine. For those with guns and connections, all wildlife is a source of instant wealth. For those of meager means, it is competition for the land, a marauding army that can wipe out a season’s harvest in an overnight rampage. A Kenyan friend remembers seeing his school and home destroyed by a herd of elephants and spending the night perched in a tree with his family to escape the beasts below. “And you tell me I should
love
the elephants?” he asks. One elephant alone eats six hundred pounds of food a day. Turn a herd loose for a week and it can uproot enough trees, tear down enough fences, trample enough acreage and eat enough foliage to transform a lush green valley into an arid wasteland fit for neither man nor animal. In countries such as Kenya, where every inch of usable land is already under cultivation, the wildlife that the tourists marvel over is a luxury the peasants can ill afford.

When two herds of elephants moved into Rwanda’s overcrowded farmland in 1975, the government commissioned several white hunters to reclaim the land for the people. On foot and in an airplane, they shot and killed 106 of the elephants and “darted” the remaining twenty-six young ones with tranquilizer guns, moving them into a national park. The conservationists howled. But the Rwandan government had had a simple choice: either the people or the animals survived.

Kenya’s response to a similar dilemma also seems a sensible one. Relying on tranquilizer guns and huge nets, Land-Rovers and airplanes, the government is moving great numbers of elephants, rhinos, zebras and giraffes back into the national parks (one of which, Tsavo, is as large as the state of New Jersey) where, for the time being at least, they will not compete with man for the country’s diminishing farmland. Over several years in the late 1970s, drought and poachers forced thousands of elephants to migrate from Kenya’s barren north to seek safety and food in the highlands,
the country’s most fertile and productive region. I joined the rangers one day as they tried to move a herd of two hundred elephants into Aberdare National Park.