by Robert Guest
©2004 By Robert Guest
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Published in 2004 in the United States of America
By Smithsonian Books
in association with Macmillan,
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guest, Robert.
The shackled continent: power, corruption, and African lives /
Robert Guest. p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58834-311-6
1. Political corruption—Africa. 2. Africa—Politics and government—1960– 3. Africa—Social conditions—1960–
4. Poverty—Africa. I. Title.
JQ1875.A55C6378 2004
960.3′2—dc 2004052131
v3.1
To Emma, for holding the babies while I slipped off to write
Acknowledgments
Barbara Smith, my editor at the Economist, has been a delight and an inspiration to work for. Stuart Evers, my editor at Macmillan, has shown a lighter touch in handling the manuscript than that Ivorian rebel I mentioned. Thanks to my agent, Andrew Lownie, for selling the book, and to James Astill, Tony Hawkins, Steve King, Philip Marsden, Anthea Jeffrey, and Broo Doherty for their helpful comments.
Among the many who have shared with me their insights and experiences, I am particularly grateful to Shantha Bloemen, Paul Collier, Ahmed Diraige, Nima El-Bagir, Comfort Ero, François Grignon, Heidi Holland, Dick Howe, Victor Mallet, Mesfin Wolde Mariam, Deligent Marowa, Strive Masiyiwa, Andy Meldrum, Fred M’membe, John Robertson, Themba Sono, Thomas Sowell, Brian Williams, Nashon Zimba, and Faides Zulu. Of course, none of these excellent people should be blamed for any of my mistakes.
Finally, a word of thanks to the Cameroonian policeman I met at the thirty-first road block between Douala and Bertoua for unwittingly providing me with the best quote in the book.
London, August 2003
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Map
Preface
Introduction: Why Is Africa So Poor?
Chapter 1. THE VAMPIRE STATE
Chapter 2. DIGGING DIAMONDS, DIGGING GRAVES
Chapter 3. NO TITLE
Chapter 4. SEX AND DEATH
Chapter 5. THE SON OF A SNAKE IS A SNAKE
Chapter 6. FAIR AID, FREE TRADE
Chapter 7. OF POTHOLES AND GRASPING GENDARMES
Chapter 8. WIRING THE WILDERNESS
Chapter 9. BEYOND THE RAINBOW NATION
Conclusion: One Step at a Time
Notes
PREFACE
It was not much of a road block: a heap of branches and a broken fridge with a cow’s skull on top, painted the orange, white, and green of the flag of Côte d’Ivoire. But the rebels manning it had guns and rocket-propelled grenades, so we stopped.
There were about fifty of them, and they were determined to look tough. Some strutted around shirtless, with sashes of bullets wrapped around their chests. Others wore T-shirts with death’s heads on them. Most sported reflective sunglasses, and all except the most senior officer waved their weapons around carelessly. Several were drunk. It was 10:30 on a hot Ivorian morning, but the top was off the plastic jerry can of koutoukou, a throat-scalding local palm spirit, and young rebels were gulping it from battered tin cups.
They told us to get out of the car. I was traveling with Kate Davenport, another British journalist, and Hamadou Yoda, our Ivorian driver and guide. None of us wanted trouble, so we got out, stood in the road, and tried politely to explain our business while they searched our bags.
In my bag, one of them found the corrected first draft of this book, which I was hoping to read on spare evenings during this trip to report on Côte d’Ivoire’s civil war. It was a thick block of paper, held together with a rubber band. The rebel picked it up, waved it in my face, and demanded to know what it was. “It’s a book,” I said. “What’s it about?” he asked.
“It’s about the abuse of power in Africa. It describes how men with guns, like you, have impoverished an entire continent,” I wanted to reply, but of course I said nothing of the sort, though it would have been true.
In five years of reporting on Africa, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing power abused. Some of the less media-savvy politicians are quite open about it.
I once had a conversation with the governor of a remote part of Namibia, where a minor uprising had just been put down with energetic brutality. Several hundred people had been tortured and then released without charge, presumably because they were innocent. Asked whether he was sorry that innocent people had been tortured, the governor told me his only regret was that he had not been able to take part in the beatings himself. I couldn’t think of any more questions after that.
Africa* is in a bad way and this book is my attempt to explain why. I think it’s an important question and one that needs to be answered if the continent is ever to recover. But I don’t think the gravity of the topic is an excuse for dull writing, so I’ve tried to keep the narrative vivid and punchy. Whenever it makes the argument more digestible, I’ve thrown in real-life examples. Some may be startling, but none, I hope, is gratuitous. The anecdote in Chapter 4 about the prostitute in the lift illustrates a serious point.
On re-reading the text, it occurs to me that I’ve left out a lot of the good things about Africa. The kindness of its people, their passion for life, the extraordinary hospitality of the poorest of the poor, the joy of Congolese rumba music, the sunset over the Okavango delta; the list goes on. But this is a book about why Africa is poor, so it has to grapple with war, pestilence, and presidents who think their office is a license, literally, to print money.
Africa has endured its share of evil leaders. The more colorful tyrants, such as Idi Amin and Mobutu Sese Seko, are well known. What is less well known is that, with so few effective checks on arbitrary power in Africa, its well-meaning leaders have often done great harm, too. Julius Nyerere, the revered former Tanzanian president, sincerely hoped to make his people better off by forcing millions of them into giant collectives, but instead he almost destroyed his nation’s capacity to feed itself.
The rebels at that Ivorian road block probably also thought they were fighting for a noble cause. To be fair, the government they hoped to overthrow was indeed an unpleasant one. But their revolution did not topple it. Rather, it split the country in two and exposed wide swathes of it to rape and pillage.
Not that we were badly treated. They only held us for an hour. We were given seats in the shade, near an old tape deck belting out dance tunes, and our guard kept offering us swigs of koutoukou. At one point, we watched him respectfully help a couple of old ladies up an earthy bank they had to climb in order to be questioned. All in all, this was a relatively disciplined group of rebels, which was a relief. But it would have been better if there had been no war, no road blocks, and no need to ask men with guns for permission to go about one’s daily business.
* By “Africa,” I mean sub-Saharan Africa. This book does not deal with the Arab countries of North Africa.
INTRODUCTION: WHY IS AFRICA SO POOR?
The helicopter swooped low over the floodwaters of southern Mozambiq
ue. The South African airmen sitting in the rear, legs dangling out of an open doorway, strained their eyes for a glimpse of survivors. I sat behind them, taking notes.
Poking out from the leaves of a tree that, despite the deluge, had somehow stayed upright, the pilot saw a scarlet shawl on a stick, waving to attract our attention. He took the helicopter down, and as we drew closer, the blast from its rotorblades flattened the canopy to reveal twenty-two Mozambicans clinging to the branches to avoid the churning waters below.
To rescue these people required hovering dangerously close to the tree, but the pilot did not hesitate. An airman rappeled down and strapped a little girl into his spare harness. The two were then winched back up. The airman quickly but gently handed the girl to his mate and rappeled down again. And again, and again, and again, until all twenty-two of the people in that tree were safely on board the helicopter.
The refugees had all tried to save their most treasured possessions from the flood. Most carried sacks of half-rotten corn or bundles of damp clothes. One man wore a miner’s helmet – a status symbol in a country where the best-paid workers are often those who toil in the gold and platinum mines of neighboring South Africa. Another fellow had salvaged his hut’s wooden front door and was distraught when the airman told him that there was no room for it on board. A thin old man was told that he could not keep his pet dog, but the airman relented when he signaled, by pointing to the dog and then to his mouth, that the animal was for food. The dog defecated with fear when pulled into the helicopter, adding a new stench to an atmosphere already rank with the smell of large numbers of unwashed bodies crammed into a small cabin.
By the time the airmen had finished plucking people out of trees and from thatched rooftops, there were at least sixty in a machine that would have felt crowded with ten. I found myself pressed against a bag of pots and pans, with a mother of two and her children sitting on my leg. But it was only a thirty-minute flight to the refugee camp, where everyone was obviously grateful to be put down. The refugees had no language in common with the airmen. They spoke no English or Afrikaans, and the airmen knew no Shangaan or Portuguese. So they thanked their rescuers with gentle nods as they were ushered out of the helicopter and across a field to the nearest feeding station. The airmen smiled and nodded back and then flew off to pull more people out of trees. A baby girl was born in a Mozambican tree that day; both child and mother were rescued.
Perhaps a million southern Africans lost their homes in the floods of March 2000. Mozambique, the poorest country in the region, was also the worst affected. At the time, it was still recovering from two decades of civil war that had reduced many people to wearing tree bark and eating wild berries. The country had done well in the late 1990s, its economy expanding at a scorching pace, albeit from a wretchedly low starting point. Then, suddenly, the Zambezi, Save, and Limpopo rivers swelled to rushing torrents up to eighty miles wide, drowning villages and hurling livestock into the Indian Ocean. Countless Mozambicans, who were struggling so determinedly to pull themselves out of poverty, had just been knocked back down by several billion tons of muddy water.
Back in the capital, Maputo, I was in a taxi heading for dinner when my mobile telephone buzzed. It was Phil, an old friend from back home in Britain. His Internet company had floated that morning, making him a millionaire. I congratulated him and asked him to tell me all about it. He started to gush but then paused. “What’s that noise?” he asked, referring to a hubbub in the background. I told him. It was a throng of half-naked street kids, tapping on the taxi windows and begging for change. Phil took this in and said: “Well, that certainly puts things into perspective.”
I calculated that, at current income levels, it would take an average Mozambican 10,000 years to earn what my friend earned that day. As it happens, Phil lost it all again when the dot.com market crashed. But somehow that does not make the contrast any less striking. He’s young, he’s clever, and he lives in a country where talent is amply rewarded. He’ll probably make another fortune some other way. For the Mozambican street kids, the prospects are not quite so good. They are young, too, but they live in Africa, the poorest continent on earth, and the only one that, despite all the technological advances that are filling stomachs and pockets everywhere else, has actually grown poorer over the last thirty years.
The numbers are staggering: half of sub-Saharan Africa’s 600 million people live on just sixty-five cents a day, and even this figure is misleadingly rosy. Many Africans rarely have any money at all. They build their own homes, often out of mud and sticks. They grow their own food. When the rains fail, they go hungry. And when the rains are too heavy, as in Mozambique, they lose their homes. The median African country has a gross domestic product (GDP) of only $2 billion – roughly the output of a small town in Europe. Not even Africans want to invest in Africa – about 40 percent of Africa’s privately held wealth is held offshore.1
As a journalist covering Africa, I’ve come face to face with some of the human consequences of economic failure. I’ve seen ragged children foraging for lunch in an Angolan trash pile and listened to Ethiopian nomads describing what it feels like to starve.
I don’t imagine that I can change any of this, but I do believe that it can change. Any country inhabited by human beings has the potential to grow rich. We know this because many countries have already done so. If Africa is to succeed too, it is crucial to understand what has gone wrong in the past. Just why is Africa so poor?
This book is an attempt to grapple with that question.
In historical terms, Africa’s plight is not unusual. Since humans first stopped being apes, most have lived short and hungry lives. The way the poorest Africans live today is not much different from the way most Europeans lived until the industrial revolution. In fact, modern Africans live longer than Europeans or Americans did before the twentieth century, largely because so many useful medicines that were invented elsewhere – antibiotics, for example – have become cheap enough for Africans to buy.
It is not much comfort for Africans, however, to hear that other people were equally poor a hundred years ago. Even cattle-herders in the foothills of Lesotho know that, today, the rest of the world is much richer than they are. Any African who occasionally watches television can see that people in America live lives of unimaginable luxury, with bulging fridges, soft clothes, and big cars that even teenagers can afford. Why, they ask, is life in Africa not like that?
Some blame geography. It is certainly a factor. Most African countries are tropical. Rich nations tend to have temperate climates: roughly 93 percent of the people in the world’s thirty richest nations live in temperate zones. The tropics tend to be poor: of the forty-two countries that the World Bank classified in 1999 as “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries” (HIPCs), thirty-nine either were in the tropics or consisted largely of desert. The only three temperate HIPCs – Malawi, Zambia, and Laos – were land-locked.2
The Victorians believed that hot weather drains a man’s strength. A more likely link between climate and poverty is that hot countries are home to all manner of diseases that affect both people and their livestock. Africa has the worst of them: malaria, yellow fever, rare but deadly viruses such as Ebola, and a host of energy-sapping parasites. Down a cup of dirty water in Nigeria, for instance, and you may find yourself infested with threadlike, meter-long guinea worms, which cause a painful fever and can, for months, make you too tired to work. You can cure guinea-worm infestation by waiting till the worm’s end bursts through the skin and then wrapping it around a stick and tugging it out slowly and gently over the course of several days. But Africans can’t do much about the climate that allows such horrors to thrive, and it is hard to build a prosperous, efficient society when you are riddled with parasites or shaking with fever.
Another popular culprit for Africa’s ills is history. Many Africans argue that the continent’s current problems spring largely from the traumas that Europeans visited on Africa, such as slavery.
&n
bsp; It’s an emotive argument. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Africans were kidnapped, chained, squashed into the fetid holds of slaving ships, and taken across the Atlantic. Many died before they reached the other side. Those who reached the Americas were set to work, unfree and unpaid, on plantations. Those who stayed behind in Africa lived in fear that they would not escape the clutches of the slave raiders the next time they came. This fear and the constant loss of healthy adults were massively disruptive to African societies.
Slavery was not introduced to Africa by Europeans. Arab slavers arrived earlier than the Portuguese, British, and French, and Africans were enslaving each other centuries before even the Arabs arrived. In fact, slavery was common in most parts of the world before the British started trying to crush it, and Africa was no exception. By one estimate, between 30 and 60 percent of Africans were slaves before the Europeans arrived.3 The shipping of slaves to America could be seen as an extension of Africa’s internal market: many African chiefs saw no wrong in selling slaves to European traders, and some even protested when the trade was banned. None of this excuses the European slavers, of course. Judged by today’s standards, their behavior was abominable, and even by the standards of the day it was cruel and rapacious.
Of course, slavery is evil. But it is implausible to blame it for all of Africa’s modern problems. Practically all nations have endured slavery at some point. Probably everyone alive today is descended from slaves (and from slave-owners, too). Thirty or forty generations ago in Europe, the vast majority of people were serfs: bonded laborers, tied to the land, forced at their lord’s whim to fight for him, sleep with him, or harvest his corn.
Granted, if you are African, your closest slave ancestors probably lived more recently than the medieval serfs from whom most Europeans are descended. But the transatlantic slave trade ended in the nineteenth century. Slavery continued in much of East Asia and the Middle East for decades longer. In a few African countries, notably Sudan and Mauritania, it still exists, though both governments deny it.
