A Tanzanian child began to shake uncontrollably. The doctor guessed, correctly, that she was in the grip of malarial convulsions. But the child’s mother diagnosed that her daughter had been seized by evil spirits and, knowing that if the doctor gave her an injection to calm her, those spirits would escape through the needle-hole and possess more victims, she clasped the girl to her chest and fled from the clinic.
The clinic staff were aghast. If the child was taken back to her village, she would surely be subjected to the traditional “cure” for convulsions, where the victim is put under a blanket and made to inhale the smoke from burning elephant dung until she passes out. This would probably not address the underlying cause of her sickness, namely the millions of malarial parasites cavorting in her bloodstream. So they chased after the mother and persuaded her to return to the clinic by promising that her daughter would not be given an injection. Instead, they gave her a tranquilizer, Valium, via a suppository. When the shaking stopped, they were then able to give her quinine to tackle the parasites, and she was cured.
I was told this story by Harun Kasale, a Tanzanian doctor, who was trying to explain some of the difficulties of delivering medicine to the poorest of the poor. Many rural Tanzanians believe that diseases have supernatural causes, which prompts them to seek supernatural remedies. Instead of trusting conventional medicine, they turn to traditional healers. Some traditional treatments may have healing properties, but many are useless and possibly dangerous. They remain popular, however, not least because they tend to be much cheaper and nearer than the nearest clinic.
Dr. Kasale was trying to make it easier for rural Tanzanians to get proper health care. He was working on a ponderously named scheme with a simple premise: the Tanzania Essential Health Interventions Project (TEHIP) set out to show that even a tiny health budget, if spent rationally, could make a big difference.
Backed by the Tanzanian health ministry and a Canadian charity called the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Dr. Kasale and his colleagues carried out an experiment. They took two miserably poor rural districts, with a combined population of 700,000, and tried to find out how many lives could be saved by budgeting more logically. The results were so startling that I flew out to Tanzania to have a look.
The experiment was conducted in Morogoro and Rufiji, two sprawling slabs of bush the size of Belgium. I landed in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital, and drove out westwards to Morogoro with Dr. Kasale. It was as beautiful as poor rural areas usually are. Coconut palms glistened in the morning mist, dazzling sunlight played on green-cloaked mountains, and every ten-dollar shack had a million-dollar view.
The people in Morogoro live much as they have since agriculture first reached Tanzania, growing starchy vegetables, eating what they need, and trading the surplus, if any.
Before the experiment began, annual health spending in Tanzania was about $8 a head. In Morogoro and Rufiji, IDRC added $2 a head to the pot, on condition that it was spent rationally. By this the donors meant that the amount of money spent on battling a particular disease should reflect the burden that disease imposed on the local population.
This may sound obvious, but it is an approach that few health ministries take, in Africa or in the West. In Morogoro and Rufiji, no one had a clue which diseases caused the most trouble, so TEHIP’s first task was to find out. The traditional way of gathering health data in Tanzania was to collate records from clinics, but since most Tanzanians die in their homes this was not terribly accurate. So TEHIP sent researchers on bicycles to carry out a door-to-door survey, asking representative households whether anyone had died or sickened recently, and if so with what symptoms.
These raw numbers were then crunched to produce a “burden of disease” profile for the two districts. In other words, researchers sought to measure how many years of life were being lost to each disease, with a weighting to reflect the collateral damage to families when breadwinners die. They found that the amount the local health authorities spent on each disease bore no relation whatsoever to the harm that the disease inflicted on local people. Some diseases were horribly neglected. Malaria, for example, accounted for 30 percent of the years of life lost in Morogoro, but only 5 percent of the 1996 health budget. A cluster of childhood problems, including pneumonia, diarrhea, malnutrition, measles, and malaria, constituted 28 percent of the disease burden but received only 13 percent of the budget.
Other conditions, meanwhile, attracted more than their fair share of cash. Tuberculosis, for example, accounted for less than 4 percent of years of life lost but received 22 percent of the budget. No one wanted to cut spending on anything, but the research suggested that the extra $2 a head would be best spent on neglected diseases for which there were cost-effective treatments or preventive measures. As it turned out, the extra cash was ample: neither in Morogoro nor in Rufiji was the system able to absorb more than an additional 80 cents or so.
This tiny cash infusion smoothed the transition to a more effective approach to health care. Health workers, mostly nurses or paramedics rather than doctors, were given a simple procedure to show how to treat common symptoms. An illustration: if a child arrives coughing, and with a running nose and a hot brow, the nurse is instructed to work through a checklist of other symptoms to determine whether it is merely a cold or something worse. If the child is breathing more than fifty times a minute, for example, he is assumed to have pneumonia, given an antibiotic, and checked again after two days.
In most cases the cheapest treatments are offered first. Children with diarrhea are given oral rehydration salts, which cost a few cents. If the salts don’t work, the child is referred to a clinic and put on a drip. For malnutrition, the first treatment offered is advice on breastfeeding. When this is not enough, the child is prescribed cheap vitamin-A pills. AIDS is tackled through education, condoms, and antibiotics to heal open sores caused by other venereal diseases, which present the virus with an open door into a new bloodstream.
Knowing which diseases people are actually suffering from enables clinics to order the right drugs. Previously, the government sent out the same package of pills to all dispensaries, which meant that popular drugs ran out while others gathered dust. Non-malarial mountain villages used to receive as many malaria drugs as mosquito-infested lowland ones, and villages where no one had ever suffered from asthma received asthma medication. “We did things blindly,” a doctor in Morogoro recalled.
Perhaps most important, health centers in Morogoro now encourage people to use bednets impregnated with insecticide, which fight mosquitoes in several ways. If the bug hits the mesh, it dies. If it merely flies close to the bednet, it feels dizzy and either falls to earth, where it is eaten by ants, or buzzes off to rest and recuperate, which means that it will bite no one that night. A bednet’s mosquito-repelling effect stretches for 500 meters in all directions, so netless villagers gain some protection from their better-equipped neighbors.
Conservative types at first shunned bednets in favor of the mtuti, a hot, itchy traditional sleeping bag woven of palm leaves. But with a bit of urging from nurses they discovered that cotton bednets are softer on the skin and better at beating back bugs. Despite the cost – about $3 for a locally made net, with the insecticide somewhat subsidized – the nets are popular. Village shops sell them. Peasants hang them in huts on stilts in their rice-fields, where they sleep during harvest season, so as to be at hand to scare off crop-munching hippos. In Morogoro, even the Masai, a fiercely conservative tribe of nomadic cattle-herders, have started draping themselves in insecticide-soaked bednets when sleeping under trees.
The results of all this were stunning. In Rufiji, infant mortality fell by 28 percent between 1999 and 2000, from 100 deaths per 1,000 live births to seventy-two. The proportion of children dying before their fifth birthdays dropped by 14 percent, from 140 per 1,000 to 120. The figures for Morogoro are thought to be equally good, although they had not been properly checked when I was there. In nearby districts, and in Tanzania as a whole, there is no evidence of a similar improvement over the same period.
The stories I heard in Morogoro suggested that better health care had made people less poor. Everyone agreed that the fall in malaria had had especially happy effects.
Like most of Tanzania, Morogoro is a holiday camp for mosquitoes. While Dr. Kasale and I were there, we were caught more than once in booming rainstorms. When each downpour stopped, it left stagnant puddles everywhere, which swiftly became hatcheries for mosquitoes. The locals stay dry-ish by using big palm leaves as umbrellas but until recently had little protection against the swarms that follow storms.
I asked people if their lives had changed since the TEHIP experiment began. They all said they had. A young peasant called Mustapha Dangeni told me that his two children used to be smitten with fever almost every month before he got a bednet. Now, he said, they had been healthy for a whole year. He and his wife had found that, because they did not have to spend time nursing sick children, they could work longer in their fields, so they had produced more spare corn and millet. They earned more money than usual and did not have to spend any of it on anti-malarial drugs. Dangeni invited me into his hut to show me all the things he had bought with the extra cash: a radio, a bicycle, some rough furniture, better tools, and so on. “Things are continually improving.” He beamed, leaning shirtless against a sack of charcoal.
Health and efficiency
The lesson from Morogoro and Rufiji is that simple ideas, rigorously applied, can yield dramatic results. Africa’s problems are huge but, if tackled rationally, not insoluble. The Tanzanian government is keen to roll out TEHIP-like programs across the whole country. That would be a good start. Other countries should follow suit. And they should also apply the same rational approach to more or less everything they spend money on.
Too often, they won’t. Governments everywhere waste money, but in Africa the problem is especially grave because there is less cash to waste and because it is wasted so flagrantly.
Given finite funds and potentially infinite demands for them, a government has to decide what is really important and what is not. Needs vary from country to country, but most African countries still need the basics: primary education, primary health care, passable roads, piped water, and a functional legal system. Such bare necessities should be given priority but often aren’t.
Even in the most indebted countries, there is always money for ministerial limousines and mansions or for first-class flights to pointless conferences. After an unexpected upgrade on a plane bound for Lusaka, I once found myself sitting next to one of the top men at the Zambian finance ministry. When he found out who I was, he spent the next half an hour hectoring me about Zambia’s need for deeper debt relief, before the complimentary champagne put him to sleep. Around that time, his country’s annual budget for dealing with its AIDS crisis was half the sum earmarked for building villas for heads of state attending a talking-shop Zambia was hosting.
In 2001, some 18,000 delegates gathered to trumpet their grievances and demand “remedial measures” at a “UN World Conference Against Racism” in Durban. Some Africans and black Americans demanded that compensation for slavery should be paid by the American government. Others demanded that reparations for the Rwandan genocide should be paid, also by the American government. Several African presidents dwelt at great length on the iniquities of colonialism while omitting to mention their own countries’ current ethnic violence.
In itself, the conference was not important. But it did highlight two big problems. First, the tendency of African elites to spend other people’s money on themselves – a suite at one of the hotels on the Durban waterfront does not come cheap. Second, their tendency to believe that Africa’s problems are someone else’s fault.
I hear this argument often, at least from the educated middle class: civil servants, politicians, academics, journalists, and so forth. African newspapers are full of it, as is my email inbox. A good way of keeping up with the trends in this school of thought, I have found, is to subscribe to the New African, a glossy magazine published in London. It makes fascinating reading.
The latest issue to land on my desk contains the following. An editorial denouncing the “secret groups” from “the nations of European stock” who “meet each year and fix the rules and order of the world.” An article praising Robert Mugabe’s land reform program. Another installment in a long series on German massacres in Namibia around the beginning of the twentieth century. An article on the American presidential election of 2000 entitled “So who stole the black vote in Florida?” A piece on water privatization in Ghana, subtitled “Why does the West want to take away from the people the most precious and indispensable commodity of all – water?” A book review arguing that “the current geopolitical order … has ensured that Africa [is] at the eternal mercy of the big powers and their multinational corporations.” And a report that a Cameroonian doctor has discovered a cure for AIDS.1
The magazine’s editor, Baffour Ankomah, a Ghanaian with a colorful turn of phrase, acknowledges that many African governments are corrupt and undemocratic but seems to resent it when foreigners point this out. If an African leader is particularly vilified in the West, Ankomah tends to applaud him for standing up to the neo-imperialists. When interviewing such leaders, Ankomah’s journalistic scepticism tends to fail him.
In the issue of July/August 2002, for example, he devotes the magazine’s cover and sixteen inside pages to a “ground-breaking world exclusive interview” with Charles Taylor, who at the time was the president of Liberia. Readers are assured that the piece is “a collector’s item” and treated to a dozen shiny pictures of Taylor, snappily suited, comfortably enthroned, and parrying tough questions such as, “How has life been at the top, as the democratically elected president?”
While it is quite true that Taylor was elected, one feels there is a bit of background missing here. In 1989, Taylor led a rebellion against the corrupt and murderous regime of Samuel Doe. After an eight-year civil war, during which soldiers in Mickey Mouse masks played “guess the sex” of unborn babies before cutting their mothers open to see, Taylor emerged as the most powerful warlord in Liberia. An election was held in 1997, which Taylor won by making it clear that if he lost he would start fighting again. “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him,” ran one of his campaign slogans.
Two years later, a new civil war broke out, pitting Taylor’s government against rebels backed by neighboring Guinea. Taylor’s ability to fight back was hampered by UN sanctions imposed on his regime for supporting the hand-chopping rebels in another neighboring country, Sierra Leone, and for his alleged involvement in the illicit trade in “conflict diamonds.”
Taylor tells the New African that he thinks these sanctions unfair, particularly since Sierra Leone’s civil war has ended. Ankomah agrees and lets Taylor ramble on about his theory that “there has been a conspiracy out there to destroy this country and our people,” and, furthermore, that the imbalance in power between America and the rest of the world is “the root of all crises throughout the world.”
The New African quotes, without comment, Taylor’s assertion that “there are no political prisoners in any jails in this country. We have freedom of speech, we have freedom of the press.” Gugu Radebe, a colleague of mine from Johannesburg, tells a different story. In 2000, while filming a documentary in Liberia, he was arrested, along with three other journalists, Tim Lambon, Sorious Samura, and David Barrie, for allegedly plotting to defame the regime.
Prison was not comfortable. The cells were tiny, the windows had been blocked up, and only an airhole the size of a brick allowed them to breathe the hot, wet Liberian air. Gugu recalls: “We were locked up in the cells and people kept coming to look and peek. These guys were coming around and holding their dicks and looking at the white guys thinking: ‘Hmmm, supper.’ Things like that. We then looked for the main man there, and we found him quite quickly.… I called him across and said, ‘Look, I’ve been in prison before, I know what goes on in here, can we buy our protection?’ ”2
For $150, the four bought themselves some watchful muscles. Fortunately, Nelson Mandela and Jesse Jackson appealed for their release, and after a week behind bars they were freed. Gugu vowed never to go back to Liberia.
Ankomah does, to be fair, raise a couple of sensitive topics, such as the almost complete lack of development in Liberia in the 155 years since independence. Taylor’s explanation for this is that America has done “nothing” for its former colony in the last century and a half. This is not entirely accurate, Ankomah interjects, prompting Taylor to backtrack a bit. He concedes that the Americans built Liberia’s main airport but stresses that this was only so they could use it as a military base. He admits that they built a seaport, too, but this does not count because it was “built to export rubber.”
I hear this argument quite often: that because the colonists built infrastructure to suit their own needs, it was therefore of no benefit to the locals. This does not follow. Doubtless many ancient Britons objected when Roman invaders built roads all over their country. The Romans did not build them to please the natives; rather, they wanted to make it easier to govern their new colony and easier to trade with other parts of the empire. Nonetheless, after the Romans left, their roads remained the best in Britain for 1,000 years.
Anyway, back to Taylor. “We have not had any major long-term assistance,” he moans. “Liberia has natural resources. People now have to come in to invest in the country long term. Don’t come and dig the iron ore and take it out. You dig the iron ore, you must smelt it here and you must produce steel rods here. That’s long-term economic development for our country.”
One reason why investors might not be keen to do this, which you would never guess from reading the New African, is that Taylor passed a law giving himself the right to dispose of all “strategic commodities” in Liberia. These include all minerals, all forest products, all agricultural and fishery products, and anything else the president chooses to call “strategic.” Until his overthrow in August 2003, Liberia was, as one of my colleagues at the Economist put it, “Charles Taylor, Inc.”
Why ideas matter
Few people succeed unless they believe that they can, and no nation ever has. Top athletes exude a self-confidence that often elides into arrogance. So do countries that are doing well: think of Britain in the nineteenth century, Japan in the 1980s, or America today.
Much of Africa, by contrast, is seized by the uniquely disempowering notion that foreigners are to blame for most past and present ills. Of course, foreigners sometimes really are to blame. Africans have suffered, and it is only natural that many should bear grudges for the wrongs of the colonial period. Many people in other parts of the world also nurse old grievances, and it has not necessarily held them back. Britons who were born long after 1945 still harp on about the Second World War, and some Koreans have still not forgiven Japan for invading Korea in 1592. But there are few places besides Africa where intellectuals are so consumed by the past. Nor are there many non-Africans who have devoted as much time, effort, and diplomatic capital to the pursuit of various forms of reparation for historical crimes.
Railing against outsiders may be cathartic, but it does not achieve much. The politician who makes the most ferocious speeches denouncing Whitey is not necessarily going to be the best at balancing the budget or fixing the drains. More often, the opposite is true: bad rulers often cloak themselves in nationalism to distract attention from their failures.
The quest for reparations is likely to be counter-productive. Rich countries give aid mostly for reasons of charity, not contrition, and will not open their purses wider just because African campaigners demand that they take responsibility for their ancestors’ misdeeds.
Campaigners may retort that other victimized groups have succeeded in winning reparations from Western governments. The aborigines of Australia, for example, and the indigenous peoples of America and Canada have wrung a continuous flow of handouts from their fellow citizens. True, but it is not clear that the money has done them much good. Some people argue that, on the contrary, it has fostered dependency and alcoholism.3
A few small groups of Africans have won compensation for historical wrongs, but sudden payouts can be as disruptive as winning a lottery. In 2002, the British government agreed to pay $7 million to 228 members of the cattle-herding Samburu tribe in Kenya, to compensate them for deaths and injuries caused by mines in an area used as a training ground by the British army. Hundreds of them walked miles to Nanyuki, the nearest town with a bank, to collect payouts ranging from $13,000 to $430,000. The average annual income in Kenya is $360.
With the first payout, the Samburu held the biggest party Nanyuki had ever seen. They scattered banknotes around bars, ate every cow in town, slept with the horde of prostitutes who had come from afar to join the frolics, and bought old clunkers for huge sums with the vague idea that they might start taxi businesses, although few had driving licenses. After the mother of all binges, they left, singing, in their worn-out taxis.4
Wiser Africans do not wish to be seen as victims. At the Durban racism conference, Abdoulaye Wade, Senegal’s president and a descendant of slave-owning African kings, pooh-poohed the idea that modern Africans should be paid compensation for nineteenth-century slavery. “If one can claim reparations for slavery,” he said, “the slaves of my ancestors, or their descendants, can also claim money from me. Slavery has been practised by all people in the world.”5 George Ayittey goes further, arguing that “Almost every black problem is placed or explained in terms of a racialist paradigm, giving the false impression that black problems cannot be solved until racism is totally eradicated. This is painfully unrealistic. Regrettably, there will always be racism in the West and elsewhere. Must we blacks wait for its end before we take the initiative ourselves to solve our own problems?”6
Even some of the loudest grievance-shouters, such as Thabo Mbeki, recognize that Africa cannot grow rich from reparations. As I argued earlier, if Africa is to prosper, it must do so the way all prosperous countries, barring a few oil sheikhdoms, have done: by making things and providing services that other people want to buy.
This idea does not get much play in the African media, but it gets some, and as the press grows freer it may get a bit more. One of the most cheering stories of the last decade has been the steady liberation of the African press.
In the 1980s, governments completely dominated Africa’s airwaves and printing presses. Broadcasters were state-owned and pumped out dreary propaganda. Independent newspapers were either banned or subject to frequent run-ins with the secret police. But since the end of the Cold War and the demise of the one-party state, dozens of lively, irreverent, and sometimes scurrilous papers have popped up. Private radio stations are also booming, which is important because most Africans cannot afford a daily paper but every village has a radio. In 1985, there were only ten community broadcasters in the whole of Africa; in 2000 there were more than 300. In Uganda alone there are more than thirty private stations pumping out hip music and frank chit-chat, and 100 more have won licenses.
A hack’s life is freer and safer than ever before. In 2001, no African journalists were killed because of their work, although four were murdered for motives unknown. Less encouragingly, over 180 were jailed, but most were released within forty-eight hours without charge. Several countries still have censorious laws. In Congo, those who “insult the army” face the death penalty. In Angola, it is an offence to “slander … the memory of the dead,” and for those charged with defaming the Mozambican president, “truth is not a defence.” But only in Zimbabwe and Eritrea has press freedom been seriously curtailed in recent years.
Our brave correspondent in Harare, Andrew Meldrum, was arrested in 2002 for allegedly “publishing a falsehood.” He spent a night in a cold, lice-ridden police cell, where he says he found the company extremely pleasant. His cellmates were two Zimbabwean journalists, equally innocent of any wrongdoing. They found a copy of the state-owned newspaper, the Herald, on the cell floor and started chatting about its contents. A guard ordered them to stop, adding that prisoners were allowed to use newspapers only for toilet paper.
Andy was eventually acquitted, but within minutes of his acquittal he was served with a deportation order. In May 2003, while he was still appealing against the order, he was abducted by the police, bundled on to a plane, and expelled from the country. He is the first to admit, however, that had he not been an American citizen he would probably have suffered far worse.
In less tyrannical countries than Zimbabwe, the main problem for African journalists is not censorship but money. I spoke with Diallo Souleymane, the editor of two newspapers in Guinea, Le Lynx and La Lance. He told me that not many Guineans could afford to pay the fifty cents or so that he charged for his papers but that news vendors hired copies out for a fraction of the cover price. “A guy takes the paper to his office, reads it for half an hour, and returns it when he’s finished,” he said. Each copy, he reckoned, was read by thirty people.
But still, his papers are not exactly drowning in cash, and this affects their capacity to gather news. Souleymane told me that he had fifteen reporters in the capital, Conakry, but that he could rarely afford to send them to other parts of the country to find out what was going on. He tried recruiting freelancers in provincial towns, but the local political leaders were usually able to co-opt them by paying far more than La Lance could afford in return for sycophantic coverage.
Private newspapers and radio stations, being businesses themselves, are quite likely to promote business-friendly values. Many don’t, of course, but there is a much broader range of ideas circulating now than in the days when the state had the only megaphone in town. Independent journalists are also much better at exposing corrupt officials, criticizing government policies, and generally holding their rulers to account. One of the surest signs that they are doing a good job is that African politicians, by and large, detest them.
The feeling is particularly strong among the more recently victorious liberation movements, who remember being lionized when they were rebels and resent being lambasted now they are in government.
I encountered this regularly in South Africa. The ANC received little but adulation from the foreign media while it was a rebel movement, simply because it was opposed to apartheid. But when it formed a government, the press started to assess it on the basis of how well it governed. For some ANC leaders, the ensuing criticism was hard to stomach.
I once managed to secure an interview with President Mbeki by politely and persistently nagging his deputy press secretary. The day before the interview was to take place, I was summoned to Pretoria for a briefing with his chief spokesman, Parks Mankahlana. Ushered into his office, I extended a hand and introduced myself. Perhaps because he had been gravely ill, Mankahlana appeared to have had no idea that he had an appointment with me. He turned to his deputy in fury and asked her, “Why on earth did you lethimin here?”
He then gave me a lecture on how much he hated the Economist for its arrogance and Afro-pessimism, before moving on to the subject of how much he hated the entire Western press corps for the same reason. A recent incident particularly rankled: he told me that he had invited all the foreign hacks in South Africa to a press conference about a new presidential advisory panel, but no one showed up. Perhaps unkindly, I pointed out that the conference had been held on the same day as a violent election in Zimbabwe that had captured global headlines and that if any of us had stayed in South Africa, we would probably have been sacked. Then he really lost his temper.
Sadly, Mankahlana died a few months later of AIDS. Possibly, when I spoke to him, illness had already affected his judgment. But I suspect that the sentiments he expressed were sincere, even if he might not have chosen, had he been healthy, to express them so bluntly.
Being a journalist in Africa is no way to make friends. Many politicians have berated me for the Economist’s Africa coverage, which they say dwells too much on wars, famines, and Zimbabwe and so scares off investors. When on holiday in Africa, as soon as I reveal what I do for a living I am usually harangued by the tour operator for the excessive attention Western hacks pay to stories of bloodshed and particularly to stories of Western tourists getting murdered.
I can see their point, and I sympathize with it. Some journalists are irresponsible, some are lazy, some report in a highly misleading way. But most, in my experience, try quite hard to find out what is happening and to convey that information as accurately as possible. They may oversimplify, they may sacrifice nuance to make the story more gripping, but they don’t usually lie. The reason they report that Africa is plagued by war, famine, and pestilence is that Africa is plagued by war, famine, and pestilence. They will stop reporting this when it stops being true.
Of course there is much that is good going on in Africa, and some news organizations go out of their way to report it. CNN regales viewers of Inside Africa with plenty of upbeat stories, and BBC World devotes a regular slot to African business. But these are not the stories that people remember. Thumbing through my own cuttings, I am reminded that I have written about African novels, theater, radio, advertising, drinking games, banking, corporate governance, rugby, soccer, sex, golf, cricket, cartoons, car manufacturing, platinum mining, migration, music, information technology, tourism, education, and countless other everyday topics. I don’t need a cuttings file, however, to remind me of the charred bodies on Kinshasa’s pavements or the sunken, subdued faces of AIDS patients in Ndola. I could be wrong, but I suspect that you, too, recall the ghastly images of Ethiopia’s famine of 1984 more sharply than you can the last article you read on microcredit.
Some Africans have suggested to me that journalists, local and foreign, should go easy on Africa’s rulers because it is not reasonable to expect the governments of poor countries to be as efficient or clean as those of rich countries. I take the opposite view. In poor countries, bad government is a matter of life and death. If someone defrauds the French government of a few million euros, this is a crime, and he should be jailed, but life for the average Frenchman will continue to be comfortable. If, on the other hand, a Malawian politician is looting the emergency grain reserve, people will starve as a consequence of his actions. An aggressive press is a crucial check on corruption.
Out of Africa, hope for something new
I will always be an outsider in Africa. I have never been poor or oppressed, and I grew up in a country where African-style poverty has been unknown for generations. When I wander around Africa, I do so wrapped in the armor that money provides. Where there is violence, I can afford to stay in a hotel with security guards. Where there is sickness, I can buy medicine. Where there is hunger, I can always find something to eat.
Africa constantly reminds me how lucky I am to have grown up in a rich, peaceful country. If I’d been born in Africa, there’s a good chance that I’d be dead by now and almost no chance that I’d be racking up so many frequent-flyer miles. I’m a foreigner, so this is an outsider’s perspective, for what it is worth.
I believe that Africa can grow rich. Most African countries are not yet on the right path, but several are at least hacking through the undergrowth looking for that path. Where exactly it will lead is up to Africans; only they can choose what kind of society they want to live in. But whatever the details it is clear that the society most Africans want to build is an industrialized one. I do not think I have met any Africans, whether peasants, bishops, or bankers, who do not want their countries to enjoy a standard of living like the West’s. And this will take time. Nations do not suddenly wake up industrialized. To join the modern world, Africans will have to study, toil, save, and invest.
In Europe, the process was excruciatingly slow. After the sack of Rome in 410, Europeans almost entirely forgot how to read, write, or lay bricks. For 1,000 years, they huddled in freezing huts of sticks and straw, terrified of the wolves and evil spirits that lurked in the forests around them. Their lives were so static and insular that they often could not understand the dialects spoken by the peasants in the next village. The local warlords who ruled them did so with unreflecting cruelty. It would never have occurred to an English king of the fourteenth century that public money was not his to spend as he pleased, though he might have had difficulty counting it, math skills being rare in those days.7
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans rediscovered the great works of classical literature and philosophy and hauled themselves back up to the level of civilization their ancestors had enjoyed in Roman times. A trickle of technological advances over the next two centuries turned into a stream in the 1800s and a torrent in the 1900s. In mid-century, communism and fascism slew millions and threatened to halt the continent’s progress, but both ideologies were eventually vanquished.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, life in Europe and most of its offshoots, particularly America, is peaceful and prosperous. East Asia, which started industrializing later but had the advantage of being able to learn from the West’s example, is catching up fast.
In all these places, change has been traumatic. Mass affluence has shaken up the old social order. British plumbers can earn more than professors or archdeacons. Mass mobility has loosened family ties. Religious faith has waned in much of the rich world, with the striking exception of America.
In Africa, too, as progress comes, it will involve pain. New technologies will kill old industries; cost-cutting governments will lay off legions of un-needed employees. As Africa grows less poor, its people will probably become more individualistic, for money allows individuals to make more choices for themselves. A peasant typically spends his whole life farming the strip his chief allocates to him. But if he hops on a bus, moves to a city, and learns a skill, he has a much wider range of options as to what kind of work he will do, where he will live, who he will marry, and so on.
Some Africans already fret that modernization will mean the Westernization of their culture: that television will kill traditional songs and festivals or that the empty materialism of American soap operas will infect their children. It is a worry. African folk tales, if not written down, may be lost. Some of Africa’s many languages will disappear, too. People find it easier to communicate if they speak tongues that many others speak, which is why billions learn English, whereas Khoi will probably go the same way as Cornish.
But a glance at the rich world suggests that the new does not necessarily drive out the old. Japanese teenagers watch American movies, but they watch more Japanese ones. Television has not killed kabuki theater; it has projected it to a wider audience. People tend to preserve the traditions they value and quietly ditch the ones they do not care about. People are not usually forced to join the modern world, although the modern world’s bulldozers do sometimes destroy the forests where traditional hunter-gatherers live. For the most part, the drift from traditional to modern ways of living is voluntary. People migrate to towns because they prefer the greater material well-being, the greater freedom, and the greater variety of opportunities that an industrialized society offers.
Which is why the vast majority of Africans are striving, step by step, to get richer. For some reason, the African go-getter who sticks most in my mind is a young man I met on a hill in rural KwaZulu-Natal. This South African province used to be riven by political violence: as apartheid crumbled, followers of the African National Congress fought a sporadic guerrilla war against Inkatha, a Zulu tribal party. The apartheid security forces sent arms and agents provocateurs to stir things up: between 1985 and 1994, some 12,000 people were killed.
Many young men dropped out of school and spent their adolescence burning down neighboring villages. Tens of thousands endured such a bloody upbringing that they are now emotionally damaged and practically unemployable. But despite this tough start many are straining diligently to lift themselves out of poverty.
The one I spent the longest talking to was a veteran of the local war, a nineteen-year-old who had seen more deaths than he had worn neckties. When the conflict ended, he started raising chickens, which he slaughtered, cooked, and sold. He had big plans: he had been studying basic accounting and wanted to expand his business, save, and put his children through university. He told me that if South Africans worked hard, the country could grow rich, like Japan.
I cautioned, pedantically, that the Japanese had labored for a century before they caught up with the West. He shrugged. “We can do it, too,” he said. “And besides, raising chickens is better than fighting.”