By David Smith
The dark continent. The hopeless continent. A scar on the conscience of the world. The cradle of humankind. African renaissance, Africa rising. Amazing Africa. I am an African. Scramble for Africa. Out of Africa. Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.
There have been countless attempts to define the world’s second biggest and second most populous continent, often and notoriously from outside. If measuring a nation’s essence is like pinning a jelly to a wall, then asserting an entire continent’s character is folly. Africa’s 54 countries – even this number depends on your point of view – are home to around a billion people manifesting thousands of languages and myriad ethnicities.
This most generalised and pigeonholed of all continents cries out for nuance, shade and complexity. South Africa is reputedly the beacon of hope, embarked on a judicial inquiry into its deadliest police massacre since the end of racial apartheid.
Somalia is arguably the world’s most failed state, but on Monday its troops entered the last stronghold of militant Islamists to offer the best chance of peace for 20 years.
Elsewhere, Kenya, hub of economic potential, internet entrepreneurs and Olympic champions, reeled from a grenade attack on a Sunday school; Mozambique’s ruling party celebrated half a century of socialism with a lavish party worthy of Jay Gatsby; and Zimbabwe’s prime minister and would-be democratic saviour apologised for leaving a trail of broken hearts in his search for a wife.
It is indeed a long way from Cape Town to Cairo. In-between are hundreds of millions of people trying to earn a living, raise families and pursue happiness. More newsworthy are the dictators and democrats, dirty wars and peaceful elections, Arab springs and sub-Saharan non-springs, abundant mineral wealth and ossified poverty, rocket scientists and subsistence farmers, thriving cultural industries and dying manufacturers.
The outside world has noticed and those externally imposed narratives of Africa are shifting. Once they were dominated by conflict, despotism, disease, televised famine and hapless victimhood.
Now, the talk is of African lions, six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies, a booming middle class, a slew of natural resource discoveries, the next frontier for investors – not aid donors. A new Africa.
Perhaps the pendulum is in danger of swinging from one extreme to another, from pathological pessimism to a Pollyannaism no less dogmatic. Businesses, the media and politicians arguably conspire in an “optimism industry” that patronises through the soft bigotry of low expectations. It is now a common trope to quote the Economist’s 2000 cover “The hopeless continent” then compare it to the same magazine’s “Africa rising” from 2011.
The reality is chequered, awkward, defiant of two- or three-word headlines.
Africa accounts for about 2% of world GDP. The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya may yet prove giant leaps for democracy, but big blows to some of Africa’s strongest economies.
This year, Senegal’s elections produced a smooth transition of power, but neighbouring Mali suffered a coup and loss of ground to Islamist militancy. Nigeria powers on with brilliant entrepreneurs co-existing with desperate infrastructure and violent extremists seeking to impose sharia law.
To be born female or gay in most African countries is still to be faced with a lifetime of cultural and material disadvantage. Human rights are often defined by so-called traditionalists, and sometimes governments, as a western invention, a colonisation of the mind.
Rapists continue to inflict horror on an unimaginable scale.
Homophobia is often enshrined in religious conviction and colonial-era laws.
Even devout sceptics, however, would be hard pushed to deny the (often Chinese) concrete reality of new buildings and bridges, roads and railways transforming the face of the continent. Mobile phones make it possible for users to communicate with, and send money to, relatives in faraway villages with an ease that was once unthinkable. Combined with the internet, they also make it harder for tyrannies to bury their crimes.
The number of major African conflicts is down from 12 in the mid-1990s to four today. Secondary school enrolment rose by 48% from 2000 to 2008. Deaths from malaria and Aids are in decline. In eight of the past 10 years, sub-Saharan Africa’s economies have outpaced east Asia’s. Africa has its super-rich elite, its middle-class shopping malls, its age of leisure and obsession with the English Premier League.
But too often this growth is jobless, meaning that Africa’s fast-growing young population has the makings of a demographic timebomb. Nor does economic success appear to be any guarantor of democracy or human rights. Sub-Saharan Africa’s third biggest economy, oil-rich Angola, has been ruled by the same president for 33 years.
Rwanda, one person’s post-genocide miracle of stable efficiency, is another’s nightmare of internal repression.
One thing is certain. There is now more rambunctious, sharp-elbowed debate than there has ever been thanks to phones, email, Facebook and Twitter. The Guardian’s new Africa blog and network, launched today, will join the debate – around contentious issues such as quality of leadership, the legacy of colonialism, identity politics that pitch women’s and homosexuals’ rights against a form of cultural fundamentalism. What is “Africa” anyway and should it look east, or west, or within?
The blog will showcase strong, sometimes conflicting opinions from inside and outside the continent in collaboration with our new network made up of a dozen independent sites. Our partners include solo bloggers such as Rosebell Kagumire in Uganda; Tolu Ogunlesi in Nigeria; and Minna Salami’s Ms Afropolitan. There are also collectives such as the Daily Maverick in South Africa; the women of HerZimbabwe; and the provocative Africa is a Country. Some are from established institutions such as the Royal Africa Society’s African Arguments or media groups such as the Mail & Guardian’s ThoughtLeader and the online magazine Think Africa Press. There’s also the development blog A View from the Cave, voices from the diaspora in Africa on the Blog; and the resource site Africa Portal. Add to this mix the Guardian’s own correspondents and exclusive pieces from regional experts, and we hope you will be informed, engaged, provoked, annoyed and moved.
David Smith is the Guardian’s Africa correspondent
A thought provoking article! I was born and bred in Europe and spend the last 30 years in South Africa.
I have come to perceive the continent as suffering from a general identity crisis. Nations are not homogeneous grown nations but tribal units with their own culture and language, lumped together or split by artificially created borders into “African countries”.
These African countries have been created by the European (and other) colonists to suit their activities in those pieces of land. The continent is most likely the only continent in the world with straight borderlines.
The African population was forced into adapting the culture and language of the resource hungry colonizing nation instead of fighting for and establishing its own tribal land or “country” with mutually accepted border lines.
No wonder that many Africans and African states still seem confused in their national goal setting.
It is not unlike the current unease of many Europeans with the working of the EU. Many feel this EU as an infringement on their tradition, culture and language sold under the banner of economic benefits.
Interesting debate, looking forward to more..
Agreed. Very interesting article. I think we should add the influence of timing to the mix. Africa seems to be a continent that is trying to catch up with the 21 st Century at the same time as it is trying to recover the past that it lost. Very few countries in the world have escaped colonisation or division or conquest of some sort – some recent examples include the balkan states and the former USSR. So actually it is nothing new. It is how Africa deals with it that is different.. We seem paralysed and incapable to moving purposefully in any direction. I think we are emotionally immature. Most other countries and continents recover from devastation – Just look at Japan after the second world war and the nuclear devastation – they just got on with it. Germany completely rebuilt itself – twice. We seem to be unable to get on with it and we don’t seem to know why. I certainly have no answers.
Well David, you certainly won’t be lacking in any dramatic headlines and stories fraught with human suffering.
The trouble is, does the rest of the world care?
The Europeans, Asians and Americans have enough of their own daily struggles to overcome in just coping with increased living costs and pressures of high density city living to be interested in yet another inter-tribal massacre.
The only ones really interested are the international neo-colonialist resource vultures whose sole aim is to strip the continent of as much natural resources as possible.
And in this process they are ably assisted by the entrenched corrupt hierarchy. Remember the slave trade?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sigh ….
An excellent “opening shot” (to use a rather unfortunate military metaphor)! May it reverberate and echo. It is true that we are doomed / challenged to keep on returning to this concept and history and discourse and dream and despair and defiance of ‘Africa’. Both from within and without…
May a thousand tongues speak.
@problem: Germany appears to have rebuilt itself. An African Studies Conference two years ago on South African and the former GDR are suffering from very much the same problems twenty years on: lack of private investment, corruption, high unemployment rates, brain drain and general emigration due to the above mentioned factors. All they do have is the possibility to tap into the social system.
I wish a subject with the label European Studies could be created. Then we’d quickly understand how a European – say Vladimir Putin or Silvio Berlusconi (sp?) – typically thinks and behaves. However, in the realm of reality, a General Unified Theory of a European weltanschauung will be a tad difficult to propound. Au contraire, Africans including Mugabe, Madiba, the Arch, and Teodora Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, occupy the same moral universe. The European mind is capable of remotely apprehending the innermost being of these denizens of the Dark Continent inspite of the fact the European analyst may not know squat about any of them. I’m looking forward to the enlightenment that the Guardian African Network will be showering upon us.
@SowetoSage – I agree. We also have our Mandela as part of that moral universe and I would assert that he is vastly superior to the names you have raised. But I refer more to a people and not necessarily its leaders. Hitler was who he was – a variety of evil manifestations. But because of, and then despite him, the German people rebuilt their country from total ruination (physically and financially )- twice – to become the European superpower. It takes a “personality type” if you will, and that is what interests me. As I said, I really don’t have any answers, which is why I think this kind of discussion is so interesting. I really hope all contributors can keep this conversation at a constructive, philosophical level. When I speak of the element of time, I believe that the knowledge economy and ICTs are playing a very influential role in our ability to respond proactively to the challenges of transformation – making it so much more difficult than would have been the case had we become a democratic society 50 years ago. I would be interested in other views.
I think the issue goes back much further than any discussion here. The first humans to populate Europe came from small groups, which is why Europeans are much more closely genetically related to each other than Africans are to each other. From these small bands, countries grew. When you have common ancestry you tend to work together more easily to reach common goals, and so society is more cohesive. Tribal affiliations eventually led to nation states. That isn’t to say, however, that it doesn’t have problems, it simply means that people see common interests more clearly. Africa, as you say, has been, and remains, much more diverse, and so people haven’t worked together at anything other than a very simple tribal level. Colonisation in many countries lasted less than a century, and in some countries, like Somalia, never really happened. As I say, Africans don’t really work together to improve their societies, to incorporate differing views into the polity. There are no “left” or “right” parties in Africa, simply ethnic leaders or corrupt leaders who get into power by means other than vision or competence. Africa is probably at the level Europe was around the time of the Romans. Like Europe it was colonised, and then when the colonial power departed fell into the Dark Ages. There is no romantic perfection about pre-Colonial Africa. Like pre-Colonial Europe, it consisted of fractuous internicine struggle. If this forum can help Africa move forward, it is to be welcomed.
@Richard: in my previous comment I referred to the different historical routes in the development of Europe and Africa which make the current Africa a fact as is the current Europe. Both are still developing and will do so for many years to come. History can be useful to explain the present and give hints to developing the future. History should not be used to apologize for ever.
The real question is then: how can Africa develop into a real partner in future world’s happenings? In my opinion? Building “respect” as Africans would be a good start. How??