Africa

by Guy Arnold

  In his seminal work False Start in Africa Dumont examined the one-party system from both the political and development angles.

  The one-party system helps avoid the spectacle of parties out-doing each other with extravagant campaign promises; but this can occur anyway. And the system tends towards the abuse of power by the ruling group, if there is no minimum opposition to make its protests heard. To be truly acceptable and effective, the party must have a real popular base, organize the peasants, and help them to stand up for themselves; their complaints must be heard by the government. The system should facilitate the ‘dialogue’, between the base and the summit, in both directions: first, to transmit to the peasants the provisions of the plan and necessary crop and economic disciplines; and also to find out what the peasants think of it, what they need to carry it out, and what organizations are best able to put all of them to work.17

  At the beginning of 1961, following the annus mirabilis of independence, 27 African countries were independent. Thereafter, the pace was slower: two in 1961 – Sierra Leone and Tanganyika; four in 1962 – Algeria, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda; two in 1963 – Kenya and Zanzibar; two in 1964 – Malawi and Zambia; one in 1965 – The Gambia; two in 1966 – Botswana and Lesotho; three in 1968 – Equatorial Guinea, Mauritius and Swaziland; so that by the end of the decade there were 43 independent African states. Of these states Algeria, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zanzibar, Lesotho and Equatorial Guinea were to undergo coups before the decade was over. Kenya, Malawi, Tanganyika (later Tanzania) and Zambia would become one-party states (without the assistance of their armies) and in the case of Tanzania under Nyerere would provide the intellectual as well as the practical justification for adopting such a system. The Gambia, which became independent under a coalition government led by Sir Dawda Jawara, was to enjoy a long period of stable government under a multiparty system, as would Botswana and Mauritius. Swaziland, under its semi-feudal system, enjoyed what might be described as limited democracy until its King carried out his own coup in the 1970s.

  Whatever the systems they opted for, the new African rulers had to deal with problems of immense poverty and their people’s huge expectations that, once freedom had been enjoyed, independence would mean a better standard of life. The majority of rulers tackled questions of structure first (at least in the sense of exercising control over the political system) and then turned to development.

  A primary objective was to Africanize the civil service and here the problems were intensely personal as well as political. In the immediate pre-independence period there had been the returning student who had proved himself academically only to find that he was downgraded and paid less back at home than the white expatriate, or failed to get a job at all. The resulting bitterness rankled. One result of this kind of situation was that no new government could reduce civil service salaries as the economy in most cases required. Another problem that reflected the snobberies of the colonial systems that had just passed was that Africans were loath to take jobs as technicians or tradesmen. They wanted desk jobs. Thus, when Africans began to take over the senior jobs they expected also to receive all the same symbols, such as secluded housing and cars, that had pertained to colonial officials so that in a traditionally egalitarian society, European class barriers were introduced that set the civil service apart as a class. When raised to a senior appointment, for example, an African civil servant at once obtained a government loan to purchase a car for this was required by the status of the job rather than foregone because of the state of the economy. ‘It was inevitable that as local persons invaded the senior ranks of the service, their emoluments should bear a close relation to those of their expatriate colleagues in the same or similar posts. This had a distorting effect on the whole of the salary structure.’18 Meanwhile, rapid constitutional advancement or change in the new states outstripped the development of many institutions including the civil service. All governments recognized the need for a sound, efficient, loyal and stable civil service and gave high priority to its reconstruction and development. But, as with everything else, money was in short supply and corners had to be cut.

  There was a quite different political problem. Thus, the British concept of a civil servant not identifying himself with any political party, so as to respond to the policies of the party in power, came under heavy fire in those countries that became one-party states, where the concept of an impartial civil service was abandoned in favour of loyalty to the ruling party. Sometimes, too, ministers did not understand the responsibilities of their top civil servants and would attack them for acts performed in their official capacities. Most civil services in any case are hierarchical and the general European pattern required a high university education for its senior members. But in some new states there were demands that posts should be open to civil servants who lacked university education provided they had the necessary ability to work their way up through the ranks. The British approach differed from that of the French. Although it was proposed that colonial civil servants should be put on a permanent basis with careers, emoluments and pensions guaranteed by the British government and that they should then be seconded on request to the new governments to help maintain existing services, this was not followed through. Furthermore, the British made the new governments responsible for paying compensation to the departing civil servants, a requirement that was deeply resented. France, on the other hand, did better. Its Overseas Service was kept in being with salaries and career prospects guaranteed. The members of the service were then offered under technical assistance to the newly independent states. Other expedients were tried in the run-up to independence: these included job-splitting, promotion on trial, paying less attention to the possession of formal certificates of education or allowing senior Africans to shadow the expatriate whose job they would soon assume. Some of these expedients worked better than others but the need to Africanize the civil service, the speed at which in most cases it was carried out and the lack of experience of the incoming Africans presented huge problems during the initial years of independence.

  There was much debate about the educational systems that the colonial powers had left and the extent to which these were appropriate for the new states. Apart from the incongruencies of lessons that referred to ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ the real argument, often stressed too much by the departing British and French, was that their African subjects had wanted the same education that they themselves had enjoyed, even though this assumed a perpetuation of colonial values. The situation might have been different had the original intention of the colonial powers been – what they often claimed – to prepare their subjects for independence. As Dumont claimed, present education obstructs progress. ‘For most African children, in town and country alike, school represents above all a means of entering the elite class. Even in the most backward areas of the bush everyone has grasped the fact that the official with clean hands earns more and works much less.’19 Inherent in this statement by an outsider, although one deeply sympathetic to African independence and development, is the assumption that every African wants to do what will best assist national development. Every African, like people the world over, wanted to improve his own lot and that of his family.

  The concept of development as applied to the newly independent countries led to a number of assumptions about people’s behaviour that simply do not operate in a normal society whether such a society is rich or poor. Development is an abstract concept of governments or aid donors. Ordinary people concentrate upon their own needs and ambitions: the politicians about how to rule and stay on top, the elite how to enjoy the best possible lifestyle, the majority about survival and bread. Meanwhile, the real problems of education were those of scarcity: there were not enough schools; where schools existed there were insufficient teachers and lack of equipment; there was never enough money for a full educational programme and, in any case, a national education programme encompassing primary and secondary education for all takes many years to creat
e, even with a reasonable starting base, and few colonies had more than that. Then came the question of higher education – technical colleges or universities. Although every new state wanted its university, politicians learnt early the threats that could be posed by unruly students. Most important of all at independence was the simple lack of enough people in almost all fields with the skills required to make the system work efficiently. The Congo in 1960 – the legacy of a deliberate Belgian policy – had only a reputed 14 university graduates out of a population of fourteen million; and Botswana in 1966 had 26 sixth formers. The lack of skilled personnel meant the necessity of importing aid personnel under technical assistance programmes and though these were forthcoming and their ranks were swelled by the sudden proliferation of non-government (volunteer) organizations (NGOs) providing young people of doubtful skills, such as the British Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) or the American Peace Corps, these represented no more than a short-term gap-filling expedient. The crucial consideration was how long it would take before the indigenous education system would be able to produce graduates or other trained people at a level that would begin to meet national requirements.

  Tribalism presented a range of political problems that were acute before independence and threatened political structures after it had been achieved. During the 1960s, in particular, African leaders shied away from using the word tribe at all and tried to persuade their people to think of themselves for the first time, and only, as Kenyans or Zambians. A principal justification for the one-party state was to prevent the alternative of a multiparty structure whose different parties would be appropriated by rival tribes and so would perpetuate tribal rivalries. But the pretence that tribes could be subsumed in a greater nationalism was doomed to failure. They were and remain a necessary calculation in politics throughout Africa. Colonialism, in any case, had exacerbated tribal antagonisms and suspicions. ‘The frontiers generally correspond neither to language nor indigenous tradition, but to nineteenth-century European rivalries or mere subsequent administrative convenience; they bisect some tribes with a long history of antagonism. It is the tribe that largely held popular allegiance before, and if it has a rival now – one, indeed, of persistently mounting appeal – it is much less the nation than the race. And how should this not be so?’20

  Early in the independence era political leaders made plain that they expected the press to support the government; they became easily offended or vindictive when uncomplimentary reports were published about their policies or doings, however fair such reports may have been. Before long, leading newspapers had been acquired, either directly by the state or by the ruling party, and these at least became mouthpieces of the official line while editors quickly learnt how far they could go before they risked some form of reprisal, reprimand or worse from the government. ‘The politicians have put forward several excuses to back up their demand for a “moderate” and “co-operative” press in Africa. “Africa needs all the energies of her sons and daughters for nation-building and therefore cannot afford the luxury of encouraging dissident newspapers” is one excuse.’21 Such attitudes represented one of the earliest indications that opposition, whether of parties or of opinions, was likely to receive short shrift in the new Africa. The classic 1960s approach to the press came from the Information Minister of Ghana in 1962:

  The African journalist is fully conscious of the responsibility that rests on the shoulders of Africa’s new journalists – that of keeping the people informed of the new developments in the country, the continent and the world; exposing imperialism and neo-colonialist machinations; projecting the African personality and contributing to the African liberation struggle and building of African unity.

  The new African journalist keeps cheap sensationalism out of his duties and lays emphasis on the positive things that go to help in building the new Africa – he does not relish the stories which do no credit to the advancement and education of the people.

  This Orwellian description of a nationalist paragon of journalistic rectitude does credit to the Minister’s imagination if not to reality; behind it, however, is the mailed fist. Journalists in the new Africa were expected to toe the party line.

  Writing at the beginning of the 1960s when the world had become conscious, as never before, of the gaps between rich and poor, a gap that was emphasized by the rapid appearance of new African states, many of which had gross national products the equivalent of the income of a medium-sized British or French city, René Dumont argued prophetically:

  Two separate worlds are forming; soon they will have nothing in common, and they may one day confront one another even more tragically than East and West. The idea that an American businessman’s son and the son of a Congolese or Indian peasant have an ‘equal opportunity’ at birth cannot be seriously entertained. The rich world calls itself the free world, and thereby thinks that its conscience is clear; but a ‘defence’ of liberty which is allied with defence of privileged status is fairly suspect.22

  Meanwhile, the ex-imperial powers instructed the new African leaders and people to work selflessly for development – something never achieved in Europe – and then complained when they failed to do so.

  It was during the 1960s that the world really learnt about development: Western governments established aid ministries, NGOs came into being in order to send volunteers to work in under-developed countries, universities set up departments to study development problems, and aid and development became a growth industry while newly independent countries were invaded by experts, both invited and uninvited, to tell them how to deal with their problems. African leaders saw that they were in an economic strait-jacket and obliged to use the economic channels that had been created by the colonial regimes for their own ends. How to break this pattern was (and remains) a crucial test of independence. Was it possible, for example, to change the nature of a country’s exports, and not just their destination, in the sense of finding new, non-traditional markets? If the new states were to achieve even a modicum of economic independence they required capital at all levels, technicians, engineers, skilled mechanics – in fact trained personnel for just about every occupation conceivable. And, realistically, they knew they could not do this on their own. They needed help, and help in the form of aid, whether financial or as technical assistance, came only at a price. The price was to maintain the economic strait-jackets left in place by the departing colonial powers. The question of the value of aid, or of the damage it can inflict, will recur throughout this book. In the 1960s there was still a belief in some quarters in the donor countries that the right injection of aid would enable countries to reach the point of take-off while most African leaders saw aid as a right, a necessary compensation for past exploitation. In order to obtain the help they needed, the new African leadership was obliged to make up to the capitalist countries of the West – and sometimes to the Communist countries of the East – and they soon learnt to play one side off against the other in their search for assistance.

  As aid began to flow the recipient governments had to decide how to use it. A gulf soon appeared since ‘The overwhelming majority of nationalist parties show a deep distrust towards the people of the rural areas’. Fanon, indeed, saw the process of aid as a debilitating one that would always threaten true independence:

  The economic channels of the young State sink back inevitably into neocolonialism lines. The national economy, formerly protected, is today literally controlled. The budget is balanced through loans and gifts, while every three or four months the chief ministers themselves or else their governmental delegations come to the erstwhile mother countries or elsewhere, fishing for capital.23

  Education in the colonies had essentially been for the elites, modelled on British and French university systems, and it had paid scant attention to anything to do with development let alone development needs at the lower levels of society. As a result the formulation of development plans was given over, almost entirely, to foreigners, the new breed of ex
perts who became the ubiquitous expression of ongoing Western interest in the new states of Africa. Such foreigners had a sufficiently difficult task establishing a relationship with the political leadership that was all the more suspicious of them because it needed them so badly. The same experts made no contact with the mass of the people; neither did they learn, even at second hand, what those masses might see as development priorities. While development plans were being forged the new governments had to face the rising expectations of the people who had voted them into power and at least appear to be doing something to meet those expectations. And though Ghana’s Nkrumah and Guinea’s Touré had attempted, with considerable success, to break the pattern of ongoing dependence upon the West, most of Africa, either willingly or unwillingly, found it was unable to do so.