The Africans (62 page)

W
E
LEFT
A
FRICA
on a midnight flight to Rome, not quite believing that four years could have passed so quickly. I do not like goodbyes, thinking that partings are only temporary when you leave people and places you care about, so Sandy and I slipped out of Nairobi rather quietly, without farewell parties or airport send-offs. The packers had cleared out our home on Riverside Drive, and I stood briefly in the living room, near the empty bookcases by the fireplace, remembering all the friends who had gathered there, hearing the voices that at some point each evening always seemed to turn to a discussion of Africa, about how it was doing and where it was going. It was, we had found, impossible to live in Africa and consider it as just a place to work. Africa had become an obsession, a state of mind. You can love it or hate it but you cannot be indifferent to it.

Lloyd’s of London had, at my request, insured the huge carton of research material I had collected in my travels through Africa for $20,000. It was, of course, unlikely that anyone would want to steal a cardboard box full of notebooks and maps and articles and photographs, but I did not rest easy until I saw the container being unloaded in Los Angeles. The other day I dug out the first notes I had taken in Africa. They were of Kenya’s president, Jomo Kenyatta, addressing a crowd on Kenyatta Day, a holiday that marked his imprisonment in 1952 by British colonial authorities. I had jotted down: “Crowd silent, mesmerized … JK in leather jacket … fly whisk in right hand … penetrating eyes, powerful voice … great presence, sort of magical.” And I noted him saying, “ ‘Throughout history
there has been no stronger weapon to fight for the equality of human rights than unity,’ ”

Kenyatta is dead now, as are most of the other men who led Africa out of colonialism and into independence, representing what surely was one of man’s greatest triumphs over human injustice. But the unity of which Kenyatta spoke remains an elusive dream on a wounded continent, and the equality of human rights has proved easy to preach and difficult to practice. So much remains to be done. Three decades ago, when Kenyatta was in prison as the alleged Mau Mau leader and the colonial empires were first showing signs of cracking, John Gunther wrote in
Inside Africa
: “The two things Africa needs most are development and education.” The same is still distressingly true today. Coming back to the United States, back to the affluence and abundance that Americans accept so unquestioningly, one is overwhelmed by the widening chasm that separates the industrialized nations of the First World and the hoe-farming nations of the Third World. Here in the United States I have become more convinced than ever that the West must close this gap, that the one global competition that really matters is the race to develop all men’s abilities. To ignore black African countries, instead of aiding them, is to let them slide into the Soviet camp. To be oblivious to the problems of Africa is to promote more international misery, hunger, instability—and to increase the threats to peace in the world.

I have written at length during this long journey about the obstacles Africa must overcome if it is to develop and realize its almost unlimited potential: an out-of-control birth rate, declining food production and primitive health conditions; inadequate leadership whose prime concern is the perpetuation of its own power; a rural exodus that strains urban social services to the point of collapse, and sometimes beyond; an untrained, unskilled population and a lack of opportunities for the educated; political instability, official corruption and an unequal distribution of national wealth, jobs and authority, all of which take root in tribalism.

Some countries, notably Kenya and the Ivory Coast, have been able to cope with these problems and have at the same time provided their people with political stability and growing economies. It is no coincidence that both nations had strong central leadership in Kenyatta and Félix Houphouët-Boigny, both relied heavily on expatriate assistance and both adopted a free-enterprise system. They are
among the few luminaries on a continent that will, as the World Bank has noted, require a great deal of effort “simply to stand still” in the 1980s.

One reason that so many countries—and again, Kenya and the Ivory Coast are exceptions—have been unable to meet the economic challenge of nationhood is that there are no incentives for the individual to produce. Trying to separate themselves from everything left behind by the European colonialists, government after government embraced socialism, and sometimes Marxism, believing that people were willing to work for the community rather than for themselves. Economies were nationalized and individual incentives were eliminated.

Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, once put it this way: If underdeveloped countries “do not choose socialism, they will continue in a state of weakness, they will be maltreated, oppressed, exploited. We are fighting against capitalism.”

Though he still clings to his doctrine, Nyerere’s experiment has been one of the great failures in independent Africa, and one that should be a lesson for other countries. Half the 330 companies he nationalized went bankrupt within a decade. Worker productivity, the Tanzania Investment Board admitted, dropped by 50 percent between 1969 and 1979. The government’s bureaucracy grew at the rate of 14 percent a year, and government expenditures increased twice as fast as the gross national product. What Nyerere overlooked was that people in Africa do not have to work to feed themselves, and in that setting socialism is a bad alternative. The rich soil and tropical climate provide ample food for subsistence. Take away the monetary rewards for increased production and people are perfectly content to live as they always have, growing just enough food for themselves and their families.

Each of the United States’ 5.5 million farm workers produce enough food and fiber to care for 68 people (compared to 45 people a decade ago), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Africa has an estimated 200 million farmers, and they produce, in the best of times, barely enough to fill their own stomachs. I am not suggesting that Africa rush out and abandon socialism in favor of American-style capitalism. But I do think that Africa must improve its economic health before it can restructure its political and social systems, and a first step in this direction would be the creation of mixed economies that offer inducements for working harder and producing more.

The West needs to play a major role in altering the self-destructive course on which Africa seems headed. And not just for humanitarian reasons. Africa’s mineral wealth, its agricultural potential and strategic location thrust the continent into the likely position of influencing the events of tomorrow. For self-serving reasons alone, it is to the West’s advantage to share its knowledge and monetary resources with the poorest of the poor in order that Africa can become a contributor to, rather than a drain on, the global community.

Western aid should focus on vocational training in the cities—Africa needs mechanics and medical technicians at this point, not architects and open-heart surgeons—and on rural development. It is nothing less than a crime for the West and East to “assist” Africa by building airports and donating weapons when 30 percent of the food grown on the continent is lost because of faulty storage facilities and inadequate transportation systems. Granted, most of the aid that pours into Africa today is wasted or stolen and accomplishes little other than massaging the consciences of the donors. The United States, for instance, spent $4.6 million for a cereal-production project in Senegal that did not increase grain output by a single bag. It spent another $13 million on a livestock scheme in Mali and later admitted that nothing whatsoever had been achieved. Somalia once refused to accept a $12 million crane from West Germany until the donors paid the importation customs duties. “But this is a
gift
,” said Bonn’s representative. “That has nothing to do with it; you haven’t paid the duty,” replied the Somali. West Germany paid up. I could cite dozens of similar examples, but nevertheless, the concept of international aid remains a good one. Aid is both worthwhile and essential for Africa’s development. Its failure is that the money is often dispensed and used in the most senseless manner.

In looking at all the troubles that have haunted Africa over two decades of independence, one tends to forget how young Africa is as a group of nations. Probably the world expected too much too quickly. We got swept up in Africa’s early enthusiasm and rhetoric. “Be like us and you will succeed as we have,” the West told Africa, ignoring the fact that Africa did not want to be like us. And when we criticized Africa for stumbling we never mentioned that the United States in, say, 1796 was a country where corruption was rampant, political unity and national prosperity were distant goals and a civil war lay half a century down the road.

For now, the key to the continent’s future is South Africa. There can be no lasting solution for Africa as a whole until a multiracial
society in South Africa has been created. If South Africa had normal relations with its neighbors, and if those neighbors could draw freely upon South Africa’s surplus food, industry, expertise and efficiency, the economic character of all southern Africa would be dramatically altered. Then everything else would follow, for economic self-reliance is the forerunner of political stability, the birth of a middle class, improved health conditions and a controlled birth rate.