The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

  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 let him in 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 sta
y 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