Nor is the corruption so widely associated with Africa an exaggeration. Police, civil servants, even teachers regularly demand bribes in order to make ends meet on their meagre salaries; the well-connected are just insatiably greedy. According to a much-quoted report prepared for the African Union, African elites steal $148 billion (all figures US) a year from their fellow citizens while national budgets often total less than $1 billion a year. African countries routinely dominate Transparency International’s Corruption Perception indices; predatory African leaders have clearly turned the skill of manipulating political systems to their own advantage into a fine art.
Africa is not a poor continent, and not all Africans are poor. Merrill Lynch’s World Wealth Report for 2006 calculates that there are 82,000 African millionaires — a mere bagatelle out of some billion people, but surely a surprising number nonetheless. Their total worth is $786 billion. But instead of providing moderate prosperity for all, many African nations are the most unequal places on earth. You see it immediately: the gated communities and guarded monster homes of expatriates and local elites right next to mile upon mile of squalid townships with their tiny hovels, filthy water, open sewers, piles of rubbish. Even the rich can’t escape the broken roads, the ubiquitous garbage, the gridlocked traffic, the suicidal drivers, the gangs of feckless young men, the beggars so thick on the ground that even liberals keep the windows closed in their air-conditioned suvs.
These are the external signs of the larger economic reality. Of the 177 countries on the undp’s Human Development Index, the bottom twentyfour are all African, as are thirty-six of the bottom forty. Most of these countries can’t be expected to improve their lot because they lack the basic institutions and capital needed to develop. Future generations will likely be more numerous, poorer, less educated, and more desperate. According to the Economic Commission for Africa’s flagship Economic Report on Africa 2005, African poverty “is chronic and rising. The share of the total population living below the $1 a day threshold is higher today than in the 1980s and 1990s — this despite significant improvements in the growth of African gdp in recent years. The implication: poverty has been unresponsive to economic growth. Underlying this trend is the fact that the majority of people have no jobs or secure sources of income.”
Forty thousand branches of international aid agencies now operate throughout Africa. Many make a significant contribution through small local projects. Yet as American travel writer Paul Theroux found when he returned to areas where he had worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, virtually everywhere today things are shabbier and less hopeful than they were four decades earlier. Who can resist sharing Theroux’s disillusion about foreign aid or his dour overall view of the continent forty years later?
In the face of these disappointing developments, African leaders continue to bring shame on their countries. South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and his barking-mad minister of health are undermining serious attempts to deal with one of the world’s greatest aids crises. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has systematically devastated his country. In Malawi, which ranks 165 of 177 on the Human Development Index, the newly elected “reform” president chose the huge legislative building for his official residence, bought a half-million-dollar Chrysler Maybach 62 (and, in so doing, kept up with the reckless king of impoverished, aids-ridden Swaziland), and was to have an official portrait painted at a cost of $800,000. Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, a long-time favourite of the US and Britain and head of state for twenty years, changed the constitution so that he could run for a third time. He had his leading opponent charged with treason and rape. It is as if these men are deliberately seeking to humiliate their continent in the eyes of the world.
Failed or ruined non-states are commonplace. Angola, Liberia, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, southern Sudan, and the Republic of Congo are all emerging from ghastly fighting, all of it internally driven. The challenges each faces even to reach normal levels of African underdevelopment border on the intractable. Conflicts of varying degrees of destructiveness continue in western Sudan (Darfur), between Sudan and Chad, in northern Uganda with the Lord’s Resistance Army, in Somalia, throughout the vast Democratic Republic of the Congo (aided and abetted by Rwanda and Uganda). Nigeria is in a state of imminent implosion. The resumption of war between Ethiopia and Eritrea is a distinct possibility. Across southern Africa, the spread of hiv/aids threatens the very existence of Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, and Zambia; South Africa, whose well-being is key to Africa’s future, has more hiv/aids sufferers than anywhere else on earth save for India.
Perhaps the most depressing phenomenon is the situation of girls and women. Many African countries boast the most egalitarian protocols and regulations imaginable promoting the status of women. Rwanda’s parliament has a higher percentage of women members than any other country in the world. Africa has produced a significant number of powerhouse women as well as impressive feminist ngos. Yet the distance between this development and the reality facing the majority of African women seems unbridgeable. In many African countries, in fact, women have no rights at all — they are regarded by customary law as minors, their lives in the hands of their husbands. From legal status to education to manual labour to social obligations to family responsibilities to sexual victimization, life for many, perhaps most, African girls and women is truly Hobbesian.
This portrait, of course, is not the entire reality of Africa today. The continent is endlessly diverse, and all generalizations have exceptions. Hundreds of millions of Africans are just like the majority of people everywhere — hardworking, trying to cope, and full of the multiple complexities of our species. Nonetheless, it’s virtually impossible not to be stunned by the pages and pages of horrid news that constitute the reality of modern-day Africa in a way that’s not true of any other part of the world. In the forty-odd years since my first visit, the dream of a continent that would show the rest of us new possibilities for the human condition has turned into a grotesque nightmare.
How do we account for Africa’s plight and what should be done? The conventional wisdom is that the problem is African and the solution is for the rich, white Western world to save Africa from itself, its leaders, its appetites, and its apparent incapacity for civilization. We give, they take. We’re active and entrepreneurial, they’re passive and dependent. We help, they’re helpless.
There is in this neat equation more than a hint of centuries-old racist attitudes toward Africans, our era’s version of the white man’s burden. But there’s an alternative perspective on the “African problem,” one that is not nearly as self-congratulatory and dishonest. This interpretation says that rather than being the solution to Africa’s plight, Westerners are a very substantial part of the problem and have been for centuries. None of this condones or justifies African malfeasance. But it does help to explain it and to indicate different directions that need to be taken if Africa is to find its path to a better future.
