THE STATE OF AFRICA: A History of Fifty Years of Independence
by Martin Meredith
The Free Press £20 pp768 GELDOF IN AFRICA
by Bob Geldof
Century £20 pp320
The first African republic, Martin Meredith reminds us, was Liberia (1847). The Americo-Liberian freed slaves who ran the place deliberately aped the manners, lifestyle and even architecture of the antebellum South and regarded the natives with the same contempt with which their old slavemasters had regarded them.
An early low point came in 1931, with the finding by an international commission that senior government officials were involved in organised slavery, but this was far surpassed by the regression to barbarism that racked the country from 1980 onwards under the rules of, successively, Samuel Doe, Prince Johnson and Charles Taylor. When Johnson deposed Doe, he made a bestselling video out of his “interrogation ” of the fallen dictator — with his hands tied and wearing only underpants — in which he cuts off Doe’s ears one by one, and attempts to eat them while he questions him, then gradually mutilates him to death. Warlordism, mass mutilations, child soldiers, rape, murder and mayhem engulfed both Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone thereafter. When Taylor, every bit Johnson’s equal in savagery, was finally bribed to go in to exile in 2003, he dressed himself in virginal white, compared himself to Jesus — he was “the sacrificial lamb” — and called on God to help him to come back soon.
This descent from liberatory euphoria to the heart of darkness is all too symbolic of what Africa has gone through since independence, and it is this that Meredith chronicles in a series of often vivid country snapshots. Africa’s two biggest nations, Sudan and Congo, have been racked by civil wars for so long that these conflicts now seem permanent and insoluble no matter what: it must have been the same during the Hundred Years’ war. But almost one third of black Africans are Nigerians, making Nigeria the truest microcosm of the continent. Despite the country’s oil bonanza, the average Nigerian is now far poorer than he was in 1970. The country is racked by ethnic and religious disputes and is one of the most corrupt places in the world. The justice system has collapsed, crooked judges, civil disorder and capital flight are the norm, and the universities have imploded — a crucial indicator everywhere in Africa, for this robs the country of the possibility of institutional and elite renewal. If it can’t produce a next generation of well-educated civil servants, politicians, economists and intellectuals, then how can the country not go backward?
Meredith is a sure guide to this colossal, sad story but it is frustrating that he doesn’t ask some of the obvious questions. He accepts Claude Ake’s view that it is not so much that development has failed as that it was never on the agenda in the first place, thanks to Africa’s “vampire-like politicians”, mere predators on their countries. But, for example, he recounts how Julius Nyerere’s crazy economic policies (and forced population removals on an apartheid scale) reduced Tanzania to bankruptcy and near-starvation. Yet Nyerere was not personally greedy or “vampire-like”. The question is not just why monsters such as Idi Amin, Mobutu and Robert Mugabe reduced their countries to ruin but why just about all the other African leaders including such Christian gentlemen as Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda did the same.
And why do Africans not seem to care about this? Not long before Nyerere died, I heard him cheered to the echo by the South African parliament after he had delivered a ringing defence of all the policies which had crucified his country.
It is commonplace for Russians today to say that they wish only that the freakish conditions of 1917 had never given the Bolsheviks their chance of power, and that the whole communist nightmare could have been avoided; but the failure of African decolonisation has been so great that something like the same question must be asked of Africa. The coming to power of African nationalism turned out to be a disaster for the continent: the Sierra Leoneans who in recent time cheered the British return there to restore order would probably have voted for a resumption of colonial rule. In black Africa, the unique case is Botswana, where the ruling elite has used independence to steadily improve the lot of the people while preserving a stable democracy.
It is a relief to turn to Bob Geldof’s book because, in addition to the handsome and often intriguing photographs, he does not mince his words. On meeting Arafat, he tells us: “He was pale, his lips slobbery. They were loose, floppy and wet. He looked f***ing awful.” Although there’s a photo of our man Bob, arm around Arafat, captioned “Yasser, that’s my baby”, the fact that Geldof (rightly) muses that Arafat is “The Corrupt Crook posing as the Great Liberator” warns one that this is not another naive western celeb tripping through Africa while completely missing the point. To Geldof’s annoyance he keeps coming across David Beckham worship in places such as Timbuktu and longs to tell them to shut up, that he hasn’t come all this way for “you to keep crapping on about David bloody Beckham”. In the end, to avoid this he stops saying he’s from England and says he is from Ireland.“Rrroy Keane”, comes the reply.
Geldof’s diary of 20 years’ wandering through Africa is (with a little help from his friends) extremely well written and often remarkable. Many of his encounters, such as those with Somali warlords, are clearly dangerous, but you can always hear him concentrating hard to understand, nothing is romanticised and he is often quite funny. In Somalia, he learns that his name translates to “Most honourable camel-looter”. He likes visiting small, out-of-the-way places and delights in the bizarre in the manner that anyone who loves Africa must: facts such as the Masai’s presentation of 15 cows to the people of New York in sympathy for 9/11. But he is a sensitive man too: it’s not all jokes and scarifying and what-the-f***. If six years of the second world war have affected the consciousness of several western generations, he wonders aloud, then what did four centuries of slaving do to Africans’ minds? He imagines everywhere the ghosts: “On the river the ghosts of the slaves. Centuries of ghosts forever travelling to horror and exile. They rattle in their shackles, clank in their chains.”
He sees children in Uganda running from the mutilatory horrors of the Lord’s Resistance Army. He cries, calls home. “You always think you’ve seen it all. I have seen things no human should ever, or ever have to, see. I had never become inured to it. That such things should happen to children and people at the beginning of the 21st century makes me sick and enraged.” And so on, to the worthy declaration of Blair’s Commission for Africa with which the book ends. One dreads Geldof’s reaction when he realises that this, too, is hollow, and that quite a few of his fellow commission members are part of the problem, not the solution. One doesn’t want to see the day when he gets fed up, turns his back and sinks into cynicism. But he probably won’t. By the end you realise that, through all the swearing and the jokes, the guilt trips and the hyperbole, Geldof, who was always humane, is now pretty shrewd, and may even have become a little wise.
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