H.D.S. GREENWAY
A weakness in Africa that threatens the world
ARUSHA, Tanzania MORE THAN 40 years have passed since I visited this country. It was called Tanganyika then and was still under British rule. Until it fell to the British as part of the spoils of war in 1919, it had been part of German East Africa. Like all the rest of this continent, this country's fate, as well as its borders, was arbitrarily decided by Europeans in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Before that, Arab slave traders made forays into the interior.
In those days of the early '60s "the winds of change," as British Prime Minister Harold MacMillian termed it, were swirling through Africa, and European colonialism was preparing to lower its flags. One by one the British, French, Belgians, Italians, and Portuguese followed the Germans out of Africa. Only the Spanish remain in their tiny enclaves. White regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa continued in power for a while but in time gave up power to the majority rule. Much of the hope and promise of independence that was so in the air in 1961, however, has been dissipated, and the sad truth is that much of this unfortunate continent is worse off and less happy now than in the bad old days of colonialism. For every step forward there have been two steps backwards. During the Cold War the Communists and Western powers played out their rivalries across the continent, but few Africans benefited. Today 70 percent of the world's poorest countries are in Africa, and although oil is beginning to play a major role in some countries, oil dependency seldom lives up to its promise. Nature has been unkind to the land of Africa. The deserts are expanding. Mount Kilimanjaro, "as wide as the world . . . and unbelievably white in the sun" as Earnest Hemingway wrote, is losing its snow and ice. No place on earth stands to lose more than Africa if the pace of global warming continues. Strange diseases have jumped from animals to humans with devastating effect, from bush fire plagues such as ebola to diseases such as AIDS, which burns slowly but even more devastatingly. Out of 38 million HIV-infected people world wide, 25 million live in sub-Saharan Africa. One can only guess at what AIDS will do to African societies if the pandemic is not checked. Old and curable diseases such as polio threaten epidemics at least partially because provincial and religious leaders are warning people that polio vaccines are a Western plot to harm them. But the worst plague that Africa has suffered has been bad leadership. Nowhere on earth have societies been held back by venal, corrupt, and violent leaders as in Africa. The worst have been in the former Belgian colonies. The Congo has wallowed in misrule with its leaders taking a leaf from the Belgian kings who thought the sole purpose of the colony was personal enrichment and exploitation. In the last five years, 3 million Congolese have died as six foreign African armies have fought over its territory. Rwanda witnessed one of the great genocides of our time, with nearly 800,000 killed within 90 days -- most of it done with knives and sticks. Ten years later the war crimes trials of those who planned and committed these deeds drag on here in Arusha with no end in sight. But three times as many have died in what has been called the slow-motion genocides in the Sudan. At last the world seems to have awakened to the horrors of Darfur, where government-sponsored militias have created havoc. But actual progress to stop it have been little and late. Bad leaders have exploited and slaughtered their own people. Seventy-five percent of the world's armed conflicts are taking place in Africa, and warfare is becoming privatized to loot natural resources. In the continent's Arab countries the tides of Islamic extremism are rising, and terrorists are making inroads in failing states south of the Sahara. The West ignores all these problems at its peril, for in the modern world no continent is an island entire of itself, as John Donne would have said, and events that might seem local to Africa will eventually spill over to diminish the world.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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