Bryan Rostron Consider, in the light of Zimbabwe’s election, this report on the political background to the renaissance: “Now, if the interests of the ruling class are at stake, the Constitution is no longer altered, but simply abused, the ballot boxes are falsified, the officials bribed or intimidated.” The economic consequences, meanwhile, are all too familiar to our own circumstances: “The consequences are catastrophic for the broad masses: unemployment as a result of the transfer of interest from agriculture to industrial production, overcrowding of the cities, rising prices and low wages are experienced everywhere.”
The first description, of course, is of the Renaissance in early 16th-century Florence; the second deals with the wider social ramifications throughout Europe. Long ago, in the rebellious spirit of the times, I was banned for six months from Rhodes University and spent the time reading something far more interesting than the official syllabus. The four volumes of The Social History of Art by Arnold Hauser convey an important point: that even great cultural movements do not occur in a vacuum. The European Renaissance produced, after all, not just Michelangelo, but Machiavelli. It saw the rise of capitalism and what today we think of as new: globalisation.
Yet ever since President Thabo Mbeki launched the theme of the “African renaissance”, most of the debate seems to have taken place precisely in such a void. It is a term bandied about, like an advertising jingle, to promote everything from a re-evaluation of African history to the promotion of nuclear power plants. But while there are a lot of good intentions mixed with genuine hopes, it is all to often discussed as if a “renaissance” could take place divorced from the harsh realities of political and economic power. The fact is that a modern global apartheid is in place: a minority, approximately 20% of the world’s population, consumes more than 80% of the world’s resources. They are not about to give this surfeit up, or share it out. Recently in Durban, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel made a plea at the Southern African Economic Summit for the developed nations and organisations like the International Monetary Fund to be more just. “As long as we have selfishness in the world,” he said. “Africa will remain poor.” But asking the developed world to change out of the goodness of its heart is probably as likely to achieve success as the African National Congress, in the first 50 years of its history, moderately petitioning white governments to cease their persecution in the name of decency and fair play. The developed world has Africa in a neck-lock and isn’t just going to let go. There are profits to be made from poverty. In these circumstances, Hauser’s description of the high Renaissance in Europe sounds eerily familiar: “Most men find it more and more difficult to fathom the decisive factors in economic affairs and are less and less able to exert any influence on them. The demands of the market attain a mysterious, but all the more inexorable reality; they hover suspended over men’s heads like a lofty, inescapable power.” One element of the stranglehold on Africa is called, euphemistically, aid. In reality, this is simply another system of transferring money from poor countries to rich countries: for every $1 that comes to poor countries, $1,3 returns to the rich ones. This debt might more honestly be called a bond. But whereas you or I would eventually pay off a bond on our house, however onerous, no such prospect lies ahead for Africa. People go uneducated, starve, even die in order that this debt be repaid. Even so, it just gets bigger. Poor countries simply keep sending money to the rich countries.
Yet arguments for debt reduction are still met with strictures about “free lunches” and “moral hazards”. Such moralising neatly disguises the economic benefits of this burdensome exchange. It is the modern version of the Inquisition: torturing humans for their own good. More well-meaning people, appalled at this inhumane state of affairs, wring their hands and lament: but this is the global economy, there is no alternative. Thus the grotesque discrepancies continue to multiply. According to the London Financial Times: “At the start of the 19th century the ratio of incomes per head between the world’s richest and poorest countries was three to one. By 1900 it was 10 to one. By 2000 it had risen to 60 to one.” The statistics numb you. Last month a World Bank report said that many African countries are worse off than they were in the 1960. This month the World Health Organisation said health levels in some African countries were dropping back to levels not seen in advanced countries since the Middle Ages. Is there truly no alternative? A couple of years ago the United Nation’s annual Human Development Report pointed out that the combined resources of the world’s seven richest men could wipe out global poverty. “Political commitment, not financial resources,” concluded the UN report, “is the real obstacle to poverty eradication.” This commitment can only begin in the poorer countries, many of whose leaders and elites are the spoiled children of the revolution, as Franz Fannon called them. If they cannot demonstrate trust in their own citizens, why should anyone else? Perhaps Mbeki could begin by circulating the pithy telegram (copy to Robert Mugabe) sent by playwright Bertolt Brecht to the East German politburo after it suppressed a workers’ rebellion: “If you do not have confidence in the people, suggest you elect a new one.” Then, perhaps, we could confront the global problem. Africa’s dilemma, the current dazed acceptance of free-market fundamentalism, was also described by Hauser: “And was not the whole capitalistic economy in the long run simply an illustration of Machiavelli’s theory? Did it not show clearly that reality was obedient to its own stern necessity, that all mere ideas were powerless when faced with its relentless logic, and that the only alternative was to submit to or be destroyed by it?” An African renaissance in these conditions? Not, I fear, while we are still living in the global Dark Ages.