The Africans (6 page)

The per capita income in Africa is $365 a year, the lowest in the world. In real terms that income—and the standard of living in
Africa—is falling, with peasant farmers at the mercy of price fluctuations on the world market for their crops. A decade ago a Zambian farmer needed to produce one bag of maize to buy three cotton shirts; today that bag of maize buys only one shirt. A Tanzanian farmer could buy a Timex watch with the proceeds from 7.7 pounds of coffee; today he needs to produce 15 pounds of coffee to buy the same watch.

The infant mortality rate in black Africa, 137 deaths per 1,000 live births, is the highest in the world. In Upper Volta, where life expectancy is thirty-three years, the mortality rate is 189 deaths per 1,000 births. (By comparison, the rate is 12 per 1,000 in the United States.) Europe has one doctor for every 580 persons; Kenya, one of Africa’s most developed countries, has one for every 25,600 persons.

Only 11 percent of the age-eligible children in Africa are in school, compared to 35 percent in Asia and 45 percent in South America. In the twenty- to twenty-four-year-old age group, 1.4 percent of Africans are studying at a university. In Asia the figure is 5.7 percent, in Latin America 6.7 percent and in the United States 48 percent.

The illiteracy rate in Africa is about 75 percent. That rate should continue to drop as more children attend school, but if Africa’s population doubles by the year 2000, as expected, 60 percent of the continent will be illiterate. It will be the highest concentration of illiterate people in the world.

When the independence era began in 1960, Africa produced nearly 95 percent of its own food. Today every country except South Africa is an importer, and by the year 2000 one of every two Africans will be eating food imported from other continents. When we arrived in Kenya in 1976, the stores were amply filled with both basic and luxury foods. By the time we left in 1980, there were long lines for everything from milk and flour to maize and butter.

Despite the awesome problems facing the continent, African leaders spend little time examining their own conduct and shortcomings and a great deal looking for a scapegoat. Usually every problem is laid on the doorstep of colonialism, for to criticize Africa as an African is considered treasonous. Perhaps Africa’s reluctance to impose self-criticism is merely a defense mechanism for the humiliation it suffers so often when reminded that its armies are not very tough, its governments not very efficient, its ability to back words with deeds not very effective.

In Somalia the average government ministry has eight hundred
civil servants. On any given day, a senior government official told me, only sixty of them show up for work. In Zaire a $1.8 million international grant to repair Kinshasa’s broken-down city buses is swindled down to $200,000 by the time it reaches the transportation ministry, and ends up accomplishing nothing at all. In Nairobi a man calling the police station to report that his house is under attack by a band of bandits with machetes is told he will have to drive to the station to pick up some officers; the department has no cars on duty that night. In Zambia hundreds of government cars sit rusting in a huge parking lot outside Lusaka. Many need nothing more than a new carburetor or fuel pump. But with no mechanics around, and not much initiative to spare even if there were, it is easier to junk them and buy new ones with an international grant.

Stormed Zambia’s President Kenneth David Kaunda at one moment of particular frustration: “If by next year all the five million Zambians choose to be lazy as they are now, I would willingly step down as president because I don’t want to lead people with lazy bones.”

Kaunda’s comment underscores the fine line between racism and criticism that Western journalists must deal with in Africa. If a white person had made the same remark, it would be considered racist; but a black can say it and be accused of nothing more than honest criticism. This duality operates on all official levels of African government and its effect is to make Africa immune to censure. A government, for instance, might execute a dozen dissidents or persecute an entire tribe and label its actions “social reconstruction.” If a Western diplomat or journalist calls it barbarism, the African dismisses him as a racist. The result is that Westerners, particularly scholars, often write timidly, even romantically, about Africa, and African governments go on doing pretty much what they want to their own people.

The Zambians, incidentally, did not suddenly spring alive, and Kaunda, who has been president since 1964, did not step down.

With Africa floundering economically and meandering politically, the continent remains as ripe for exploitation today as it was a hundred years ago. Both the East and West have stepped into the void, pouring military and developmental assistance into country after country in the hopes of creating new satellites. As a consequence, outside influence in Africa has increased and Africa’s control over its own affairs, military and economic, has decreased.

“I think the time has come to leave Africa to the Africans,” says President Étienne Eyadéma of Togo. “We can find solutions for African problems. The East and West must stop interfering in our internal affairs.”

The demand is a commonly expressed one in Africa—and an empty one. If the East and West were to cut off their flow of guns, money and technology to black Africa, almost every government would collapse in a matter of months. Never has Africa been as dependent on foreign powers as it is today. With the exception of Nigeria, whose oil revenues reached $60 million a day in 1980, black Africa lives on the international dole. When national security is threatened, the first thing Africa does is call for help from non-African countries because few countries are capable of defending themselves. Only Angola and Ethiopia—two Marxist states armed by the Soviet Union—can assemble five hundred or more pieces of heavy artillery, tanks and rocket launchers.

Although black Africa has 750,000 men under arms, most armies are badly trained and poorly disciplined and serve little function other than internal security. As a guerrilla, the African is an effective fighter because his unit is small and loosely structured and his cause—liberation—is one he can understand. But as a member of a large organized army, his military capabilities are greatly reduced: now he is fighting for a nation that he does not really feel part of; he may be taking orders from an officer of a tribe hostile to his own; he is expected to operate sophisticated weapons even though he may never have driven a car or seen a pocket calculator. Even when elite units go into battle, they often end up putting down their guns and fleeing. More often the army has been the main instrument for terrorizing and exploiting the population.

The end of colonialism has not brought genuine freedom to Africa. With an external debt exceeding $35 billion, black Africa has become a cluster of welfare states, surviving at the whim of foreign donors and aid agencies. As President Moi of Kenya put it on a begging trip to West Germany, apparently without realizing the irony of his words: “No country can remain economically independent without outside assistance.”

Some of Africa’s problems—especially those caused by forces other than man—are so enormous, so constant, that a people of lesser spirit long since would have succumbed. The inescapable heat numbs the mind and drains vitality. Tsetse flies and a score of other insects carry terrible diseases that incapacitate entire villages. Simple
disorders like diarrhea are fatal to tens of thousands of African children each year. Swarms of locusts—twenty or thirty million slim, shiny creatures that weigh an ounce each and eat their own weight daily—can cut through a nation’s entire grain harvest in a matter of days, leaving not a living plant in their wake. The droughts stay too long and the rains fall too heavily. Nature, like man, is a cabal, disenfranchising a people from its own land.

Maybe sub-Sahara Africa can continue to stumble through the 1980s and into the 1990s, hoping, dreaming, talking, ignoring the life-death issues it must confront, accepting adversity and misadventure as the work of forces beyond its control. Or maybe there will be an awakening, a realization that with good fortune and sensible planning Africa can control its own destiny—or, at the very least, can maneuver its way through some of the storms.

But whatever, two decades of African independence has provided one invaluable lesson: progress is not inevitable.