More on Africa

It looks like I'm not the only one with Africa on his mind. Over at Begging the Question, Fitz-Hume has posted about various ways in which Africa keeps coming to his attention, including a review of Lord of War, a film that is getting good audience reviews but has gone largely under the radar due to lukewarm critics and, I suspect, a growing suspicion of all things related to Nicolas Cage. Anyhow, Fitz-Hume also had this to say:

But as fascinating as Africa is, the whole continent is so troubled that I get depressed just thinking about it. AIDS, genocide and ethnic violence, manmade famine, perpetual poverty, magnificently corrupt rulers who revel in the suffering to which they subject their people, violent religious extremism, the destruction of habitat, when I take a close look at Africa it's makes me begin to question the humanity of man.

There is a lot of truth in that. I have tried to take a step back and decide whether Africa is so much worse than other parts of the world in terms of its tragedy, its violence and the like. And I think in the end, it is worse. But not because of anything inherently wrong with the people there. I think the combination of geographical and historical forces can teach us a lot about why Africa is the way it is, and what can be done.

That's one of the reasons reading Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun has been so valuable. He has a way of bringing together the political, the sociological, the geographical, and the historical fabrics into a well-woven tale that does not explain all, nor attempt to, but does educate. Here's a good example, in which he discusses the lingering effects of the colonial system after African independence in the 1960s:

London and Paris, in order to induce their civil servants to go work in the colonies, created for those amenable to the idea a grand quality of life. A minor clerk from the post office in Manchester received upon arrival in Tanganyika a villa with a garden and swimming pool, cars, servants, holidays in Europe, etc. Members of the colonial bureaucracy lived truly magnificently. And now, between one day and the next, the inhabitants of the colony receive their independence. They take over the colonial state in an unaltered form. They even take great care not to alter anything, because such a state offers fantastic privileges, which its new administrators naturally do not wish to renounce. The colonial origins of the African state--a state wherein the civil servant received renumeration beyond all measure and reason--ensured that in independent Africa, the struggle for pwoer instantly assumed an extremely fierce and ruthless character. All at once, in the blink of an eye, a new ruling class arises--a bureaucratic bourgeouisie that creates nothing, produces nothing, but merely governs the society and reaps the benefit.

I don't think all of the corruption seen in many African governments can be blamed on this colonial heritage, and I don't think Kapuscinski is making such a claim. But how else could the newly independent countries have been expected to respond? The colonial governments were the only model they had for how to govern these larges "nations" that had little or no connection to the tribal or clan affiliations by which most Africans had identified themselves for hundreds or thousands of years. Can they be blamed for not recognizing that the European colonial governments were awful and corrupt in their very design, and not merely in their application? This does not excuse the horrendous behavior of many individuals in their offices, nor the failure to effect meaningful reform in many countries in the decades since independence. It does however, give an insight to understanding the root of the modern problem, and makes clear that it can not all be blamed on "Africa."