Posted on 04/23/2004 9:42:01 AM PDT by Valin
Anthony Daniels reviews The Shackled Continent: Africa's Past, Present and Future by Robert Guest
In the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalist doom-mongers, mainly of the Left, predicted the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the Third World by famine, which they regarded as practically inevitable - if, that is, global cooling or the nuclear winter did not get them first.
Against these confident but dismal predictions, however, the world entered a phase of sustained economic growth from which the poor benefited enormously. Life-expectancy in South-East Asia and Latin America now approaches that of Europe and North America. China and India have become the workshops of the world: they are in the process of overtaking Europe technologically. A vast increase in population has been accompanied by an even greater increase in wealth.
The one exception to this happy process is Africa. While the rest of the world has prospered, Africa has stagnated or even regressed. Why? Why is the news from Africa always bad, indeed the worst possible? Why is Africa the happy hunting ground of the Four Horsemen? Robert Guest, the Economist's African correspondent, tries to answer these perennial questions.
On the whole, he succeeds. The main problem in Africa is that personal advancement is possible almost exclusively by the political route: to become rich, or even minimally prosperous, you have either to seek political power yourself, or at the very least cultivate and become a client of those in power.
For many years, the whole purpose of education in Africa, from the pupil's and student's point of view, has been to obtain a position in government from which to extort and expropriate from others. "Seek ye first the political kingdom", said Kwame Nkrumah, and that is precisely what Africans have been doing ever since, with disastrous results.
The more African bureaucrats and politicians extort and expropriate, the less there is to extort and expropriate, which makes the competition for power ever more desperate and violent. And the wholly parasitic nature of the elite explains why both the expansion of education and the existence of natural resources in an African country conduce not to prosperity, but to civil war and impoverishment.
Mr Guest is less good at explaining why such a political culture should have taken root in Africa. In my opinion, it is part of the baleful legacy of European colonialism. Intentionally or not, the colonial powers bequeathed to their African successors a model of political power in which philosopher-kings took all the important decisions. Many of the colonial philosopher-kings, especially towards the end of colonial rule, were benevolent; but their African replacements came from an entirely different culture, with different imperatives. An African who did not use his position to benefit his family, kinsmen, village and tribe, far from being regarded as incorruptible, would be deemed either stupid or inhuman. African countries have thus been turned into giant zero-sum games.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world, especially Europe, has not helped. Instead of opening its markets to African agricultural produce, Europe has subsidised its own farmers at great expense and then dumped their produce on the African market, thereby inhibiting African growth. Aid is no substitute for trade.
Mr Guest is sometimes a little naive, or at least superficial, in his judgments. For example, he repeatedly characterises Julius Nyerere, who removed millions of Tanzanian peasants from their land by force, and herded them into collectivised villages, as a misguided idealist. To behave in this fashion, however, is not misguided idealism; it is raging egotism. Moreover, while it impoverished his countrymen unnecessarily, it kept Nyerere in power for a quarter of a century, which is to say that the suffering of millions served the purposes of one man.
Similarly, Mr Guest quotes Nelson Mandela respectfully as being hurt and surprised that so many members of the ANC, once they reached positions of power, turned to corruption. Either this was disingenuous of Mr Mandela, or it was stupid. But Mr Guest does not recognise the horns of this particular dilemma.
On the other hand, he is one of the few commentators who recognises the vital significance of the end of the Soviet Union in the demise of apartheid. If the Soviet Union had remained a beacon of hope for the ANC, the Nationalist Party would not have agreed to hand over power to it: the Soviet Union thus in effect stood guarantor for apartheid.
Mr Guest is also right to point out that positive discrimination in South Africa, if taken much further, is the royal road to economic and political ruin. His fundamental point that wealth is dynamic and not static, that it has to be created and not merely cut into slices like a cake, and that too few Africans appreciate this even now, is an important, indeed vital, one.
His book, though clearly written, sometimes lapses into that horrible mid-Atlantic style that The Economist imposes on its writers and which no doubt eventually becomes a habit. All the same, I doubt whether there is a better brief introduction to the travails of modern Africa and their causes.
Anthony Daniels is a practising doctor who has worked in Africa.
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