A dozen nuclear plants on the Chernobyl model are still in operation.
Pretense and promises are vulnerable to truth and experience. When the dream vanished, when people came to know the difference between the systems, communism lost its legitimacy. The walls came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, not by revolution, but of abandonment.
…the ecological inheritance [of Africa] could never have been less than difficult. Africa was “tamed” by its historical peoples, over many centuries, against great handicaps not generally present in other continents, whether in terms of thin soils, difficult rainfall incidence, a multitude of pests and fevers, and much else that made survival difficult.9
All the ills that have hurt Latin America and the Middle East are exponentially compounded in sub-Saharan Africa: bad government, unexpected sovereignty, backward technology, inadequate education, bad climate, incompetent if not dishonest advice, poverty, hunger, disease, overpopulation—a plague of plagues. Of all the so-called developing regions, Africa has done worst: gross domestic product per head increasing, maybe, by less that 1 percent a year; statistical tables sprinkled with minus signs; many countries with lower income today than before independence. The failure is the more poignant when one makes the comparison with other parts: in 1965, Nigeria (oil exporter) had higher GDP per capita than Indonesia (another oil exporter); twenty-five years later, Indonesia had three times the Nigerian level.10
The pain of reality hurts more for the initial exhilaration. With independence, the burden of exploitation would be lifted. Time now for rewards. Some early growth figures seemed to confirm this: “Some areas—like the Rhodesias, the Belgian Congo, Morocco, Gabon, Kenya—were given as growing at 6 to 11 per cent per year, rates among the highest in the world.”11 Few people deflated these estimates to take account of upward bias in countries moving toward urbanization and a growing share of monetized, hence countable, transactions. And no one paused to ask why the colonial powers were so quick to leave. People wanted Africa to do well. Here is a Western observer, writing in 1962:
Africans in general are the most present-minded people on earth…. Without significant exception, all African leaders…share the passionate desire to acquire all the good things which western civilization has produced in the two millennia of its history. They want especially to get the technological blessings of American civilization, and to do so as quickly as possible. The lack of historical consciousness of their people gives the African leaders a great advantage in moving rapidly toward this goal of modernization.12
And yet…Basil Davidson, Africanist of unquestioned sympathy and bona fides, writes sadly of the moment of disillusion—that point when the Africans of one or another place realized that freedom was not an automatic gateway to happiness and prosperity.13
Specialists in these matters distinguish between food security and food self-sufficiency; Africa is wanting on both scores. A large and increasing number of people—and that means women and children especially—are hungry and malnourished, whether for want of purchasing power or for bad distribution. Recalling the anarchy of the late Roman empire, city and country are at war with each other. The new bureaucrats try to squeeze the land and pay less than market value. The farmers hold back or give up. The rootless urbanites have learned tastes that cannot be satisfied locally. So, even in the best of circumstances, the land produces too little food or the wrong kind of food, and must bring it in from outside, at a growing cost to earnings and balance of payments. No other part of the globe is so much prisoner to survival.14
Unlike other poor regions, moreover, Africa’s shortfalls in food supply afflict, not the food buyers in the cities, but the small farmers who scratch the soil and raise the livestock.* Here nature—material impediments and climatic variations—plays a nasty role, not only swinging widely from fat years to lean, but cumulating trends over longer periods. In the quarter century from 1960 to 1984, food output did not keep up with population, and only a rapid increase in imports kept nourishment up to inadequate (as against catastrophic) levels. Market forces encouraged the trend: food grains from the United States, for example, could be had in Lagos in 1983 at a quarter of the locally grown price.15 Import dependency (6 percent of caloric intake in 1969-71, 13 percent in 1979-81) switched tastes from old, boring stapies to new cereals, while new urban eating habits led to an increased demand for meat by those who could not afford it. In this way, more and more of Africa’s food crops went to animal feed. All along, the highest natural rates of population growth in the world (3+ percent per year) were pushing farmers on to marginal soils that quickly wore out. Or driving them from country to slums in the city.16 In countries where political agencies are fragile and ineffective, the scars of mismanagement do not easily heal, and the good and bad do not balance.
One should not blame these outcomes on smallholder ignorance or incapacity, for in Africa, as much as anywhere, farming methods and reproductive behavior mix old values and rituals with a rational response to material circumstances. African farmers are not fools, and children start paying their way early in a land where firewood and water are scarce and much time is spent foraging and carrying. The result is a reasonable preference for large families. Large families are also proof of virility and a source of pride.17 In general, the women do as they are told, especially in those cultures where polygamy prevails; and when the men come home, for they often work far off, they have their way, often at great risk to health. AIDS? Forget condoms; the men don’t like them. And the women? “They have so many other problems to think of, why should they think about something that kills you in 10 years?”18
In the latter days of empire, some governments and foreign advisers tried to remedy these ills, although their calculations were often distorted by extraneous motives and personal interest. Take agriculture. Even before independence, some colonial rulers tried to correct for past mistakes and indifference and to introduce “modern” methods.
The “mother” of all such projects was the British groundnut (in American English, peanut) scheme, launched and sunk in Tanganyika over the period 1946-54 and “intended to demonstrate what the state was capable of…when it harnessed modern Western technology and expertise.”19 The idea came originally from the managing director of the United Africa Company, a subsidiary of Unilever, a company reputed to know its oil. The plan was vetted and approved at British cabinet level. The immediate objective: to alleviate British postwar oil and fat shortages without spending dollars (buy colonial). In the words of Food Minister John Strachey, “On your success depends, more than on any other single factor, whether the harassed housewives of Britain get more margarine, cooking fat and soap, in the reasonably near future.”20
The ultimate aim was to “raise the standard of living of the African peasant” by demonstrating the possibilities of modern technology. To be sure, these peanuts were not destined for consumption by Africans, hungry as they might be; but the peasants would see (would be given an “ocular demonstration,” in bureaucratese) and copy the superiority of large-scale, mechanized agriculture. No hands; everything would be done by machine: bulldozers, tractors, rooters, sowers, combines.
At the same time, as though to prove the virtues of British-style socialism (the project was intended, among other things, to demonstrate a superior alternative to Soviet ideology), the British Labour government sent officials to teach the African employees how to strike for higher pay. This altruism succeeded beyond expectations. The natives took up spears, idled the tractors, blocked the roads, stopped the railway. Police had to be brought in; the union leaders, put in prison. The strike failed, but the natives had learned a thing or two.21
The planners went in without a plan. They chose a central site because it was empty. It was empty because it had no water. Members of the mission acknowledged “a total lack of any experience of mechanised agriculture.” No one had ever tried this kind of thing. Information on rainfall patterns and their effect on yields was wanting; ditto regarding the s
oil; and estimates on cost of clearing bush drew on experience with airstrips during the war. Supplies took the form of leftover army stores from the Philippines, some useful, some worthless, all the worse for neglect. The mission had no engineering expert. As one member, an accountant, put it: “It was all guesswork, and our guess was as good as anybody else’s.”
Both British housewives and African peasants had a long wait in prospect. African farmers raised peanuts in some areas, but they (usually the women) did so at enormous pain and effort, scratching and clawing every step of the way. Even so, they did better than these machines, which for all their steel, rubber, and internal combustion engines, sickened in the African climate. Breakdowns were common, repair shops lacking, and what would they have done anyway without replacement parts? Clearance of the gnarled brush and roots was a nightmare. It cost ten times original estimates, and the ground, once cleared, dried to brick hardness.* Very soon the projectors had to scale back expectations and substitute sunflowers for some of the peanut bushes. The changes did not help. Nature refused to cooperate, and yields were far below expectations.
The effects on the local economy and society were deplorable. The British employes had enough money to buy the natives out of food, and the natives in turn got jobs with the project and gave up traditional cultivation. So food production went down and large amounts had to be imported to feed those who were supposed to be producing a surplus for export. Liquor came in too; and prostitutes, charging “stupendous fees of five shillings and more”22 and thieves—all the afflictions and corruptions of unexpected wealth. Meanwhile the British tried to teach the natives the virtues of working-class solidarity and equality. The natives saw this as a subversion of order and morality.
By 1950, failure was inescapable; time now for remorse and liquidation. The groundnut does not lend itself to mass cultivation. Economic yields require intensive farming. The plan to grow in huge 30,000 acre units proved utterly impractical. It took four years to dispose of the equipment and installations. The British turned as much as possible over to the government of newly independent Tanganyika, which saw these ill-favored leftovers as nuisance more than assets. It wasn’t hard for observers to note that the money could have been put to better use.
Needless to say, the fiasco hurt British prestige and discouraged other “imaginative schemes of economic development.” Would these have done better? The record is not encouraging, except to ever renewable planners and technicians, who seem to use these projects as children might a dollhouse, and who learn with every failure. I would not depreciate the motives and deeds of these experts. They remain our hope for large-scale, long-range amelioration. Yet nothing is more inebriating and seductive than making a world and feeling virtuous for it. In the end, the British shrugged the failure off. The nation was tired and had better things to worry about than peanuts in Africa.
The British groundnut scheme was not the exception. Colonial governments were liable to these temptations, which held out the irresistible promise of doing well while doing good. The French tried for cotton on the Niger River, upstream from Timbuktu (today Mali), from the 1910s to the 1940s. Again Africa was to supply European needs—this time the potential demand by French spinners, pressed to find precious dollars for American cotton. The colonial administrators involved were concerned to protect their African constituents, even against themselves, while ensuring a supply of raw cotton that could compete on the world market. The French also wanted to preserve freedom of enterprise where possible. So, with consummate Gallic logic, they came up with a compromise formula: the peasants had a “strict obligation” to grow cotton from dawn to dusk, but complete freedom to sell it.23 Then the French uprooted and replanted peasants and made them plant cotton bushes, and if the peasants made trouble or brought in unsatisfactory cotton, they were marched off to jail. It was, some like to think, a loose, easygoing jail—enough though to make the point.
One would like to think that liberation changed all that, but in fact the new governments had their own schemes of economic development and social engineering, inspired by a new world of peripatetically eager experts and technicians—eager to spend money, to do good, to wield power. These doers, be it said, had no trouble imagining schemes, the bigger the better. And when the schemes failed?
That is the fault of the West. The West told us to build power stations, bridges, factories, steel mills, phosphate mines. We built them because you said so, and the way you told us. But now they don’t work, you tell us we must pay for them with our money. That is not fair. You told us to build them, you should pay for them. We didn’t want them.24
Much of the gap between expectation and realization came from unpreparedness. The postcolonial Africans had no experience of self-government, and their rulers enjoyed a legitimacy bounded by kinship networks and clientelist loyalties. Abruptly, these new nations were pressed into the corset of representative government, a form alien to their own traditions and unprepared by colonial paternalism. In some instances, this transition had been preceded by a war of liberation, which mobilized passion and identity. But the legacy was rule by a strongman, autocratic embodiment of the popular will, hence slayer of democracy. Stability depended on one man’s vigor, and when he weakened or died (or was helped to die), the anarchy of the short-lived military coup followed.
The governments produced by this strong-man rule have proved uniformly inept, with a partial exception for pillage. In Africa, the richest people are heads of state and their ministers.25 Bureaucracy has been inflated to provide jobs for henchmen; the economy, squeezed for its surplus. Much (most?) foreign aid ends in numbered accounts abroad.26 These kleptocrats have much to gain by living in Switzerland, near their banks. But maybe money alone is not enough.
Basil Davidson gives us two case studies in incoherence. The first, Zaire (ex-Belgian Congo), was a skeleton of a state. The tyrant Mobutu Sese Seko ruled in the capital Kinshasa and a few other cities, and in those localities where foreign companies were extracting mineral wealth. All of these paid him tribute, and his accounts in Switzerland were said to total billions of dollars. Between these few points of effective control, the only transport was by air, for the roads below are neither passable nor safe. Under Belgian rule in 1960, the Congo had 88,000 miles of usable road; by 1985 this was down to 12,000 miles, only 1,400 of them paved. But then dirt roads are better than holed and cracked hard surfaces. Paving is only as good as its maintenance.
Almost the whole of the country and the society was in but not of the pseudo-nation. In the east, foreign invaders were driving foreign refugees to their death while supporting rebellion against Kinshasa. In the capital, the parliamentary opposition denounced rebel plans and warned against a new despotism: “We are not getting rid of one strongman to replace him with another.” The rebel reply: “If the opposition leader “wants to pilot a ship that is going down,” he’d better learn to swim.27 Meanwhile Western agents worked to persuade Mobutu into retirement (or keep him in office) while jockeying for influence with what might follow. The primary Western concern was to keep getting those minerals out. The French also wanted to keep Zaire in the francophone orbit, as though the dignity of France depended on it. (The Belgians had thrown up their hands long ago.) The Americans…well, it wasn’t clear what might be the American interest, except maybe to “stick it” to the French.
In the midst of this anarchy, international relief agencies tried to keep refugees alive but had to break off every time marauders drew near. Some emergency supplies got in, but for whom? Some mineral resources were still getting out, but for whom? The capture by rebels in April 1997 of the country’s diamond capital portended a change in regime. Without revenues, Mobutu could not pay his troops, now given to pillage (a soldier’s got to live); nor could he hold the hearts of the great powers, even if he spoke French. Footnote: Zaire had vanished by then from the tables of the World Bank. This was prescient: the victorious rebels, after forcing Mobutu out in June, changed the name of the c
ountry back to (the Republic of) Congo.
The second case is Benin, formerly Dahomey. This country’s biggest products from 1960 to 1989 were Marxist-Leninist propaganda and political coups. The official statistics showed product and trade as almost nonexistent. Yet Benin was planting and harvesting palm oil and peanuts. It simply did not yield up its product to the authorities or to official markets. Just about everything moved in parallel channels. These yielded the farmer more than he would ever get from an official marketing board, and the farmer bought off the swollen bureaucracy. On the record, then, Benin is an empty husk with big negative trade balance and negative growth; but it’s really a smuggling machine.
The lesson one draws from these and similar instances is that Africa is not so badly off as it appears, just worse. Look at a photo or TV screen, at these prostrate fly-specked children, all bones, saggy skin, bulging eyes and belly, and you are overwhelmed by the misery. You know that the children you are looking at are dead by the time you see them. Look at another scene, especially in the picturesque pages of the National Geographic, and you marvel at the smiles and vigor of the dancers or traders in an exotic landscape. The continent bears witness to hope and hopelessness, courage and despair. Circumstances are appalling, but somehow people find ways to cope, survive, die, yet multiply.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 59
