The Challenge for Africa (4 page)

Many people who care about the fate of Africa question why so many postcolonial African leaders treated their citizens so cruelly, and why after nearly half a century of independence so many African countries still remain bywords for failure, poverty, and dysfunction. As with many issues associated with the condition of Africa, no simple answers exist. However, a number of factors can be pointed to that suggest why the continent continues to have a considerable leadership deficit. Among these are the legacy of colonialism, the Cold War, post-colonial governance structures, and cultural destruction.

An important milestone in the creation of the modern leadership dilemma in Africa was the Berlin Conference in 1884-85.
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Here, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, and King Leopold II of Belgium, among others, carved up the African continent into spheres of influence. The European powers were seeking to establish not merely outposts from which they could launch campaigns against each other to preserve their geopolitical dominance, but also new sources for the raw materials they needed to expand their industrial economies—or, in Leopold's case, a personal fiefdom in Congo.
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The territories established after the Berlin Conference served the interests of the colonial powers well. The administrations they set up were not interested in the genuine development of an empowered local populace; they were there either to ensure the flow of raw materials to the mother countries or to provide representation and organizational capacity for the white settlers who were encouraged to colonize the new territories, in the name of developing them, and to “civilize” and Christianize the native peoples.

As in any society, some natives, especially those in trouble with the local establishment, cooperated with the newcomers,
sharing the community's secrets and lifestyle. In return for their “generosity,” these collaborators (many of them outcasts) were elevated to the positions of chiefs, scouts, or church elders: positions that they would never have held in the traditional societies. This deliberate practice of ignoring or misunderstanding the complex and subtle existing leadership structures in favor of selecting leaders and imposing them on the population was the cornerstone of the colonial administration. Though they were members of the community, such chiefs and their assistants were de facto agents and information gatherers for the imperial powers. These local autocrats did everything they could to promote the oppressive, exploitative, and undemocratic authority of the colonial government and ruled their own people with even greater cruelty than the colonizers. In turn, they were empowered to arrest and detain any member of the community, regardless of that individual's standing. The colonial authorities' elevation of these individuals, and the imposition of them on an unwilling community, laid the foundation for an oppressive provincial administration that undermined indigenous systems of governance and justice. These newly powerful men became the new African elite.

The colonial administration could also confiscate the local population's most valued assets—land and livestock—especially from those who did not cooperate, thereby damaging both the basis of the local economies and Africans' right of ownership, their honor and honesty. Without any means of redress or restitution, communities' existing systems of justice and sense of fairness, including a traditional respect for privately held property, were rendered irrelevant: the power of the gun was the new form of administering “justice.” In this way, a dictatorial regime was cultivated, imposed, and, in time, increasingly tolerated.

By the end of World War II, however, the economies of the European powers lay in ruins, and the imperial project of the
previous four centuries was not only exhausted but also unsustainable. Many Africans who had been drafted and had fought for the colonial forces returned to their home countries with their horizons broadened and their “masters” ever so slightly demystified, and with a knowledge of guerrilla warfare. As a result, many colonized or conquered peoples throughout the world, including in Africa, were inspired to start campaigns to liberate themselves. In Kenya, this experience led to the Mau Mau freedom struggle. At the same time, within the United Nations, several individuals, including the American Ralph Bunche, head of the Department of Trusteeship and later undersecretary-general, put the issue of decolonization on the UN's agenda.

To a number of African men fell the task of freeing their peoples from the yoke of colonialism, humiliation, and exploitation. These men struggled and fought, with their people behind them, and with the example of those who had waged similar struggles against slavery and exploitation, especially in the Americas. (Although women participated in liberation efforts, they generally were not at the forefront and rarely held real power.) Over a period that spanned four decades, the peoples of Africa gained political independence. Many believed, often wrongly, that economic wealth would follow automatically.

Unfortunately, only a few leaders served and honored their long-suffering peoples by putting them first once independence was achieved. Many lacked principles and true leadership qualities; indeed, many were just ordinary men who happened to be in the right place at the right time. They dishonored the trust their people placed in them, and instead of standing up for them, many turned against the very individuals on whose shoulders they had stood to acquire power and the extensive privileges that came with it.

It is perhaps hard, looking back, to capture the excitement of the early years of independence, and how rapidly the transition took place. In January 1966, when I was twenty-five, I returned to Kenya, having completed my undergraduate and master's degrees in the United States. Six years earlier, I had gone to the United States as part of the Kennedy “lift,” a visionary attempt to educate a generation of East African leaders to meet the challenges of independence. The initiative was supported by the U.S. Department of State and members of the prominent U.S. political family the Kennedys.

When I left Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, the president of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), then a leading pro-independence political party, was still in internal exile, and the country was under a state of emergency imposed in 1952 by the British colonial administration after the outbreak of the Mau Mau war of liberation. When I returned, Kenya was independent, and Kenyatta was its first president. During the years I was away, Nigeria, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Algeria, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, the Gambia, Botswana, and Lesotho also achieved independence. I remember the exultation that I and many other young Africans felt then and the commitment we shared to build the newly emerging countries that were now fully ours, on a continent returning to African control.

Disappointment lay ahead. By and large, newly independent nations made no efforts to change the inherited colonial systems of governance, even though they had been designed, principally, to facilitate the continued exploitation of human and natural resources of the colonies for the benefit of the colonial motherland. And, although they were relinquishing direct rule over their colonies, the European powers were eager to maintain economic ties with the new states and ensure a steady supply of the raw natural resources that had provided their countries with such wealth during the colonial period. The
departing administrators made sure that the leaders who eventually held power in the former colonies were as cooperative politically as they were pliant economically. For all practical purposes, it was simply a change of guards. Those leaders, like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who sought to remain nonaligned and who tried to forge a different path of development were isolated, vilified, and denied support.

At the same time, those leaders who toed the line were rewarded with political protection from would-be plotters of coups d'états. They were given economic assistance they did not have to account for, such as opportunities to open secret bank accounts or purchase expensive villas in foreign capitals. Their armies were well supplied with weapons and equipment, which were used mostly to silence their own citizens. These regimes violated human rights and remained unquestioned even by those colonial powers that considered themselves defenders of freedom and democracy.

Such was the legacy of colonialism in the newly independent states of Africa: it left the African people chained to a new form of oppression. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, many colonial administrations had deliberately kept local Africans undereducated and prevented them access to the professional classes in order to avoid unnecessary competition and to ensure that the new managers of the state could not lead on their own. This helped maintain Africans' dependency. The rapid withdrawal of colonial administrators left newly independent countries with relatively few local people qualified to manage the inherited colonial bureaucracies, or medical and service professionals to operate health services, the business sector, schools, and other institutions. For example, when Zambia achieved independence in 1964 there were only about a hundred university graduates in the country
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It translated into a long delay before the new African nations and citizens could develop the mechanisms of government that
would allow it and other institutions to function efficiently and independently. Unable to compete, but preferred by the nation-state when business licenses were issued, some Africans quickly succumbed to corruption and easy money. They often became so-called sleeping partners, who received dividends as nominal co-owners, while doing little for the business. Eventually, many failed and never caught up.

A further impediment to genuine autonomy was the fact that the countries of Africa became independent during the Cold War, which in Africa was far from cold. The United States and the Soviet Union and their allies not only were determined to maintain their axes of influence in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, but also saw African nations as bulwarks against either Communism or U.S. expansionism. As a result, from the outset, countries throughout the continent were forced to ally themselves with either the Eastern or Western blocs. These divisions stifled any efforts to foster the cooperation, development, and unity that many Africans of my generation had hoped for and expected. Dictators and bad governance were at best ignored and at worst promoted. Those who refused to cooperate sometimes “disappeared” or were made irrelevant.

It was, therefore, hardly a surprise that barely six months after achieving independence from the Belgians in 1960, the Republic of the Congo's democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was overthrown in a coup, widely alleged to have been backed by a foreign government. Lumumba was said to have been murdered by forces loyal to then colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who would lead his own coup in 1965 and hold power for the next thirty years as president of the country he later renamed Zaire. The years I was away in the United States saw instability in a number of the new African states.
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In the year 1965 alone, civil war broke out in Chad; the Southern Rhodesian government under Ian Smith unilaterally declared
independence from Britain (only a guerrilla war would eventually achieve black majority rule in 1980, when the country was renamed Zimbabwe); and Pierre Ngendandumwe, the first Hutu prime minister of Burundi, was assassinated by a Tutsi extremist—a sign that the animosity between Hutus and Tutsis in both Burundi and Rwanda, fostered over generations by the colonial authorities, would not be “solved” even by self-government.

Following my return to Nairobi in January 1966, the governments of the Central African Republic, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), and Nigeria were overthrown in military coups. A second coup in Nigeria the following year led to the Biafran War, which over three years killed an estimated three million people. The conflict in Sudan that had broken out between the mainly Muslim north of the country and the mainly Christian south shortly before independence in 1956 continued, and would lead to a series of civil wars that lasted until 2005. In February 1966, another coup allegedly backed by a foreign power ousted the founding president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, forcing him into exile. Today, many Ghanaians and other Africans realize he was a wasted talent.

Nkrumah and other first-generation postcolonial leaders had recognized that the economic and political strength of their new nations would be enhanced if they worked collectively rather than separately. To that end, in 1963 the countries of Arabic-speaking North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa came together to create the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the precursor of the current African Union. The leaders identified three major goals: to decolonize the entire continent; to promote unity; and to effect economic and social development in order to rid Africa of ignorance, disease, and poverty. These were monumental tasks, perhaps beyond the scope of some of these leaders, especially given the inherited legacies of the
slave trade, colonialism, and the burden of the Cold War between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies.