To paraphrase from a character in one of Toni Morrison’s great novels: “The trouble with these people is that they just don’t know when to stop.”
OK, I admit it, I’m still smarting. Sitting in the centre of the African continent, staring out at its myriad wonders, I find myself still smouldering like the magnificently mysterious Mount Cameroon, ready to explode. For why?
A recent edition of The Economist magazine led with a cover story entitled “Hopeless Africa”. It was another example of the Western media going out of its way to trash the image of the continent, to seek to sustain the notion that Africa will remain the basket case that it has always been in the Western imagination.
Yes, there is hideous civil war raging in Sierra Leone; the Democratic Republic of Congo remains an intractable mire of war, political intrigue and financial corruption; Ethiopia and Eritrea are involved in a mortal combat of twin brothers; Aids casts its lethal and unexplainable shadow from north to south; illiteracy is growing, children face a bleak future.
And yet, this is not the only story out of Africa. There are other, equally important stories, stories that are seldom told, about the sheer exuberance and variety of the place. How can there be one image of Africa?
And yet, in spite of the schoolyard chant that says “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me”, a bad image, when carefully placed, is hard to shake off. Thus readers of The Economist, sitting thousands of miles away from the continent in question, would have swallowed the whole thing, hook line and sinker, when that noble rag made so bold as to say:
“Africa was weak before the Europeans touched its coasts. Nature is not kind to it. This may be the birthplace of mankind, but it is hardly surprising that humans sought other continents to live in …”
Three quick lies in three quick sentences. But their message hits home, nevertheless. Potential foreign investors are told what they want to hear, and decide on the basis of nothing more than hearsay to stay away.
A chain reaction follows. Continually destabilised economically, Africa finds it hard to stabilise politically. Huge numbers of its best-qualified citizens choose to join the brain-and-body drain and leave “hopeless Africa” forever – joining the rest of those (supposedly “sensible”) “humans [who] sought other continents to live on”. The lie becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But what does one actually perceive on the ground?
Take the Congo. On the surface, and all too terribly, a basket case living through an endless and meaningless series of civil wars, with no infrastructure worth speaking of 40 years after independence from the Belgians, and so on. And yet, people are living there. The land is wide, rich and fertile. The marketplace culture is alive and kicking. If the ordinary people were allowed to live in peace, they would be able to demonstrate their political sophistication and their ability to uplift and govern themselves.
Far from The Economist’s view that “nature is not kind to it”, the Congo is testimony to the fact that Africa’s natural riches are part of its fatal problem. Everyone greedily wants a share.
Far from all intelligent life forms choosing to leave it (although there are hundreds of thousands of refugees and political and economic exiles), Africa, on the contrary, as well as being abundantly populated in the most fertile of its regions, is also still being endlessly invaded from other continents. This invasion – from Britain, from Lithuania, from the Americas, from China, from Israel, from New Zealand or wherever else there is a class of buccaneer missionaries to sample from – comes, as it has always come, for the twin purposes of rape and pillage. Cobalt, wood, gold, aluminium, copper, oil, rubber, platinum, diamonds – you name it, Africa’s got it, and someone else wants it. Wildlife (both for viewing and hunting) exists in unparalleled abundance. And then there is the endless variety of its people, with their incomprehensible, fascinating, age-old, yet adaptable, cultures. Africa is still, in Western eyes, and in spite of all the deliberate disinformation, “God’s own country”.
“Hopeless Africa” is rather an image of hopelessly passionate romance. If Africa was really a hopeless case, if it was really nothing more than Heart of Darkness and “The White Man’s Grave”, would there still be so many of the latter species, in all shapes and genders, moving so tenaciously through its heartland? From King Solomon’s Mines to The Snows of Kilimanjaro, from Out of Africa, the film Chocolat, and whatever is coming out next, the West’s romance with Africa is a gripping and eternal part of its secret personality. And like a secret lover, it has to be denounced to its very face to keep the secret safe.
What else does one perceive from down here on the ground?
That Africa is not an entity divorced from the history of the rest of the world. Nor is it remote from any aspect of what the world is today. Not only is the African image deeply embedded in many of the accepted symbols of world culture: vast arrays of the cultures of the world are part of the African image – while not contradicting the existence of a distinct African identity.
Africa, like the rest of the world, is capable of being both ancient and modern at the same time.
Africa is like the rest of the world. Except that it is Africa.
We must not avoid being critical of our own continent. But we must also try to keep a clear eye on what the continent is really like, and be clear that it is not, by a long stretch of the imagination, a hopeless case.