It is hard to reconcile the current upheaval on the African continent with the optimistic scenario of imminent revival put about by the Clinton administration and its South African variant, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s notion of an African renaissance.
Angola is poised to go back to war. Hutu refugees are being slaughtered in Eastern Congo and herded into concentration camps in Burundi. Teenagers wielding machine-guns are battling for control of the streets of Freetown and Brazzaville. In Kenya, university students are facing up to baton-wielding riot police who could have learnt their
skull-crushing skills from Rooi Rus Swanepoel. Nigeria is stable, but at a cost to its people that hardly bears thinking about.
It would be misplaced to build false hopes of a better Africa. The continent needs to be understood on its own terms and not through the tinted spectacles of Afro-optimism or Afro-pessimism.
An enormously significant historical process, the centrepiece of which was the overthrow of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, is under way in southern, central and east Africa. The end is not clear, but the disturbances in Congo Brazzaville, Angola and Kenya are part of its knock-on effect.
There is cause for cheer beyond the appearance of anarchy, because dictatorship, corruption, foreign proxies and oppression are under attack. If the demise of Mobutu could be accompanied by that of Daniel arap Moi and Jonas Savimbi, then 1997 would be a great year for Africa.
But there is no room for Polyannas on this continent. At the heart of the Great Lakes region, the bloodletting between Hutus and Tutsis will take more than a lifetime to resolve; failed states are the order of the day in Africa, creating a need to reinvent governments to at least provide health care, education and security.
The millions of young marginalised people without jobs, the continued imposition of false and restrictive boundaries carved out by colonial powers, and foreign fortune seekers with private armies whose designs on Africa’s mineral wealth are unconstrained by morality, all threaten the stability of Africa.
As much of Asia, North America and Europe surge into the hi-tech world of the 21st century, will Africa remain trapped in backwardness and poverty?
To answer that one has to look beyond structural adjustment and jungle wars, to the growing informal economy where most of Africa’s people energetically go about their business.
Africa should not be forced to emulate the regimented rice-paddy and sweatshop
cultures of the Asian tigers. It should not be compared to the West where most people share, as a matter of right, advantages of life that Africans would never dream of. It is in the resilience and inventiveness of ordinary people and their ability to thrive and build out of hardship that Africa, having survived the optimists, can yet prove the pessimists wrong as well.