South Africa should get to grips with how Africans are coming up with solutions to the challenges of life, writes Stephen Ellis
WHITE South Africa spent 40 years doing its best to keep the rest of the continent at arm’s length, but reality finally intruded. Since 1994, South Africa has not only become a democracy, but has joined the Organisation of African Unity and ceased to be the outcast it once was.
So do South Africans like what they find in the rest of Africa, now that they have made friends with it at last? Many South Africans, and not just whites, give a fair impression of thinking that big problems start at the Limpopo: Aids, civil wars, massive corruption and all the rest. Above all, immigrants come from north of the Limpopo. There are plenty of tired clichs about the breakdown of formal government in most of Africa, but, unfortunately, many of them are not just figments of the imagination.
Important things are happening throughout the continent – not all of them bad, by any means. South Africans have to live with these developments, whether they like it or not. The first post-apartheid government could certainly do with a more thoughtful African policy, particularly if it is going to give some substance to Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s remarks about an African renaissance.
But this is not just a problem which can be left to the government. It concerns every South African, since whatever happens north of the border will make itself felt south of it too. Thinking about the rest of Africa makes South Africans nervous.
Let us take Zaire, since it happens to be in the news. That country has about 45- million people, of whom 23-million are economically active. Only 400000 of them have formal jobs in the private sector. There are about 420000 civil servants, but since nobody pays them most of the time, they can hardly be said to have real jobs. The armed forces are somewhere between 65000 and 80000 people, but no one pays them most of the time either. They don’t get paid because Zaire doesn’t really have a government at all, at least not in the way we would normally understand it. Nor do quite a few other African countries, some of them closer to South Africa’s borders than Zaire.
So, are Zaireans all pathetic, starving beggars? Not at all. Zaireans trade, trade, trade, and more than you might imagine they actually thrive on it. Operators on major markets in Zaire are in daily contact, via satellite-telephone, with traders on the massive Zairean market in Brussels. This is the nerve centre for trade with the Zairean communities in Moscow, Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi. There are markets in Kinshasa and Kisangani which, although unofficial, are fully globalised. Marketeers know the latest Antwerp price for diamonds and the exchange rate of dollars, and charge accordingly.
Since formal government has more or less disappeared, people have found other means of getting along together most of the time – which is what governments are really supposed to be for. The leading local businessmen often get together with other local dignitaries – a couple of bishops, perhaps a chief – and together raise the money to pay the local army commander. He can then pay his soldiers, which stops them looting. They may even get to defend the local community against bandits.
While the official government stopped working years ago, there is an unofficial government which does work better than you might expect. This state of affairs is not going to change if Laurent Kabila becomes president of Zaire, since there isn’t a functioning civil service to inherit, and he won’t be able to set one up from scratch.
So one of the biggest problems posed by a country like Zaire is knowing who to talk to about business or diplomacy. If the official government isn’t worthy of the name, and can’t control events outside the capital, or even inside the capital city, then there’s not much point in signing a diplomatic accord or a contract with it. But Zaire is too big to ignore, and there are major business deals to be done there, so a way has to be found to make durable agreements and deals. This is where South Africans need to think hard about how to deal with a place like Zaire. In any case, some typical Zairean solutions to the problems of life also occur in South Africa. But official South Africa sees them as a problem or a threat, most of the time.
This is the way things are being done in Africa, increasingly. There is little serious evidence that the continent is on the verge of solving what the World Bank calls its problems of governance with a few more structural adjustment programmes here and a couple of trained accountants there. The problem goes much deeper than that. Africa, the colonised continent, is at last getting to grips with its deepest historical traditions. Perhaps South Africans need to think about this if they are to feel at ease in the new Africa.
Stephen Ellis is a senior researcher at the African Studies Institute, Leiden University, the Netherlands, and a former editor of Africa Confidential