The Challenge for Africa (30 page)

THE RATE OF
urbanization in Africa is the highest in the world, with city populations doubling every twenty years.
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Sprawling cities and slums have gobbled up vast tracts of forest and agricultural land. Nevertheless, most Africans are still rural and directly dependent on the land for their income. In addition, many African countries have significant populations of pastoralists, most of whom can no longer migrate across long distances with their herds of cows, goats, sheep, or camels the way they did before national borders were established and land throughout Africa was bought, sold, and fenced. With the onset of climate change, arable or grazeable land is likely to become even more precious. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), degradation of land is a serious concern in thirty-two African countries, and 65 percent of the continent's farmland has sustained damage.
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Across much of Africa, landownership and distribution remain volatile issues. In many nations, colonial governments forcibly displaced large numbers of native Africans to make way for European settlers. When the colonial authorities arrived, they also brought with them a concept of landownership that was alien to much of the African continent. They insisted that land be controlled by a title deed, and when such deeds were bestowed, the authorities would provide them only to “the head of the household,” which was the man. Traditionally, land was owned not by an individual but by the family or the community. The new rules disenfranchised women, who no
longer had a right to land but who, instead, accessed land at the pleasure of the father or the husband, whose name was written on the title deed. (Advocates for women's equality are challenging this state of affairs in many African countries, and as a result laws are changing.)

At independence, land changed hands, but in many cases the details of those transactions—who owned what, who bought what, and how much of it—remain unresolved to this day. Land (the promise and the loss of it) has been a battleground—used, much like ethnic identification, by unscrupulous leaders as a way to gain political advantage. Over the past several decades, community-held and individually owned lands in Africa have been lost to a variety of forces, both man-made and ecological. Deserts have spread, topsoil has been washed away as forests and other vegetation have been cleared, and the land's fertility has been reduced through too many cycles of planting, grazing, and the application of chemicals. Much farmland has been subdivided into ever-smaller parcels as populations have grown and land has passed from one generation to the next.

Governments, too, have assumed control over land, often displacing communities in the process, for infrastructure projects (some beneficial to the nation at large, some costly “white elephants”), to accommodate sprawling urban settlements, or for national parks and reserves. Many Africans today have too little land, and some have too much, often as a result of the colonial past. In 2005 in South Africa, for instance, 96 percent of arable land was still owned by white farmers.
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In Namibia, white farmers own around 50 percent of arable land,
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and in Zimbabwe, where attempts to reapportion land have riven the country for years, as of 2000, 4,500 white farmers still owned 70 percent of the prime land.
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But it's not only the descendents of white settlers who
control vast tracts of land—nor do redistributed lands always revert to small-scale farmers or the landless. Too often, prime lands in Africa end up in the hands of ruling elites or their inner circle.
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The issue of land distribution will continue to roil African nations until politicians stop using land as a political tool, and just settlements to controversies over land are agreed upon.

The conundrum of land in Africa and its relationship to the economy, agriculture, and prospects for poverty reduction was brought into sharp relief in Kenya in 2005 when Thomas Cholmondeley, the great-grandson of Lord Delamere of Britain (1870-1931), shot to death Simon Ole Sasina, a Kenya Wildlife Service game warden investigating suspected poachers. A year later, he shot and killed a second man, Robert Njoya, who was alleged to have been poaching on his property.

Lord Delamere was a major figure in the first three decades of British rule in Kenya. He controlled land, purchased from the Maasai for a pittance, that extended over hundreds of thousands of acres in the Central Highlands and the Rift Valley. Today, the family remains among Kenya's largest land holders; the Delamere estate—Soysambu—encompasses 100,000 acres, including a 48,000-acre wildlife conservancy. Since independence, the descendents of Lord Delamere have remained close to some members of Kenya's political elite. Although he was not charged with Sasina's killing, Cholmondeley was with Njoya's murder, and the case has fascinated Kenyans and Europeans alike, as it encapsulates the racial, class, and land divides that still grip parts of Africa, more than forty years after Kenyan independence—when Nairobi's main thoroughfare was changed from Delamere to Kenyatta Avenue.

To the Delameres, the land and the animals on it are rightfully theirs, and trespassers on their property, whether those chasing poachers or poaching themselves, risk being shot. While the Delameres own beef and dairy operations, the income the estate generates from wildlife watching is considerable—an ironic reversal, given that many of the reserves established in Africa in the colonial area were set aside for white trophy hunters.

Until Europeans settled and converted a great deal of land into commercial farms, wildlife across Africa was abundant. But as the human population has increased and commercial farming has expanded, wildlife has been pushed into national parks. The only people who can have wildlife on private land are those like the Delameres, who own huge tracts. They don't need to hunt these animals for food, and many have joined the conservation and tourism sectors.

For traditional herders, separating land where their cattle, sheep, and goats can graze from wildlife reserves where they can't is an artificial construct: traditionally, in their micro-nations, no one can “own” land that has been held as a common resource by all the community's members. For Njoya and those like him who are not pastoralists and who are living in areas where wildlife is no longer present, wild animals on a neighboring large-scale estate are potential food—either for his or his family's consumption, or to sell in the market. Bushmeat markets, legal and not, are thriving in Kenya, as they are in other parts of Africa, encouraged by demand from tourists who want to eat exotic game, and from the elites who emulate them. Njoya can neither afford nor directly benefit from conservation and wildlife watching.

Njoya's experience is not unusual. Most Africans do not see wildlife in the same light as tourists do—if they see the animals at all. Indeed, many ordinary Africans who don't live near national parks or reserves see wild animals only in a zoo or
safari park. Many fewer animals still exist where most Africans live than when I was growing up. Then, it was not unusual to disturb a rabbit or an antelope while walking along a path and see them run away into the bush.

The tourism economy, while an important sector in a number of African countries, is often conducted at a remove from the African peoples themselves: the tourists arrive on planes owned by foreign companies, and often stay in hotels or lodges owned by foreign corporations; they exchange money at foreign banks and may be transported to wildlife reserves on buses or in taxis also owned by foreign companies. Few revenues from this sector reach ordinary Africans. The only local people who may make money directly from tourism are guides, or staff in the lodges, hotels, and restaurants that serve the tourists. After the private companies, the second-largest beneficiary of tourism are governments. If the revenues are managed well, of course, they will reach Njoya and his family in the form of services. Unfortunately, this is all too rarely the case. For Njoya, therefore, wildlife conservation is a foreign luxury.

My aim here is not to disparage the tourists or those who package the safaris. Both are important. My point is that Africans—and their leaders—need to develop their tourism industries for the benefit of the African people. Africans—not foreign corporations—should provide affordable and clean hotels for guests; reliable and comfortable transportation to and from the national parks; hygienic and safe restaurants where tourists can eat, perhaps offering indigenous foods; tea stalls that are attractive and clean enough for tourists to drink at; and professional cultural programs (not the usual kitsch that many visitors experience) that would engage visitors in the rich heritage of the continent's micro-nations.

Much more revenue from tourism thus would stay in Africa, generating wealth and opportunities for citizens who are willing to be entrepreneurial and work hard to make a success of
their businesses. The African people need to see that not only can tourism and conservation support their children's education, repair roads, and expand health facilities, but they can be part of the industry, too. With this, the sense of ownership individual Africans feel for the tourism industry would be strengthened. I don't mean just material ownership, but also ownership at a deeper level: taking responsibility for, and pride in, protecting wildlife and the environment, and the sharing of their nation and its cultures with visitors from around the world.

In nurturing this attitude and directing the revenues from the industry more equitably, government policies would encourage people like Robert Njoya to move away from subsistence living to, for instance, opening a clean, inviting kiosk selling high-quality Kenyan tea to tourists and passersby. Not enough of these exist, which is why people have a choice of drinking a cup of tea at a run-down stall or paying several dollars for one at a high-end hotel. A Robert Njoya might no longer need to poach, because he could buy food instead, and in the process could see wildlife as having more value to him alive than dead. It is important to note that, traditionally, Njoya's micro-nation did not eat wildlife, but only domestic animals. He has, however, been deculturated and encouraged to embrace bushmeat, and as a result is now helping accelerate the destruction of species that in the past he would not have harmed.

It is also clear that environmental education needs to be part of the academic curriculum in African schools. This would assist the peoples of Africa to recognize that they have an extraordinary resource in their wildlife, and that they need to protect and sustain it, and to spread the benefits of such a commitment broadly and fairly. If an African child grows up understanding the place an antelope has in the ecosystem, and that the animal has intrinsic as well as utilitarian value in terms of
tourism revenue, he or she will be less likely to see it simply as meat, and will not empty the forests and parks of the biodiversity that is a crucial piece of his or her cultural and spiritual inheritance.

The different perceptions and concepts about the uses and ownership of land held by pastoralists, conservationists, and farmers are aspects of the ever-present concerns over ensuring food security and reducing poverty in Africa. As the farmers in Yaoundé made evident, genuine reform and an overhaul of agriculture are a matter of urgency—especially given that, as the effects of climate change intensify, growing sufficient amounts of food will become even more challenging in many African nations. Per capita food production in Africa has already declined by 12 percent since 1981,
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and by 2020 yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced in some countries by up to 50 percent.
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The climate has become more unpredictable, increasing the irregularity of rainfall, uncertain harvests, and, as a result, the risks of food insecurity. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, as rainfall patterns shift, revenues from crops in Africa could fall by as much as 90 percent by 2100.
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Anticipated changes in climate will only make subsistence living more difficult for the 60 percent of Africans who still farm and graze animals as their primary livelihood.

Food security in Africa is also increasingly in danger due to skyrocketing food prices in world markets. They have been pushed to new highs by rising oil prices and growing demands for grains and certain plants to produce biofuels, as well as meat and dairy products, in the industrialized world, Asia, and Latin America.

Food emergencies in Africa have risen threefold each year since the mid-1980s. Although the proportion of undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen to just below one-third in the last few years, the absolute numbers have risen, from 120 million in 1980 to 206 million in 2003. In 2004, forty countries in sub-Saharan Africa received almost 3.9 million tons of food aid, almost double the level provided between 1995 and 1997.
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By 2080, the number of people defined as undernourished in Africa is expected to triple, notwithstanding world food prices.
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Some of these challenges find their source in the colonial era. Traditional farming cultures, foods, and even storage methods, such as granaries for grains and beans at each homestead, were discouraged, and then disappeared. Once they stopped growing food for the household, people began buying their food—much of it processed—in shops, and with the establishment of a cash economy, they had to earn money to pay for it. The bananas, root crops, and green vegetables that had been common in people's fields, especially between harvests, gave way to cash crops (such as coffee, tea, nuts, sugarcane, and horticultural products). As they did, household and community food security became a state matter.

At independence, governments assumed the responsibility for feeding the nation. But despite statements at international conferences and roundtables of development agencies about agriculture, food security, farming techniques, and public health, postindependence governments gave little attention to agricultural policies that would have supported the growing of food crops for both home consumption and sale in local and regional markets. This neglect may be partially due to the fact that in Africa women and children produce the majority of this food. For the most part (and this is not a phenomenon exclusive to Africa), women's work, including in food production, is neither
highly valued nor made a policy priority, nor are women adequately compensated for their labor.