Yeah, but which is declining and which ascendant? I was astonished to see this yesterday in the Telegraph:
Sooner or later Africa must face some form of recolonisation
By R W Johnson
In his New Year speech, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa announced: "We must, as Africans, say enough is enough - we have seen too many military coups, too many wars. We have had to live with corruption. We have seen our continent being marginalised." Mbeki followed this up with a ringing attack on Western countries, demanding that they reduce the continent's debt burden and get more involved in settling African disputes.
Such appeals no longer work. Given that much of Africa's debt derives from its leaders' widespread habit of siphoning off public funds and funnelling them into their foreign bank accounts (Nigeria's late president, Sani Abacha, had more than £1.5 billion in such accounts and Zaire's Mobutu a multiple of that) it is not obvious why the West should forgive such theft by writing off the debt.
And doesn't Africa marginalise itself? At present no fewer than 20 of the Organisation for African Unity's 53 members are involved in wars of one kind or another, and no African leader has been willing to criticise Robert Mugabe's campaign of state terrorism against his opponents in Zimbabwe - indeed, President Mbeki himself recurrently appears hand in hand with Mugabe, whose thugs are committing torture, murder and gang rape.
More fundamental still, the first thing most African states did at independence was to lurch from self-sufficiency in food to desperate dependence on Western handouts. The Food and Agriculture Organisation lists 15 African states now experiencing serious food supply difficulties, often as a result of the ravages of war. About 10 million people are said to be short of food in the Congo, 900,000 refugees in Rwanda are "in need of urgent food assistance", while violence in neighbouring Burundi has forced the suspension of international aid, despite a growing famine. In Eritrea 500,000 are affected - and more in Ethiopia, two other states at war with one another; the civil war in the Sudan means that two million people there rely on emergency food supplies. An estimated 1.6 million are starving in southern Somalia, but are inaccessible to relief because of civil conflict.
War-torn Angola is, the UN says, "the worst country in the world in which to be a child". Food shortages are looming in Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. Per capita income for the continent as a whole has fallen from £420 in 1975 to £325 last year; everywhere else it has soared.
It is no answer to blame Western colonialism. Many former colonies from Malaysia to Mauritius are doing just fine, after all - and in much of Africa local people regard it as uncontroversially true that things were better under colonialism. But in any case, blaming colonialism doesn't answer the question of what needs to be done about Africa - the problem child continent - now.
The choices aren't easy. One African UN official, aghast at the Rwanda atrocities, spoke bitterly but off the record. When you look at what they've done, he said, there's no way you can want to hand power back to the local elites. So the world has three choices: to put in place a long-term UN mandate system - in effect recolonising the place; to allow private companies to do the same; or to walk away. The trouble is, much the same could be said of many other parts of Africa.
Other remedies are possible. One would be to break up some of the bigger countries. The never-ending war in the biggest state of all, the Sudan, pits northern lighter skinned Muslims against black Christians in the south. Why not face reality, partition the country and start again? The same is true of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Congo was created and held together only by brutal Belgian rule. Once that ceased, mayhem and war were the norm - punctuated by a long period of similarly brutal dictatorship under Mobutu. We have seen interventions there by the UN, the CIA, French paras, mercenaries of every kind and now by neighbouring African states. None of these has done more than produce a pause in the mayhem. Surely it would be better to partition into more manageable units there, too? Angola's endless war similarly suggests a partition between a Unita-ruled south and MPLA-ruled north.
There is some force to this, but not enough. The war between Eritrea and Ethiopia shows that conflict need not cease after partition, while some of Africa's smallest states - Uganda, Equatorial Guinea and Rwanda, for example - have seen some of the worst dictatorships and massacres.
The really key variable appears to be the nature of Africa's political elites. Irrespective of their political orientation, these elites have, with few exceptions, been corrupt and authoritarian and have often presided over the virtual destruction of their national economies. Often their rule has culminated in the complete disintegration of their states, so that all that is left by the end are feuding warlords in a Hobbesian state of nature. The end of the Cold War saw Western donors make their continuing aid conditional on "democracy and good governance". This has produced some improvement - but has also shown that you cannot drag these elites, kicking and screaming, towards democracy if they don't want it themselves.
Old colonial hands tend to regard the continent's elites as incorrigible and insist that trying to bully them into becoming democrats is a bit like trying to make a lion become a vegetarian. In any case, they argue, you can't divorce elite behaviour from the more general culture of African societies, in which patrimonialism and communalism remain the key values. Patrimonialism, they argue, breeds the cult of the big man who is expected to aggrandise himself in office and whose authority is not to be checked by mere elections - or mocked by a free press.
And communalism and the lack of private land ownership, they say, mean that Africans are used to taking whatever they want from their environment and making no effort to maintain or protect it. In conditions of dramatically increased population this leads to soil erosion, a failure to maintain the infrastructure and an endemic tendency toward pilferage.
There is enough truth in such assessments to make many commentators snort with derision when they hear President Mbeki speak of the 21st century being "the African century", the era of the "African renaissance". But whereas African leaders would once have denounced greater Western involvement in solving African disputes as colonialist, Mbeki is actually appealing for it - acknowledging in effect that Africa cannot manage itself. And the West, in any case, cannot just walk away. It is not merely that Africa is rich in raw materials, including huge and still untapped oil and gas reserves. With human rights becoming an ever more prominent theme of foreign policy - this is what the Bosnian and Kosovo interventions were all about, after all - it is just not possible for Western policy-makers to avert their eyes from human catastrophes of every kind in Africa without subverting their own policies elsewhere in the world. As the CIA now accepts, in a globalised world Aids in Africa is a threat to American security.
The real question is what form will Western involvement take? We have seen brief interventions, emergency famine relief and, as the realisation grows that this is a continent where only tough love works, diplomatic and economic pressure. This has not been enough. What is staring us in the face is a reversion to the old mandate system: an acknowledgement that decolonisation has not really worked and that Africa needs sustained outside help in reconstructing its ravaged economies and collapsed states. At present such a reinvention of colonialism - for that is what it is - brings gasps of politically correct horror. But sooner or later this is what will have to be faced.
R W Johnson is the author of Ironic Victory: Liberalism in Post-Liberation South Africa (OUP, 1999)
[end]
Carl
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