THREE FOR THOUGHT: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT . . . AIDING AFRICA
Continental Divide
The plight of Africa may have dominated this week's G8 summit, DAVID KILGOUR says, but it's time to pay attention to the continent's own voices

By David Kilgour

MP Edmonton Mill Woods - Beaumont

Globe & Mail, July 9, 2005

Entertainment, Books, D15

Overnight, much of the Western world has become preoccupied and vocal about the fact that most of Africa's more than 900 million people still live in extreme poverty. We've heard from Bono, Bob Geldof and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and from pop-culture forums such as the Live 8 and political ones like the G8 summit. The only voices we don't seem to be hearing enough of are those of Africans.

One wonders, for example, what debt reduction will mean to a Rwandan trying to feed her children and heal the scars of her country's horrific past. Will an aid increase to 0.7 per cent of GNP change the life of Darfuris living under terror in squalid refugee camps? How are Africans responding to the recent surge of attention and "generosity"? And how do any of these measures tackle the greater, more complex and unpalatable problems of the West's relationship with Africa, such as inequitable trade and peacekeeping?

Books can help us to understand better the reality of sub-Saharan Africa and some of its challenges. In Peace in Africa: Towards a Collaborative Security Regime (Institute for Global Dialogue, 2004), edited by Shannon Field, 10 experts, most of them Africans, examine issues such as the role of the African Union in managing wars, violence, famine, poverty, tyrants and the scourge of HIV/AIDS. Peace and security are essential conditions for sustainable development; in Field's view, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor to the African Union (AU), was harmed by its mandate, which barred interventions in the internal affairs of member states. Because the international community seems increasingly reluctant to undertake peace operations in Africa, it is all the more important that the 2002 constitution of the AU allowed for interventions in order to ward off large-scale human-rights abuses and crimes against humanity.

Sadly, although Field and the book's other contributors thought AU interventions would prevent future Rwandas, the current catastrophe in Darfur demonstrates that security remains one of Africa's central problems -- and something debt forgiveness and aid will not solve.

We must understand more about the continent's past. King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild (Houghton-Mifflin, 1998), offers a first-rate chronicle of Western colonization in Africa. Hochschild focuses on one of the most horrific -- and largely unknown -- crimes of the late 19th century: Belgian King Leopold II's rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885, and where his mercenary army enslaved the Congolese people and inflicted grotesque punishments, including child dismemberment, mass rape and murder. Belgian rule robbed the country of 10 million people and set it up for a future of instability, despotic rulers and the exploitation of natural resources.

You need not be a historian to enjoy this book; Hochschild's narrative is accessible and tragically absorbing. It is also a crucial read, in that it illustrates how colonization changed every aspect of the economies and traditional societal structures then in place in Africa, and created the basis for many current challenges. The author draws parallels between Leopold's predatory one-man rule and the strong-arm tactics of the Congo's late-20th-century dictator Mobuto Sese Seko.

The situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo is arguably the most complex and challenging in Africa today. Political instability, extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS and civil war, exacerbated by diamonds and myriad local and international players, continue to hinder the possibility of peace and sustainable livelihoods. The prospect of elections offers little hope; elections merely raise questions as to why the West is investing so much in what many see as an attempted imposition of Western-style democracy: "free" elections in a country where most of the 28 million citizens are without food, water, medicine and education.

Hochschild enriches our understanding of whether the key to Africa's success lies in aid or in changing the very systems of trade that have established African economies as exploitable and dependent. As a Nigerian friend recently remarked, "What good will an aid increase do, when on any given day Western leaders can wake up, decide they do not want to pay as much for their sugar, rice or bananas, and by lowering market prices, devastate entire economies in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America?"

In any case, the West already has a road map for African development: Africa Must Unite (Panaf/Heinemann, 1963), by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president. Published more than 40 years ago, it is more relevant today than ever. With his theme "unity is strength," Nkrumah repudiates the still-prevalent misconception that Africa, as a continent, is a lost cause. He explores Africa's tremendous wealth and capability, and the socioeconomic potential of the continent and its people.

Indeed, decades later, this is the starting point from which Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has based many of his theories, among them the "capability approach" to development, which argues that poverty is maintained when people are denied access to the resources that would allow them to create prosperous and sustainable communities.

To build a more "free" Africa, the continent must be liberated from destructive conditions and trade policies. Nkrumah concedes that African countries, on their own, stand almost no chance of overcoming socioeconomic and developmental depression. So he details the structures and institutions necessary for the successful functioning of a unified government. Though the Pan-African movement of today is strong, Africa Must Unite was first to lay down the blueprint for a continental government. Its ideas formed the basis of the founding of the OAU and the AU.

These three books only scratch the surface of an understanding of the history of sub-Saharan Africa and its challenges. It's becoming increasingly easier to gain access to African writings. If we want to understand and aid Africa in any way, we should be reading them. Africans have always had solutions to their own problems. It's time we start including them fully in the conversation.

David Kilgour is the MP for Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont and former secretary of state for Africa. His research assistant, Magdalene Creskey, has worked in community development projects in conflict areas in southern Africa.
 

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