The Africans

by David Lamb

  In March 1977 Jean-Bédel Bokassa, leader of what was then the Central African Empire (now the Central African Republic), declared a national holiday for the birth of his thirtieth child and heir-apparent, Saint Jean de Bokassa de Berengo de Bouyangui de Centrafrique. The first cable of congratulations came from Idi Amin, then Uganda’s president, who noted that he himself had thirty-two children. Said Amin: “May God bless you and give you more children.”

  The social and economic implications of Africa’s preoccupation with virility, particularly when combined with its rampant urbanization, are disruptive and ominous. Unable to support his large family, the able-bodied male leaves the farm to find a salaried job. His wife remains behind to tend the crops and raise the children, debilitating, perhaps permanently, the extended family unit that is ordinarily a source of such strength in Africa.* In the city the new arrival soon learns that he has no employable skills. He joins the growing legions of urbanized Africans whose aimless existence is spent on street corners and in coffee houses. Because of increased demands on city services, they tend to disintegrate; public transportation breaks down; hospital beds are shared by two and three patients; electrical blackouts occur often; crime becomes a major social problem.† (In no Christian country today are city streets safe, for African or European, after dark. Interestingly, this is not true of the Moslem countries where people follow their religious teachings more faithfully. You can walk the streets of Zanzibar, Tanzania, or Mogadishu, Somalia, or a dozen other Islamic cities at any hour without the faintest worry of being robbed.)

  As the cities become more crowded, African governments are forced to devote an increasingly larger share of their budgets to urban services and development, to the detriment of the rural areas, where 80 percent of Africa’s people still live. That, too, gives impetus to the urbanization. In Nairobi, for example, there are 452 doctors at Kenyatta Hospital, the city’s largest, but there is only one doctor in Kenya’s desolate northern quarter, a region about the size of Iowa. In the Central African Republic, the country’s only banks are in Bangui, the capital. In Chad, a country twice the size of Texas, there are no paved roads 120 miles outside the capital, N’Djamena.

  Seeing the decay of the cities, many Western visitors are startled to learn how potentially prosperous Africa is. Like a closet millionaire, it hides the riches that future generations on distant continents will need to prosper, produce, even survive. It has 40 percent of the world’s potential hydroelectric power supply, the bulk of the world’s diamonds and chromium, 30 percent of the uranium in the non-Communist world, and 50 percent of the world’s gold, 90 percent of its cobalt, 50 percent of its phosphates, 40 percent of its platinum, 7.5 percent of its coal, 8 percent of its known petroleum reserves, 12 percent of its natural gas, 3 percent of its iron ores, and millions upon millions of acres of untilled farmland. There is not another continent blessed with such abundance and diversity.

  But youth and wealth have not provided the foundation or momentum for development and progress. I would be hard pressed to name more than four non-oil-exporting countries—Kenya, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and Malawi—where there has been meaningful economic development, political stability and an emerging middle class. Elsewhere the portrait of Africa is a bleak one of chilling consequences, for the continent is not catching up with the rest of the world, it is falling further behind. Africa is no longer part of the Third World. It is the Fourth World.

  According to the United Nations Council on Africa, the economics of thirty of sub-Sahara Africa’s forty-six countries have actually gone backward since independence. The real per capita income of the non-oil producers has increased less than 1 percent over the past decade, and 60 percent of the 370 million people in sub-Sahara Africa are malnourished. Seventeen black states and 150 million people entered 1980 facing what the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization called “catastrophic” food shortages.

  The per capita income in Africa is $365 a year, the lowest in the world. In real terms that income—and the standard of living in Africa—is falling, with peasant farmers at the mercy of price fluctuations on the world market for their crops. A decade ago a Zambian farmer needed to produce one bag of maize to buy three cotton shirts; today that bag of maize buys only one shirt. A Tanzanian farmer could buy a Timex watch with the proceeds from 7.7 pounds of coffee; today he needs to produce 15 pounds of coffee to buy the same watch.

  The infant mortality rate in black Africa, 137 deaths per 1,000 live births, is the highest in the world. In Upper Volta, where life expectancy is thirty-three years, the mortality rate is 189 deaths per 1,000 births. (By comparison, the rate is 12 per 1,000 in the United States.) Europe has one doctor for every 580 persons; Kenya, one of Africa’s most developed countries, has one for every 25,600 persons.

  Only 11 percent of the age-eligible children in Africa are in school, compared to 35 percent in Asia and 45 percent in South America. In the twenty- to twenty-four-year-old age group, 1.4 percent of Africans are studying at a university. In Asia the figure is 5.7 percent, in Latin America 6.7 percent and in the United States 48 percent.

  The illiteracy rate in Africa is about 75 percent. That rate should continue to drop as more children attend school, but if Africa’s population doubles by the year 2000, as expected, 60 percent of the continent will be illiterate. It will be the highest concentration of illiterate people in the world.

  When the independence era began in 1960, Africa produced nearly 95 percent of its own food. Today every country except South Africa is an importer, and by the year 2000 one of every two Africans will be eating food imported from other continents. When we arrived in Kenya in 1976, the stores were amply filled with both basic and luxury foods. By the time we left in 1980, there were long lines for everything from milk and flour to maize and butter.

  Despite the awesome problems facing the continent, African leaders spend little time examining their own conduct and shortcomings and a great deal looking for a scapegoat. Usually every problem is laid on the doorstep of colonialism, for to criticize Africa as an African is considered treasonous. Perhaps Africa’s reluctance to impose self-criticism is merely a defense mechanism for the humiliation it suffers so often when reminded that its armies are not very tough, its governments not very efficient, its ability to back words with deeds not very effective.

  In Somalia the average government ministry has eight hundred civil servants. On any given day, a senior government official told me, only sixty of them show up for work. In Zaire a $1.8 million international grant to repair Kinshasa’s broken-down city buses is swindled down to $200,000 by the time it reaches the transportation ministry, and ends up accomplishing nothing at all. In Nairobi a man calling the police station to report that his house is under attack by a band of bandits with machetes is told he will have to drive to the station to pick up some officers; the department has no cars on duty that night. In Zambia hundreds of government cars sit rusting in a huge parking lot outside Lusaka. Many need nothing more than a new carburetor or fuel pump. But with no mechanics around, and not much initiative to spare even if there were, it is easier to junk them and buy new ones with an international grant.

  Stormed Zambia’s President Kenneth David Kaunda at one moment of particular frustration: “If by next year all the five million Zambians choose to be lazy as they are now, I would willingly step down as president because I don’t want to lead people with lazy bones.”

  Kaunda’s comment underscores the fine line between racism and criticism that Western journalists must deal with in Africa. If a white person had made the same remark, it would be considered racist; but a black can say it and be accused of nothing more than honest criticism. This duality operates on all official levels of African government and its effect is to make Africa immune to censure. A government, for instance, might execute a dozen dissidents or persecute an entire tribe and label its actions “social reconstruction.” If a Western diplomat or journalist calls it barbarism, the African dismiss
es him as a racist. The result is that Westerners, particularly scholars, often write timidly, even romantically, about Africa, and African governments go on doing pretty much what they want to their own people.

  The Zambians, incidentally, did not suddenly spring alive, and Kaunda, who has been president since 1964, did not step down.

  With Africa floundering economically and meandering politically, the continent remains as ripe for exploitation today as it was a hundred years ago. Both the East and West have stepped into the void, pouring military and developmental assistance into country after country in the hopes of creating new satellites. As a consequence, outside influence in Africa has increased and Africa’s control over its own affairs, military and economic, has decreased.

  “I think the time has come to leave Africa to the Africans,” says President Étienne Eyadéma of Togo. “We can find solutions for African problems. The East and West must stop interfering in our internal affairs.”

  The demand is a commonly expressed one in Africa—and an empty one. If the East and West were to cut off their flow of guns, money and technology to black Africa, almost every government would collapse in a matter of months. Never has Africa been as dependent on foreign powers as it is today. With the exception of Nigeria, whose oil revenues reached $60 million a day in 1980, black Africa lives on the international dole. When national security is threatened, the first thing Africa does is call for help from non-African countries because few countries are capable of defending themselves. Only Angola and Ethiopia—two Marxist states armed by the Soviet Union—can assemble five hundred or more pieces of heavy artillery, tanks and rocket launchers.

  Although black Africa has 750,000 men under arms, most armies are badly trained and poorly disciplined and serve little function other than internal security. As a guerrilla, the African is an effective fighter because his unit is small and loosely structured and his cause—liberation—is one he can understand. But as a member of a large organized army, his military capabilities are greatly reduced: now he is fighting for a nation that he does not really feel part of; he may be taking orders from an officer of a tribe hostile to his own; he is expected to operate sophisticated weapons even though he may never have driven a car or seen a pocket calculator. Even when elite units go into battle, they often end up putting down their guns and fleeing. More often the army has been the main instrument for terrorizing and exploiting the population.

  The end of colonialism has not brought genuine freedom to Africa. With an external debt exceeding $35 billion, black Africa has become a cluster of welfare states, surviving at the whim of foreign donors and aid agencies. As President Moi of Kenya put it on a begging trip to West Germany, apparently without realizing the irony of his words: “No country can remain economically independent without outside assistance.”

  Some of Africa’s problems—especially those caused by forces other than man—are so enormous, so constant, that a people of lesser spirit long since would have succumbed. The inescapable heat numbs the mind and drains vitality. Tsetse flies and a score of other insects carry terrible diseases that incapacitate entire villages. Simple disorders like diarrhea are fatal to tens of thousands of African children each year. Swarms of locusts—twenty or thirty million slim, shiny creatures that weigh an ounce each and eat their own weight daily—can cut through a nation’s entire grain harvest in a matter of days, leaving not a living plant in their wake. The droughts stay too long and the rains fall too heavily. Nature, like man, is a cabal, disenfranchising a people from its own land.

  Maybe sub-Sahara Africa can continue to stumble through the 1980s and into the 1990s, hoping, dreaming, talking, ignoring the life-death issues it must confront, accepting adversity and misadventure as the work of forces beyond its control. Or maybe there will be an awakening, a realization that with good fortune and sensible planning Africa can control its own destiny—or, at the very least, can maneuver its way through some of the storms.

  But whatever, two decades of African independence has provided one invaluable lesson: progress is not inevitable.

  * Cabral was overthrown in November 1980 by his prime minister and accused, among other crimes, of murder and torture. He was later allowed to take up exile residence in Cape Verde.

  * Micombero died in 1983, at the age of 42, in Somalia, where he had lived in exile as a non-person.

  * Throughout, I have been using the terms “West” and “East” politically rather than geographically, i.e., “the West” is Western, industrialized countries and the United States; “the East” pro-Russian countries and the Soviet Union.

  * Large companies and governmental agencies in many African countries are required to provide housing for their city employees. The housing usually consists only of bachelor quarters because it is too expensive to build accommodations for families with fifteen or sixteen members. This practice also encourages the division of households and accounts for the fact that 60 percent of Nairobi’s population is male.

  † The colonialists had no problem with African urbanization, because “natives” needed special passes to enter white areas of most capitals. In South Africa they still do, and more than 300,000 blacks are arrested each year there for violating the “pass laws.”

  COLLISION OF PAST AND PRESENT

  There is no turning back. The old people in the villages just have to accept that things are changing and the traditions they grew up with are dying.

  —OLIVER LITONDO,

  a Kenyan television commentator

  THE MUD is ankle-deep in Mathare Valley during Kenya’s long, cold rainy season from March to June, and from a distance the area looks like a huge junkyard, its sides and floor cluttered with stacks of wood and cardboard and all manner of discarded oddities. Stretching out for more than a mile north of Nairobi, the valley is filled with a strange silence, leaving you with no more sense of motion or color than a one-dimensional black-and-white photograph would. At night you could drive right by it without realizing there was a living soul anywhere around.

  Yet this valley is home to more than 100,000 people, a makeshift city as large as South Bend, Indiana. Like so many other Africans, the inhabitants had deserted their villages for the promises of the city. But the city had neither jobs nor homes for them, so they squeezed into the slums outside Nairobi, and places like Mathare Valley—with no running water or electric light—became the graveyards of hope for Africa’s shifting populations.

  I remember walking through the valley one day, picking my way along the muddy paths that meander among the shanties, and being struck by how still everything was. It was like a movie without sound. I stopped at a lean- to whose roof was made of paper bags. A pot of maize porridge was cooking outside, and Mary Ngei leaned over the charcoal embers to protect her family’s meal from the soft rain. Was she willing to talk for a while? Yes, she said. Was I willing to give her a few shillings for her time? Sure, I said. She pulled from her pocket a piece of paper that was worn and held together by tape. She unfolded it carefully, smoothing each wrinkle, and held it out for me to examine.

  “There,” she said, “you see. All A’s. Hannah always got all A’s.”

  Mrs. Ngei, forty years old and the mother of thirteen children, folded her daughter’s report card in tidy little squares and tucked it under a loose board in her wooden bed where she kept a few other treasures. No, she said, Hannah was no longer in school. In fact, she wasn’t quite sure where her fifteen-year-old daughter was. All her children had dropped out of school because the Ngeis were unable to pay the annual enrollment fee of 30 shillings ($3.70). The younger ones had become street urchins, begging and scraping for survival in the Nairobi streets, and the older ones, she feared, had turned to prostitution and thievery. Her husband walked to Nairobi almost every morning, looking for work as a casual laborer, but he had found no more than five or six days’ employment in the year that they had been in the city, and she had no particular hope that he would return home that evening with either money or g
ood news.

  “Really,” she said, “I don’t know what we will do. This is no way to live. People get sick here, they just die. They don’t get to see a doctor. We could go back to the shamba but there’s no doctor there either. And no jobs and no money. What we need is to get Hannah back in school so she can be smart and get a job and help support us.”

  The Nairobi City Council views the valley dwellers as illegal squatters and periodically dispatches several bulldozers to level their jerry-built world. Knowing that they must often flee on short notice, the people disassemble their homes every morning, piling the cardboard and chunks of wood neatly on the ground. Every evening they rebuild them. The entire process takes only a few minutes, but it enables the squatters simply to pick up their homes and move if they hear the rumble of bulldozers approaching over the hill that separates Mathare Valley from the old colonial mansions now occupied by ambassadors and millionaire Kenyans. For two or three days after the bulldozers have cut through the hollow, the place remains empty. Then suddenly, mysteriously, one night the inhabitants return and by morning it once more is a tangle of shanties and filth, of people going through the dreary routine of life as though nothing had ever happened.