Martin Meredith's 'The State of Africa' 2005

 

The Free Press first edition - 2005

Where to begin?! If I thought the tale of The Scramble for Africa was filled with horror, then this story of the 50 Years since Independence for the majority of the African countries is far worse. For every abomination created or supported by the ex-colonial countries, then the behaviour of nearly all the indigenous African leaders - the 'Mr Bigs' as Meredith calls them - has been even more dreadful. I have now spent the whole of January reading just these two huge books and it has been intensely depressing. Essentially they are both accounts of Man's inhumanity to Man.

There is so much to digest (so much indigestible) and so many leaders to comment upon, that it is more sensible to pick out a few of them. I have not dealt with Haile Selaissie of Ethiopia, Gaddafi of Libya, Sadat of Egypt, Numeiri of Sudan, Charles Taylor in Liberia, Arap Moi in Kenya, Sekou Toure in Guinea - frankly the reader is bogged down and crushed by the feeling of 'No, not another one'.

• SETETSE KHAMA (Botswana - was Bechuanaland). There are only four references in the book: Botswana provided a rare example of an African state that used its bonanza of mineral riches wisely...corruption hardly existed; Botswana stood out as an example of a liberal democracy, tolerant of opposition activity, where the rule of law was held in respect and where economic development proceeded apace;(sadly) Botswana has the highest infection rate in the world, more than 37% of its population of 1.6 million are HIV-positive; in the age group of 15-49, the infection rate is 40%. By 2010 life expectancy in Botswana is expected to fall to 27 years; half of all children in the country are likely to be Aids orphans; Botswana stands out as a unique example of an enduring multi-party democracy with a record of sound economic management, that has used its diamond riches for national advancement and maintained an administration free of corruption.  I would have liked to have heard more about this from the author; above all, WHY?  In 2023, Botswana is the least corrupt country in Africa and ranks just below Portugal and South Korea (Transparency International)

• NELSON MANDELA Somewhere Over The Rainbow. Mandela stands out as a Beacon of what might have been and what could be. Unique, remarkable, awe-inspiring. A GREAT 'Mr Big'!

STRONG LEADERS?

• GAMAL ABDEL NASSER (Egypt) triumphs during the first years in power were followed by a catalogue of disappointments and disasters...he quarrelled constantly with other Arab governments, retreating more and more into isolation...yet whatever disasters befell Egypt, Nasser never lost his popularity with the masses.
• JOMO KENYATTA (Kenya) enjoyed massive authority. Even critics of his government accorded him due respect...he adhered to capitalist policies, encouraging both indigenous private enterprise and foreign investment...he was ruthless in dealing with any challenge to his authority
• JULIUS NYERE (Tanzania) socialist experiment stood out as a beacon of hope...he became the most influential thinker and writer in Africa of his time...took on the drive for socialism virtually single-handedly...between 1973 and 1977 some 11 million people were placed in new villages, in what amounted to the largest mass movement in Africa's history...there were numerous reports of coercion and brutality...by the end of the 1970s Tanzania was in dire straits...what progress was made was financed largely by foreign aid... He stepped down voluntarily, after 23 in power.
• LEOPOLD SENGHOR ( (Senegal) a centralised system of groundnut management soon became bogged down in incompetence and corruption...Senghor steered through these difficulties with a mixture of compromise, coercion and pork-barrel politics. He was one of the few (6 out of 150) to relinquish power voluntarily, after 20 years in office.
• SAMORA MACHEL (Mozambique). I would have liked much more comment on Machel. The little there is about him in the book suggests he was a skilful pragmatist.
• KENNETH KAUNDA (Zambia) was equally adamant about the merits of one-party rule and his own leadership, despite a catastrophic record of economic mismanagement over 25 years in office. I recall him for his hair quiff, his large white hankie and his predilection for weeping in public!

DICTATORS OR WORSE

• KWAME NKRUMAH (Ghana) No other country demonstrated the decline of Africa so graphically as Ghana. Although a few countries in the continent were independent before 1957 (Liberia, South Africa,  Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco), the British colony of Gold Coast becoming the independent Ghana was seen as a trailblazer, as was its new leader Nkrumah.  Meredith heads his early chapter on Ghana, The Gold Coast  Experiment, and a later one on Nkrumah Feet of Clay. Tragically, it now feels like an experiment in dictatorship, and worse, which was to be replicated throughout the dark continent.
• ABEID KARUME (Zanzibar). His regime was bizarre and vindictive from the outset...the Revolutionary Council ordered arrests, imprisonment without trial, torture and execution as it saw it.
• JEAN-BEDEL BOKASSA (Central African Republic) combined not only greed and personal violence but delusions of grandeur unsurpassed by any other African leader...he also gained a reputation for cannibalism...
• MILTON OBOTE (Uganda) in common with many other African leaders, he set his sights on establishing a one-party state, arguing that tribal and factional groupings tended to threaten the stability of the country...his style of government became increasingly secretive and autocratic.
• HASTINGS BANDA (Malawi) his dictatorship degenerated into tyranny...incarcerating thousands of Malawians in detention centres

TYRANTS

• JOSEPH MOBUTU (Zaire). The Congo/Zaire, with Rwanda, Burundi, truly represent Hearts of Darkness and Mobutu one of the worst of tyrants. Amazingly, he lasted so long. But as with so many other corrupt leaders, he lasted thanks to outsiders' support; in this case, the USA who, with France, Belgium, Britain, Russia and China, could not leave Africa alone. Their dirty fingerprints are all over this tragic 50 years - for plunder, Great Power rivalry, weaponry profits. The UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali does not come out of things smelling of roses, either.
• IDI AMIN (Uganda) organised death squads to hunt down and kill scores of army and police officers...within a few months, mass killing of Langi and Acholi began. 'It was impossible to dispose of the bodies in graves'...thousands died at the hands of his special squads. No one was immune.
• FRANCISCO MACIAS NGUEMA (Equatorial Guinea) steadily sank into a morass of murder and mayhem...thousands were incarcerated in prison and murdered there...many were executed on a whim...out of a population of 3000,000, at least 50,000 had been killed and 125,000 had fled into exile. 
• MENGISTU HAILE MARIAM (Ethiopia) thousands died in the red terror, thousands more were imprisoned, many were tortured and beaten
• ROBERT MUGABE (Zimbabwe). The author correctly heads the chapter on Mugabe's seizure of, and maintenance of, power in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, as A Degree in Violence. Perhaps it was because his regime started later (1980) than most of the others, the fact that it was a British colony, that much of the terror was aimed at whites and the growth of more intrusive media to report everything, leads one to feel his rule was one of the most tyrannical and repulsive of all. He fought the war not to achieve democracy but to gain total control...by the end of the 1990s Zimbabwe was in dire straits. In 2003, he warned he would use even worse violence if necessary. 'If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold. Ten times. That is what we stand for'.

.

The cancers of Communism (Russia, China, Cuba) and Radical Islam have only added to the poison.

Having ploughed through this woeful tale of dictators, tyrants, massacres, brutal tribal wars etc., I still believe that only one-party governments are the way forward BUT they should be paternal not tyrannical. All attempts at democracy led to one man/party quickly taking dictatorial power. Some leaders, although brooking no dissent, managed to stay just this side of tyranny and were - on a sliding scale - far less corrupt that others; but, almost inevitably, familial and tribal loyalties came before country's. Here one can certainly blame European governments. So many new countries' borders had been drawn on a map in Berlin or elsewhere. They were no respecters of tribal areas and one can look at almost any African state (Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, Zaire) and realise just how artificial a creation they were. Is there any hope for the future, when one adds natural disasters (although 'famine' was often caused by warfare) and ruthless arms traders into the mix? 

One can do no better than to quote in its entirety Meredith's last paragraph:

The same lament applies to Africa. Time and time again, its potential for economic development has been disrupted by the predatory policies of ruling elites seeking personal gain, often precipitating violence for their own ends. 'The problem is not so much that development has failed,' observed the Nigerian academic, Claude Ake, in his essay on Democracy and Development in Africa, 'as that it was never really on the agenda in the first place.' After decades of mismanagement and corruption, most African states have become hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good. Indeed, far from being able to provide aid and protection to their citizens, African government and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival.

And, so, millions died during those 50 years, through disease, hunger, displacement and genocide. A shocking, shocking tale of repetitive evil. Meredith's book was published eighteen years ago. Has anything changed? I doubt it.

Thomas Pakenham's 'The Scramble for Africa' 1991

 

Weidenfeld and Nicolson first edition - 1991

Wow, what an achievement. Pakenham's book, now thirty years' old, is a triumph of research and exposition. The canvas is vast, but he has managed to wrestle successfully with a myriad of sources and used them to back up his own visits to 22 of the 47 independent countries of Africa. No wonder he spent a decade working on the book. The result really is a tour de force.

Of course, it is impossible to give a detailed appraisal of such a huge book, but here are a few basic reactions.

• as with India and elsewhere, it is nearly incredible that so few controlled so many. Whether it was Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal or the King of the Belgians, each used a tiny amount of Europeans to lead exploration or establish and run colonies
• not until the late 1870s was there a real push to colonise rather than to trade (whether it be precious metals, ivory, rubber, oil, cocoa etc.) Only in the next two decades did the coastal forts and settlements expand up rivers (Niger, Congo etc) in pursuit of economic gain and, thanks to David Livingstone, Christian missionising (The Flag follows the Cross).
• the Scramble - above all between Britain and France and then, later, Germany, was led as much by individuals 'on the ground' - H.M. Stanley, Carl Peters, Frederick Lugard, George Goldie, Cecil Rhodes, Pierre Brazza, Jean-Baptiste Marchand - as by governments (although imperialists such as Joe Chamberlain and Gambetta were only too ready to support the intrepid explorers/colonists). Some leaders, such as Gladstone and Lord Granville, were usually opposed to any expansion; even Lord Salisbury was ambivalent. Others, like Bismarck, changed their minds about colonies. Apart from the strategic race for the Nile, the running had been left to individuals: enterprising capitalists such as Cecil Rhodes and George Goldie, humanitarians such as Lugard and Mackinnon, eccentric naturalists such as Harry Johnston.
• The brutality of all races, including the various African tribes, was shocking (and still is).
• Whilst there were clearly some genuine, upright, god-fearing missionaries, some were hand-in-glove with the dreadful behaviour of their secular compatriots - none worse than the silence of the Baptists and Roman Catholics in the Congo.
• the single-mindedness and bravery of the explorers and military officers was astounding. So many Europeans lost their lives in all the spheres - West, East, Central and South Africa - killed in battles, skirmishes, ambushes and, above all, diseases. For every well-known name - the Stanleys, Gordons, Marchands, Goldies, Wolseleys - there was a myriad of others, a few with memorial plaques on church walls back home, but most lost to the jungle etc. or, worse, eaten by cannibalistic tribes.
• the 'origin' of the Union of South Africa explains everything about its later tragic years.
• As for King Leopold of the Belgians - you need to read the book. No words here can sum up the evil done in his name, usually knowingly. Yet he died in his bed.

A few examples of the above:

1. (Uganda) Of all the freelance imperialists who promoted the Scramble, Lugard was to prove the most tenacious and, ultimately, the most successful. In the next forty years no other proconsul would put such a powerful moral stamp on the character of European rule in Africa. Significantly, both his parents were missionaries, and his hero was David Livingstone. Yet he had sailed for Africa more to cast away his life than to build an empire.
2. (German East Africa) Carl Peters was said to model himself on Nietzche's 'Superman'...not for him the usual euphemisms about the importance of 'firmness' and the regrettable need for 'vigorous measures'. He bragged to his readers about his 'exultation' as he shot down any African bold enough to oppose him, and boasted of the trail of destruction he had left along the valley of the Tana...
3. (German South-West Africa) ...the station officer at Jaune, Lieutenant Schenneman, who had taken a black mistress, heard rumours of her affairs with three Africans. He told his black servant to castrate the three men. The servant mistook his instructions, marched off with a party of soldiers and castrated the first three men he met in a nearby village. On another occasion, a Lieutenant Dominik was sent on an expedition to negotiate a treaty with the Bahoro. Instead, he shot down all the men and women in the village, and the fifty-four children that survived were put in baskets and drowned like kittens.
4. (Cecil Rhodes) These years between 1886 and 1890 were the most astonishing of Rhodes's astonishing life. It was as though he had been given the magical power to live four careers simultaneously and they were all telescoped into those four years. In Kimberley he was the Great Amalgamator, the Bismarck of the diamond mines. In Johannesburg astride the Rand gold-mines, he was a pioneer of goldbugs and Randlords. At the Cape he was the august Prime Minister of Cape Colony, trusted by both Afrikaners and the English-speaking community. Across the Limpopo he was to be a new kind of colonial imperialist, outflanking all rivals, Boers, Germans and Portuguese, as he pushed up into Mashonaland and the north. 

Pakenham's last chapter is entitled 'Scrambling Out' - The Scramble out of Africa in the eleven years from 1957 to 1968 was pursued at the same undignified pace, taking the world as much by surprise, as the Scramble into Africa more than half a century earlier. I am old enough to recall some of the newspaper headlines of this period, particularly Harold Macmillan's 'Wind of Change' speech.

1847:  Liberia    1910:  South Africa    1922:  Egypt    1941-2:  Ethiopia    1951: Libya

1956: Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan

1957:  Ghana

1958:  Guinea

1960:  Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin, Nigeria,                        Cameroon, Central Africal Republic, Gabon, Congo Republic, Zaire, Somali Republic,

1961:  Sierra Leone, Tanzania

1962:  Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi

1963:  Kenya

1964:  Zambia, Malawi 

1965:  The Gambia

1966:  Botswana, Lesotho

1968:  Swaziland, Equatorial Guinea

1969:  Algeria

1974: Guinea Bissau    1975:  Angola, Mozambique    1976:  Western Sahara    1977:  Djibouti

1980:  Zimbabwe

It is hard not to see the hundred years or so involvement by the European Powers in the continent (and some for much longer than that) as a mere interlude - albeit a rapacious one - in its grim history of inter-tribal violence, even genocide, and brutal, corrupt (yes, evil) dictators and autocrats. Aptly named "The Dark Continent".

I am going to read Martin Meredith's The State of Africa (2005) soon. It is subtitled A History of Fifty Years of Independence. Just reading the last few pages fills one with despair.