The Challenge for Africa (11 page)

Moreover, these depictions fail to capture another reality, which is that every day, tens of millions of African women and men go about their business, live their lives responsibly and industriously, and look after their immediate and extended families, even if they lack certain material possessions, higher education, or access to the range of opportunities and goods available to the wealthy in other countries, or even their own. These are the real African heroes, and it is these images the world should see more of.

I don't believe that charities or celebrities are buying into the stereotypical images of African helplessness and suffering in an effort to undermine Africans; the photos do, after all, represent a reality. Too many children
are
hungry in Africa or being forced to commit atrocities as child soldiers; or they are misusing drugs or sniffing glue on the streets of the continent's cities or are abused and raped and unable to go to school. And certainly, African governments have not paid enough attention
to the continent's myriad problems, in part because in Africa they aren't viewed with the same gravity as elsewhere, or be cause communities have become used to them (as may be the case with malaria and other preventable diseases), or because Africans are surrounded by so many challenges that the particular condition being highlighted doesn't seem as problematic to them as it does to those in the developed world. To a degree, these governments may need to be shamed into taking on these problems.

An example of this was when Bob Geldof visited Ethiopia in 1985 to see for himself the effects of the famine devastating these proud and confident people. It was only because a Kenyan cameraman, Mohamed Amin, traveled with Geldof that we Kenyans learned about the tragedy unfolding in the country next door. Why weren't we told that our fellow Africans were suffering? Why didn't the Kenyan government mobilize its citizens with the means or skills to assist the victims of the famine, which had been greatly exacerbated by a dictatorship and a devastating civil war that had uprooted the underpinnings of Ethiopia's agricultural economy?

The challenge, therefore, is not only for the international community to use more positive depictions of Africa, but for Africans themselves to stop providing so many images of dysfunction in the first place. No one in Africa can be happy that a child with a belly distended from malnutrition comes to represent a particular country or the continent at large. Clearly, it's incumbent upon Africans to project themselves better and more affirmatively, without pretending that underdevelopment isn't real. They must recognize that these challenges exist, and then decide that they will work toward resolving them.

The governments must ask themselves what policies they can adopt and what commitments they can make, notwithstanding the availability of aid, so that the images of African
children express a new reality: one not of malnutrition, but of health; not child soldiers or street children addicted to drugs, but hardworking students and intact families. This should not be because the hungry have been hidden away, or the street children thrown in jail, but because Africa has more achievements to display than famines to be covered up.

At the same time, development agencies need to present a vision of the Africa they wish to see rather than using images that undercut the very mission they are trying to accomplish. It should be possible for potential donors to respond to images of a functioning Africa that deserves support and not only give in response to those images that inspire pity and condescension.

That morning in Davos, as I listened to Sharon Stone urging other individuals to join her in raising money for bed nets, I couldn't help but notice the rather strained smile on President Mkapa's face. He was in an awkward situation. No doubt on one level he was grateful that someone cared enough about the toll of malaria on his country's children to help raise funds for bed nets there and then. But I also sensed in his demeanor a degree of discomfort—or maybe as an African myself, I was projecting such a sentiment onto him—that he was getting personal help from wealthy individuals to fund a basic intervention that, as a head of state and a proud African, he would want to provide for the Tanzanian people himself.

Indeed, at the end of his speech, President Mkapa had gotten to the heart of the need for Africa's leaders to commit to serving their peoples and to practicing better governance for their peoples' benefit:

President Mkapa knew what the right actions were. For me, however, the question still remains: If African leaders know what they ought to do, why aren't more of them doing it?

IN 1982
, I visited Luanda, the capital of Angola, as part of research I was conducting for the United Nations Economic Commission of Africa. At that time, Angola was in the throes of a ruinous civil war that had begun shortly after the country became independent from Portugal in 1975.

When I'm in a foreign city, I like to go to the markets—preferably not those set aside for tourists, but ones used by the locals. In this way, I can get a feeling for the lives and conditions of the ordinary people. Even though a war was taking place, when I visited the market in Luanda I was surprised to find it as empty as it was of both people and goods for sale. The only vegetables seemed to be wild and green, the sort farmers collect from the field after the harvest or rains. The only meat appeared to be lungfish, which can grow up to two feet long and are as thin as eels. These lungfish were frozen, which indicated to me that they were imported. When I asked a stallholder about the fish, he told me that they'd come from the Soviet Union. The civil war was one of many conflicts between the two superpowers on the continent. It was clear which one had the upper hand in Angola.

The hotel I was staying in overlooked Luanda's harbor, which despite the war still retained a degree of elegance from the colonial-era houses that lined it. Very early each morning, I noticed that, at the ebb tide, hundreds of people would be on the beach collecting crabs. While some may have taken the crabs to the market, given that I didn't see any on my visits
there, I assumed the vast majority of crabs went straight into the pots on people's stoves in their homes. What I found extraordinary, however, was that, in the afternoon as the tide came in, enormous shoals of flying fish would chase the waves to the shore.

Now, I am no fisherman, but it seemed to me that it would have been easy to put a net into the waters and catch vast numbers of these fish. When I inquired about this, though, I was told that because of the war, the fishing industry had become virtually moribund and only a few individuals entered the waters to see what they could catch. The people I spoke to said that while the Angolan fishing industry was no longer functioning, Soviet trawlers off Angola and up and down the west coast of Africa were busy fishing. They took their catch, including lungfish, back to the Soviet Union, from where they would be exported—including to countries such as Angola.

What struck me as particularly ironic was that, in spite of the demonstrable poverty of the people and the city and the lack of foodstuffs available in the market, the sea continually offered its bounty every morning and afternoon. And yet the citizens of Luanda were unable to use these resources to sustain their own fishing industry and provide themselves with food and an income. Here, in essence, were the twin tragedies of Africa: that on a continent of such abundance, there was such poverty; and that in a conflict that had very little to do with them, ordinary Angolans had become the playthings of outside forces and various militias, which often were backed by those same outside forces. Both had destroyed the political and economic structures of the state to such an extent that they had free rein to take the natural resources from under the noses of the people.

The proxy war that raged in Angola and that at various stages involved the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Mozambique, as well as the United States, Zaire, and South Africa,
ended in 2002, having taken between five hundred thousand and a million lives, displaced more than four million people, exiled a further four hundred thousand, and left the country littered with more than fifteen million land mines.
¹

Since the conclusion of the conflict, Angola's economy has experienced rapid growth. In 2007, increased demand and a high price for Angola's daily production of 1.5 million barrels of oil meant that the country's GDP expanded by 21 percent that year alone. Angola's fiscal surplus in 2006 and 2007 was a healthy 14.8 percent and 6.1 percent of GDP, respectively, while the inflation rate decreased from 325.5 percent in 2000 to 12.6 percent in 2007.
²
Luanda itself is undergoing a construction boom, and hotel occupancy rates are near 100 percent. Throughout the country, the Angolan government has rebuilt 2,400 miles of road and 400 miles of railroad track and renovated the major airports.
³

Nevertheless, peace and a growing economy have not yet brought prosperity for more than a small minority of Angola's long-suffering people. Two-thirds of Angolans still live on two dollars a day or less, and in 2006 the United Nations Human Development Report ranked Angola as the seventeenth least-developed country in the world. A third of adults remain illiterate, life expectancy is forty years, and a third of Angola's children are underweight for their age.
⁴
And according to a report from the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch, Luanda's building spree has led to the forced evictions of twenty thousand poor people from their homes.
⁵

In 1982, it was the Soviet Union that exploited the Angolan government's dependency on its aid and weaponry to extract Angola's natural resources (in that case, fish) and then sell them back. In 2008, it is now trawlers from Russia, joined by those from Europe and East Asia, that ply the coasts of Africa, depleting the continent's waters of fish from already-threatened stocks.
⁶

Like Angola, Mauritania to the north has a long coast and potentially large revenues from its fishing industry. However, Mauritania processes only 12 percent of its fish stock, and its bilateral fishing agreements with other African countries as well as Russia, Japan, and the European Union have not markedly increased its capacity to capitalize on its resources. In fact, they often have the opposite outcome. One of these agreements led to Mauritania's octopus stock being overexploited by 25 to 40 percent.
⁷

While much of this fishing is legal, made possible by formal arrangements between the fishing countries and African governments, including Angola's, there is also a large illegal trade. A report published by the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies in 2007 found that each year revenues from illegal fishing of sardines and mackerel off the coast of Angola amounted to $49 million, or more than a fifth of the value of all Angolan fish exports.
⁸
Continent-wide, an estimated $1 billion each year is lost to illegal and unregulated fishing.
⁹

The industrialized nations pay African governments for access to their fish stocks, not least because they have almost exhausted their own. One might have hoped that the ending of the Cold War would have meant a rebounding of Africa's fishing industries, and the reemergence of indigenous markets—such as one in flying fish, for instance, which in the eastern Atlantic range from Angola in the south to Mauritania in the north and beyond into the seas off western Europe. However, the effect of huge demand for diminished fish stocks, as well as cheap imports of foodstuffs and other products, has been to decimate the mainly small-scale fishing communities, and other business opportunities, along Africa's coasts. Indeed, the increase in piracy off the coast of Somalia has been blamed on reduced opportunities for local fishermen due to the lack of fish and increased competition from foreign trawlers.

Such realities have been implicated in malnutrition and
food insecurity. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, although two hundred million subSaharan Africans eat fish, and it is a source of almost a quarter of the region's protein, they actually consume the least amount of fish in the world per capita.
¹⁰
Anemia caused by a deficiency in iron takes the lives of twenty thousand sub-Saharan African women each year, and half a million children die because of an inadequate supply of vitamin A. Both nutrients are found in fish. In several West African nations, some species of fish are now so scarce that their prices have risen beyond the reach of many local peoples.