Africa's Travails

This year 16 African countries, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Mali, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia and Togo, celebrate the 50th anniversary of their nominal political freedom; many of them mired in poverty, ethnic and religious strife and political instability. What went wrong usually involves twisted facts and hypotheticals. From a western perspective, the poverty and instability that remain the hallmark of the Continent are the result of bad governance, endemic corruption, systemic repression and personality cult among African leaders. The obvious implication being that Africans would be better off today, had they remained under European rule, even though the main purpose of colonization was to pillage and subjugate the Continent and its people rather than building economically viable states.
It was almost 125 years ago at the Berlin Conference (Nov 1884- Feb 1885) presided by Germany’s Iron Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck (1815-98) that the Continent of Africa, huge and unexplored, was divided up by the European powers, namely Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Consequently, neighboring ethnic groups with nothing in common but the color of their skin were banded together into administrative entities that ultimately became nations-states. In the wake of the geopolitical realignment that followed WWII (1939-45), the keepers of the New World Order, the United States and the Soviet Union, despite their unbridgeable ideological differences had agreed on one issue: the era of European colonialism was over. Thus, grudgingly, the colonial powers complied and granted African countries limited political autonomy, which many of the newly minted African leaders mistakenly equated with outright independence.
Nationalists like Ahmed Sékou Touré (1922-84) of Guinée, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-72) of Ghana and Patrice Lumumba (1925-61) of Congo, presently the Democratic Republic of Congo, took the notion of independence literally and got a rude awakening. Having rejected Charles De Gaulle’s bizarre scheme of a confederation between France and its African colonies, Sékou Touré, was ostracized and vilified by the western media. Guinée, blacklisted by the western powers, sunk into extreme poverty despite its abundant mineral riches. In an extreme act of vindictiveness, the French dismantled the country’s telephone system before granting it its independence on October 2, 1958.
In 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a western-backed military coup while visiting China and North Vietnam. He never returned to his native Ghana and died a broken man in 1972. His Pan-African dream, lost in the unforgiving reality of the Cold War, no doubt died with him. In 1961, Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister, was arrested, tortured and assassinated on direct orders, some say, of Belgium and the U.S for having embarrassed King Baudouin of Belgium during his country’s Independence Day celebrations on June 30th 1960. Lumumba’s crime: He dared denounce the atrocities perpetuated against the Congolese by the Belgians during their colonial rule (1885-1960) during which roughly 20% of Congo’s population perished. The then-United Nations forces in Congo could have saved Lumumba’s life but were specifically told by the New York headquarters not to intervene.
Conversely other African leaders, particularly Jomo Kenyatta (1894-1978) of Kenya, Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001) of Senegal, Félix Houphouet-Boigny (1905-93) of Côte d’Ivoire, Omar Bongo (1935-2009) of Gabon and Mobutu Sese Seko (1930-97) of Zaire, blindly implemented the neo-colonialist designs of their former tormentors by towing the line. Not surprisingly, Gabon, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Zaire were for the most part “oasis of stability” in a Continent marred by military coups, ethnic strife, Apartheid and civil wars. In Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Moroccan and western troops periodically intervened to quell many rebellions against Mobutu’s tyrannical rule until one led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila (1939-2001) finally overthrew the regime of the long time dictator in 1997.
The attitude of Europeans toward Africans is that of an impenitent bank robber reprimanding his victims for their indolence and deciding his own punishment rather than pleading for mercy or forgiveness. It is all the more disingenuous that Old Europe is casting itself as a paragon of virtues and defender of human rights by castigating Chinese investments in Africa on the premise they help keep corrupt tyrants in power, therefore detrimental to social, political and economic progress on the Continent. Strange logic, isn’t it, considering the systematic pillage of the Continent and enslavement and its people by the Europeans.
It took the Europeans centuries to overcome ethnic hatred and political divisions that turned Old Europe into raging battlefields for most of its existence, yet, they are castigating Africans for not having done so in a generation. May be, it is a tacit admission by the Europeans that Africans are better human beings. It is in that context that Nelson Mandela of South Africa is venerated for his conciliatory approach to past atrocities against Africans by Europeans while Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) is ostracized for his retributive stance toward his people’s former tormentors.
As Karl Marx correctly wrote in 1852 “Men make their own history, but they don't make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.” Fittingly, Mandela and Mugabe are modern versions of earlier generations of African leaders (Bongo, Senghor, Houphouet-Boigny, Nkrumah, Lumumba, and Touré), all products of historical events that shaped their divergent political philosophies, which ironically facilitate European paternalism and hegemony in Africa.