We ask why the international community does not respond with the same urgency to the on-going humanitarian emergencies in Africa, to the recent Indian Ocean tsunami disaster?
Why do they neglect Africa so much?
Because British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) Gordon Brown have been using Africa as one of the “weapons” in their inglorious, undeclared battle for the leadership of the ruling Labour Party, Africa has been caught in the flack of a media blitz created by their rivalry. This has had some positive results in that even media organs that normally do not acknowledge Africa’s existence have suddenly begun to take note of what Blair and Brown are saying about the continent.
The two men’s suggestion that a sort of “Marshall Plan” should be devised to pull Africa out of poverty–in the same way that the Marshall Plan enabled Europe to resurrect its industrial strength after the Second World War–has received a lot of interest in the British media. But is that interest of any use to anyone?
Unfortunately, not always. For instance, on 8 January, Radio 4, the BBC’s top political and current affairs station mounted a very interesting discussion in Talking Politics, which led to some provocative statements about the state of Africa by Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of the South African President. But the producers could not conceive of the idea of finding out what other African thinkers would make of Mbeki’s rather pessimistic perspective. Instead, it was three Westerners who were hauled in to discuss the issues involved.
This type of laziness–or ignorance–that makes BBC domestic producers overlook Africans when they are mounting programmes about the continent occurs only too frequently on British TV and radio. And it makes you ask, how could they gain control of such a powerful organ of information? Domestic BBC Radio and TV have no excuse for doing this, for if they would only read African journals like New African, they would be exposed to African thinking.
[Which reminds me: publications like New African should realise that their content is too precious not to be put online in its entirety. Expecting people to pay for reading it online is not realistic; nor will reading it online affect circulation in any meaningful sense. This is a service these organs should render to Mother Africa for free.]
Of course, if BBC domestic producers–and other electronic media practitioners in Britain–would remember to consult their colleagues in the BBC World Service, they would be provided with the names of a wide cross-section of African opinion-makers from which they could find representative African views of all types to use in their programmes. As the case is, it is as if there is nobody in Africa who can discuss African affairs intelligently. Which is absolute bunkum, of course.
On the same day that Radio 4 did its thing, the London Daily Mail provided a chap called Andrew Roberts with a platform to argue no less, for the “recolonisation” no less of Africa as the solution to the continent’s problems! To Roberts, the idea that Africa’s troubles were largely caused by the imposition of alien rule by armed whites like Cecil Rhodes, greedy to extract raw materials and slaves from the continent to make themselves rich and denude Africa of its resources, is a notion from Mars propagated on earth by the European “left-liberal intelligentsia” and Africans who hold a “romantic” view of their continent’s history.
I am often confused when I read articles like that of Andrew Roberts. One feels provoked to answer him and answer him well. But is it worth the effort? If a person who has been to school advocates the recolonisation of Africa in spite of the atrocities committed by the British colonialists when they suppressed the Mau Mau struggle in Kenya; the barbaric treatment meted to the people of the Congo by King Leopold and his agents in order to enrich Belgium; the effects of British racism in South Africa which led directly to the development of apartheid by the Boers; the wholesale murder of the Hereros in Namibia by the Germans and so on and so forth, can conceive of recolonisation, then is that person worth debating?
I don’t think so. Why? Well, think of trying to recolonise any African country at this moment in time. That nation’s people, led by its intellectuals, would fight you–just as the people of Iraq are fighting the Americans and the British. You would come with an enormously overpowering array of weapons, of course. But in spite of your firepower, you would be fought–and just as the bombed-out Iraqis still do not fear to die trying to throw out the invaders, so would Africans not fear to die. Casualties in such a war would therefore be heavy, especially on the African side. But they would prefer to die than live under recolonisation. Many of the casualties inflicted on the Americans and the British are caused by suicide bombers. The Africans would similarly give their lives for their continent. We saw how Africans fought for their freedom in Guinea Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
So it is evident that recolonisation is not just a subject to be discussed over port in a Senior Common Room or after a boozy lunchtime session in a smoky pub somewhere in misty London. Despite the bloodshed to be expected, that the idea is entertained and advocated shows that there are still a lot of people who do not realise the consequences of such actions. Are they quite human? If we find them in the dock, we treat them with either contempt or pity.
Yet when a so-called “intellectual” like Andrew Roberts advocates these theories, he is treated not as wreckless but as a “thinker” whose views should be propagated by media organs that claim to possess self-respect. It is not only the Ku Klux Klan that purveys murder of black people as a policy. Anyone who advocates Africa’s recolonisation, knowing that it will entail the murder of thousands of innocent Africans, is worse than the Ku Klux Klan.
Roberts and his ilk have actually managed to infiltrate their ideas into the ranks of even editors whom these rightwing nuts deride as the “left-liberal intelligentsia”. One Sunday morning some years ago, I nearly had a heart attack when I opened The Observer–once the leading voice of enlightenment about Africa in the Western world–to find a right wing article by Norman Stone advocating the recolonisation of Africa! It was enough to make David Astor, the great and noble editor of the paper, who earned The Observer its reputation, turn in his grave.
The Independent on Sunday also once published an editorial carrying the same message. Meanwhile, Paul Johnson, having conned the leftist New Statesman into believing that he possessed views which made him worthy of becoming its editor, showed his true colours by writing in the reactionary Spectator that Africa can only be saved through recolonisation. The New York Times magazine also accorded Paul Johnson a great deal of space to propagate this view.
These puerile ejaculations expose the shallowness that underlies what is taken to be “intellectual discourse” in Western countries. One only needs to have the “right credentials”–to have been to Oxford or Cambridge–to have access to the opinion pages of all sorts of journals, including those like The Observer, The Independent on Sunday and the New York Times, whose past reputation and general standard of discourse is such that one would have expected them to know better. The “Old Boy Network” in the media, established through the “old school tie” and shared campuses is pretty strong and on subjects like Africa, where even specialists can easily go off the rails, wonky ideas can get into print at the drop of, well, a pint.
This reflects a general ignorance in Britain currently about Africa at the highest levels. African history and literature are hardly taught except in relation to what used to constitute the red-coloured areas of the global map. Certain elements in British society have never forgiven the world, especially Africa, for having “besmeared” those spots with new colours. One senses that some British males, especially those on the lunatic fringes of right wing political parties, may have been psychologically castrated by history so much so that they become “weirdos” who seek avenue in the media to attempt libidinal resuscitation.
You may think one is going on a bit about this, but please let me tell you that one is talking about a real and present campaign to traduce Africa. On 9 January, for instance, The Observer published an article by Richard Dowden, former Africa Editor of The Independent and The Economist, in which he claimed that “trillions” of aid had been poured into Africa in the past, to little or no effect, and therefore no new “Marshall Plan” of the sort advocated by Blair and Brown, was needed. I searched my mind to find where these trillions had been sent. Ghana borrowed money from the World Bank, the US and Britain to finance part of its largest project, the Volta River Project. It was not financed by aid. Nigeria didn’t finance its Kainji Dam by aid either. Britain, the former ruler of both Ghana and Nigeria, did not build these dams, despite their importance for the economic growth of the two countries. It was only after independence that the two countries realised they must build the dams.
So into which African countries were Richard Dowden’s “trillions” poured? He omitted to tell Observer readers and the editors neglected to ask him. Now, if anyone had said that the British government ‘poured billions of pounds into creating Milton Keynes’, no newspaper would publish that statement without asking for some specifics. But with Africa, anything goes: “trillions” of dollars have been poured into Africa and been wasted! Where? Maybe Dowden was thinking of American military aid to Egypt? Or to Mobutu’s Zaire? France’s lending to the Ivory Coast? “Trillions”?
Botswana, Uganda, Ghana, nor Mozambique–all countries that have implemented painful structural reforms at the behest of the West–has not seen any of these phantom “trillions.” Would Richard Dowden have been allowed to make such an unsupported statement about the US or France?
In The Independent, too, an article by Meghnad Desai on 11 January, decried the efforts of Bob Geldof and others in seeking to set the rich West on a “treadmill of giving and giving.”
Is it not tremendously exasperating when you are an African and you see British commissioning editors allowing everyone except Africans to talk about Africa’s problems? Is it not a racist trait that when you want to talk about America, you get an American, and when you want to talk about France, you get a Frenchman, but that when you want to discuss Africa, an Asian or European is thought to be just as qualified to do so?
In fact, because so little of what is published in Africa itself reaches the West–purely as a result of a general lack of curiosity about what Africans are thinking–the Western media owe it to their consumers to try a little harder in bringing African opinion to them. Is it not a betrayal of these consumers by these editors to imagine that their readers are not deeply interested in Africa? Yet the consumers demonstrate, again and again through donations to events like Live Aid and the Tsunami Disaster Appeal that they do really care about the poor areas of the world. It is about time the media’s head took a serious look at what the tail is doing.
But coming back to the main issue, does Africa need a “Marshall Plan” type of programme? The answer is yes, for it must be realised–by Africans themselves especially, who are often depressed by the poverty they see around them–that the economic mess in which Africa finds itself did not occur by accident. The West used Africa to make itself rich, by taking out Africa’s raw materials and paying a cheap price for them. It then turned these cheap raw materials into expensive manufactured goods and sold them at a huge profit to the world, including Africa.
Europeans also kidnapped millions of African people and made them slaves who were forced to plant sugar, tea, tobacco and cotton in North America and the Caribbean. Many of the huge fortunes that were made by merchants in such cities as Liverpool, Bristol, London (in Britain) and Paris, Nantes, Marseille and Nice (in France) or Amsterdam and Middleburg (Holland) Copenhagen (Denmark) and Brussels (Belgium) Seville and Madrid (Spain) and Lisbon (Portugal), can be traced back to the “triangular trade”–profits from slaves from Africa; profits from tea, sugar, tobacco and cotton from North America and the Caribbean; and finally, profits made from manufactured goods exported from Europe to everywhere else, including the manipulated markets of Africa. Meanwhile, Africa stagnated, denuded through slavery which provided much of the virile labour that should have served as the engine for its own economic growth.
Before the forcible seizure of African lands by white colonialists, intra-African trade was blossoming. Trade relations had also been long established with Asia and Arabia and would have developed further to bring in modern techniques of production. All this natural economic growth was arrested as the imperialists deliberately set about directing African trade towards themselves and seducing Africans from their cheap unsophisticated tastes to expensive products from “civilised” Europe. People often ask why Asia is cultivating economic “tigers” whilst Africa cannot even breed economic “kittens”. The answer can be found in the following quotation from Michael Barratt Brown and Pauline Tiffen’s book, Short Changed: Africa and World Trade: “Whereas Imperial Japan, in the first half of the 20th Century, established processing and refining installations in the territories that were conquered [by Japan] the Europeans (and especially the British) extracted the raw material in the colonies and processed it at home. Only where the colonial settlers became self-governing [say, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia] was the policy modified–at the settlers’ insistence.”
It was only after African countries gained their political independence in the 1960’s that the cruelty of the European colonial powers, vis-a-vis the Japanese method of colonisation, became apparent to the Africans. Worse, the Africans found that they could not easily alter the pattern of economic relationships between themselves and the West. Those African politicians, who saw the need to transform their economies by industrialising, paid a heavy price for it: they were often swindled by being sold industries that relied on inputs imported from Europe, and which ground to a halt when foreign exchange for importing the inputs dried up. (In Ghana, the Tema Food Complex; or the cutlass and soap factories, both also in Tema, are very good examples.) Other African politicians simply didn’t try to industrialise at all, either because they were frightened by the huge sums needed to finance industrial projects, or because they had absorbed so much of the dependence culture of colonialism that they could not conceive of breaking free from economic domination.
This is why Africa is today caught in the mother of all vicious circles imaginable: it cannot industrialise and add value to its raw materials before it exports them, because it is paid only a tiny fraction of what those raw materials are really worth. And also, the prices of the raw materials fluctuate on the international commodity markets, which makes for practicable economic planning difficult. The puny foreign exchange earnings obtained from the sale of raw materials further make it impossible to make the savings through which capital can be accumulated to purchase machinery to industrialise.
As if that were not enough, many African countries were left with such fragile economies that they use up all their earnings for current consumption and infrastructural development. Inflation, imported from their trade partners in the rich West, impoverishes them a lot more. When they borrow money to buy what they need, they do so at high interest rates. Repaying these debts becomes almost an impossibility.
To expect a people who are caught in the vice-like grip of economic forces over which they can exert no control at all whatsoever to “get on their bikes” and “hoist themselves up by their own bootstraps,” is nonsensical. The situation was man-made and man must solve it. Blair and Brown are therefore right to seek to get the G8 to help institute a “Marshall Plan” type rescue package for Africa. That is the only way to cut the Gordian knot that is throttling Africa. But the thinking on such a plan can only be effective if Africans are given ownership of the idea.
In this connection, both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown appear to me to have been trapped into placing too much reliance on views from official Africa. But the informal sections of African public opinion have a lot to contribute. Official Africa does not think much of micro-credit, for instance. Yet many African economies are kept going by our enormously resilient “market mummies” or women traders, who, were they to be given access to cheap credit, would work wonders in helping to transform their countries’ economies.
Ideas to be incorporated into an African “Marshall Plan” should include:
1. The World Bank and the IMF must be tasked by the rich Western countries to set up a fund from which capital can be borrowed to finance factories that add value to African raw materials before they are exported. This will not be a popular proposition in the West because African industries, if and when they are set on a firm footing, may compete with Western ones. But the West has monopolized the manufacturing trade for over 100 years. And it should be ashamed to fear competition from infant African industries.
2. Effective debt relief must be granted to African countries. Many of these debts arose from dubious deals and almost all of them were insured, and so have effectively been paid off already by export credit insurers. It is often assumed that granting debt relief will necessarily mean putting money into the hands of corrupt regimes. But countries that apply for debt relief can be required to present a strong case detailing the projects on which the money would be spent, before the relief is granted.
3. Tariffs and subsidies that make African agricultural products uncompetitive in G8 countries must be totally eliminated on a non-reciprocal basis.
4. Every African country should be asked to determine, in consultation with the IMF/World Bank, the minimum amount of foreign exchange it needs per year. When its export receipts fall below this level, it should be given a grant to make up the difference. Otherwise, current levels of consumption and infrastructural development cannot be maintained, let alone increased in line with population growth.
Helping Africa to help itself this way does not mean “throwing money at Africa”–as Africa’s detractors falsely argue. Instead, it will help to partly level the international economic playing field. This level playing field does not necessarily guarantee victory to any team. But it does give a plucky team the chance to show the stuff it’s made of.
To try and erase the “scar” that Africa currently represents on the conscience of the world, all humanity’s capabilities must be harnessed. Africa has contributed enormously to the riches of the West. She will so do again–if given the tools for the job. Neglect, in an age in which frustration can be exploited to such dangerous ends, would not be in the rich West’s enlightened self-interests.