The Challenge for Africa (5 page)

Rejecting the direct and indirect meddling by foreign powers in the politics of independent African nations, the OAU made efforts to exert some sovereignty and committed itself to a policy of nonintervention in the internal affairs of member states. Ultimately, this decision, while understandable in the historical circumstances in which it was made, would paralyze the organization's ability to stop gross human rights violations within Africa by African leadership. Perhaps it was also a clear reflection of the lack of financial and military means at the disposal of the OAU that would have been necessary to give weight to any actions against those considered rogue leaders. There were also many points of nonconvergence: history, language, ethnicity, race, culture, religion, and national boundaries. Even the difference between Francophone and Anglophone black Africa was a factor. It was hard for the OAU to establish a single identity, and not long after its inception it splintered into unofficial factions, rendering it largely ineffective.

Through the 1970s and ’80s, the struggle for influence in Africa between the East and West intensified, precipitating some of the most devastating internal wars for political and economic control African nations had ever experienced. For instance, proxy wars consumed Angola and Mozambique for years, during which more than a million people lost their lives. Tragically, the power blocs of both West and East also used the Cold War to justify the tolerance throughout Africa of dictatorial leaders who oppressed and facilitated the exploitation of their people politically and economically, and who routinely violated the rights of any citizen who dared to ask questions or dissent. The superpowers and their allies supported these leaders with a combustible mix of development aid and massive quantities of weaponry. In subsequent years these arms not
only helped to silence citizens, but whether in the hands of the state police or used by self-styled (and sometimes politically sponsored) street militias, they caused further carnage in the streets of many African cities.

Another reason—both more nuanced and yet perhaps even more devastating—for the dearth of good leadership in Africa was the destruction of Africans' cultural and spiritual heritage through the encounter with colonialism. This experience, commonly shared among colonized peoples, is not widely acknowledged in analyses of the problems facing the continent of Africa, which tend to be economic or political in orientation. However, the lack of self-knowledge that comes from Africans' cultural deracination is one of the most troubling and long-lasting effects of colonialism. Like other peoples who experienced not only physical colonization but also what might be called a colonization of the mind, Africans have been obscured from themselves. It is as if they have looked at themselves through another person's mirror—whether that of a colonial administrator, a missionary, a teacher, a collaborator, or a political leader—and seen their own cracked reflections or distorted images, if they have seen themselves at all.

For five centuries, the outside world has been telling Africans who they are. In much the same way as happened with the Aborigines in Australia, the native peoples of North America, and the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, Africans were told that their societies were backward, their religious traditions sinful, their agricultural practices primitive, their systems of governance irrelevant, and their cultural norms barbaric.

It is only relatively recently that the work of archaeologists and historians has slowly been replacing long-held European
preconceptions about Africa as the “dark continent.” These scholars have discovered that the continent in the centuries before the arrival of the Europeans had sophisticated civilizations, substantial governance structures, and cultural artifacts to rival any in the Europe of that time. For example, the central African kingdom of Kongo, which spanned 130,000 square miles and contained over half a million people, survived for centuries until the Portuguese slave trade reduced it to a virtual vassal state. The Mali Empire during the fourteenth century was larger than western Europe and, according to some contemporaries, one of the richest states in the world. During the time of its successors, the Songhai of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the renowned University of Sankore at Timbuktu, one of the oldest seats of learning in the world, reached the heights of its achievements.

The Ashanti dominated West Africa from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The kingdom of Benin spread south and west to the Niger Delta during the fifteenth century, while Dahomey (in modern-day Ghana and Benin) flourished from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. The Zulu nation resisted the British and Boer expansion into southern Africa; Zanzibar traded spices with India and the Arab world; and the city of Great Zimbabwe was a center of commerce that archaeological evidence suggests may have done business with Arabia—and, if the discovery of pottery shards from Nanjing is any indication, possibly with China as well.

To be sure, some of these states, like those of their eventual European conquerors, were imperialist, collected tributes, and engaged in slavery, across both the Atlantic Ocean and the Arabian Sea. However, contrary to the image of Africans perpetually at war with each other, there is no evidence that these civilizations were any more aggressive or perpetrated more atrocities than the colonialists who subdued them. Indeed, until the expansion of the slave trade in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, when as many as twenty-five million people were removed from Africa's shores (and new diseases wiped out both people and livestock), Africans had seen their wealth increase along with advances in technology, learning, and the arts. Some communities possessed huge herds of cattle and had mastered the ability to refine precious metals and mineral deposits.
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Given that advanced indigenous African civilizations were a reality, why were most African societies so vulnerable to European powers? One obvious factor was that African leadership and the slave traders developed an insatiable greed as the demand for slaves increased across the Atlantic. Another was the products of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of Western medicine that followed the debilitating effects of slavery. Ordinary Africans were awestruck at the power, knowledge, and skills displayed by the colonial administrators and missionaries; dazzled by the healing power of their medicines; and stunned by the speed of their transportation when horses, rickshaws, and, later, trains (“fire-spitting snakes”) and cars arrived. All of these new technologies overwhelmed the native peoples, whose technology was demonstrably less developed.

Most impressive of all, however, was the power of the gun, which was presented to the African populations as the white man's magic and witchcraft—and a very strong witchcraft at that. For the colonial powers, everything depended on intimidating the natives through the display and use of force, because if the local peoples had been less impressed, they would have been harder to subdue and exploit.

Nonetheless, in spite of the often terrible and disproportionate retribution for opposing the colonial powers, many African nations resisted the foreign intrusion and acquisition of their lands and property wherever they could. The Ashanti waged four wars with the British during the nineteenth century; Samory Touré fought French expansion in western Africa and
the Sudan for decades, while the Zulus famously battled the British in 1879; and the Hehes of German East Africa (who live in what is now modern-day Tanzania) fought the colonial administration in the early years of the twentieth century. Some African communities played imperialist forces off each other in a desperate attempt to ensure their survival as the Great Powers fought for control of the continent's human beings, rubber, gold, ivory, diamonds, cacao, timber, and fertile lands. Nevertheless, the gun proved far superior to magic, or the spear, shield, and bow and arrow. Tens of thousands of native Africans were killed mercilessly so the newcomers could access their wealth or settle on their lands. Eventually, the military power of the intruders overwhelmed Africa, and the Europeans carved its territory into spheres of control. Overwhelmed, many Africans were hauled onto reservations.

Perhaps nothing from the West, however, had greater power over conquered natives worldwide than the legal and economic systems the imperial powers imposed, along with exposure to the Bible. Before the missionaries came to sub-Saharan Africa in the mid- to late nineteenth century, contact beyond the coasts had mainly involved trade in slaves and ivory; Islam, which had been in Africa almost since its beginning in the seventh century CE, generally remained confined to the regions north of the Sahel and on the coast; and neither Arabs nor Europeans made much effort to introduce their cultures to the natives in the hinterlands.

Culture in Africa had remained mostly oral, with the tenets, triumphs, and troubles of its peoples transmitted from generation to generation through word of mouth or tradition. When written culture finally arrived in sub-Saharan Africa, especially with the missionaries, Africans were mesmerized by the records that were proclaimed to be the words of God.

While the native peoples knew and worshipped God, they didn't know that anything had been written about him. The
Bible was presented to the inhabitants as more relevant to their lives than the oral knowledge, traditions, and wisdom of the culture that had sustained them up to that point. They were told that Christianity not only represented a better expression of devotion than their own cultural practices, but indeed was the true faith; to question its authority or that of those who interpreted it was a sin and indeed heretical. To local peoples all around the world, including Africa, the Bible became the entry point to a new way of life that was guided by a new priesthood, whose power and authority were reinforced by the conquerors' guns. If some parts of the Bible contradicted the traditional wisdom of the local community's ancestors or were incomprehensible, what was needed, the natives were told, was not any effort to explain God's mysteries, but faith, and faith alone.

Missionaries certainly provided an opportunity for communities to become literate—though only the Bible was available to read. Rather than take the foreign scriptures as works of human beings inspired by the Divine, however, the native peoples took them to be the literal words of God, whether dictated or even written by God himself. Neither the missionaries nor teachers saw the need to correct such misinformation; often they believed it themselves.

However well-meaning the missionaries may have been in spreading what they perceived to be the Good News of Jesus Christ, the result of their evangelism was the beginning of a deep cultural inferiority complex among their African converts. Many assumed that God favored them less; that God had decided not to reveal himself to them directly but only to others—the Europeans—who were now offering them God's messages. If the favored communities, such as the colonialists and missionaries, had been chosen to receive the holy inspiration from God and offer it to other peoples, it was self-evident
that their way of life, culture, and mores were superior, and that native life and culture would have to change. Moreover, went Africans' reasoning, not only would they be welcomed into a superior culture should they accept the teachings of the Book, but they also would be blessed in the eyes of God.

Africans' acceptance of their own “inferiority” partly ex plains why, in spite of the political and armed resistance they marshaled, so many cultures fell to the gunboats and missionaries in the latter half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Within a few decades, everything foreign—that which the colonial administrators and missionaries brought forth—became synonymous in the local peoples' minds with what was more advanced, closer to God's wishes, and in all ways preferable to their previous way of life and values. The existence they had led before the arrival of the colonial powers and missionaries became not only unworthy, but sinful. Some peoples were even encouraged to consider themselves the children of Ham, who saw his father, Noah, naked and was cursed (see Genesis 9:22). Christianity would lift this curse Africans had lived under for centuries without their knowing it; they were baptized children of God and finally available for his mercy.

It didn't occur to the local communities or even the bearers of this message that, in the same way the Israelites were the children of their God, so were they of theirs. The idea that God speaks and inspires all peoples and gives them what they need to lead them through life was lost to the missionaries. Where there had been priests, teachers, and wisemen and -women, who carried with them the knowledge required to sustain the people and recollect their history in order to teach future generations, all local populations became perpetual students of the new knowledge and wisdom. Inherent in the very nature of being a learner and not a teacher is an inability to be master
of one's own world. One is forever being led, forever having to look for guidance from someone else, forever vulnerable to a master's misinformation or exploitation.

As Christianity became embedded in Africa, so did the idea that it was the afterlife that was the proper focus of a devotee, rather than this one—a legacy that continues to affect development. Putting so much emphasis on the delights of heaven and making it the ultimate destination devalues life in the present. It is as if all happiness and satisfaction, as well as relief from material wants and needs, will be found in heaven, not on Earth.

In my view, such an attitude allows institutions (such as the church) and powerful people (a member of parliament or other politician) to encourage people to remain passive. The people come to believe, in effect, that they will ultimately be saved by an outside force rather than by the sum of their actions. They may know they have a problem, for instance, with soil being swept into rivers when the seasonal rains come, or their sand dams being blocked. They may understand that they can change their situation, since neither planting trees nor scooping excess soil from the river requires heavy machinery or advanced technical skills. Yet they sit and wait for their MP, the church, an aid agency, or a foreign government to solve the problem. They devalue their own capacity and responsibility to act. This legacy of colonialism persists and remains devastating.