Talked recently with
a young man originally from Ethiopia but now living in the US. He
keeps up with his native land and was just back from a visit. I
asked him how things were. He said: “It's Africa, you know what
that means, corruption and conflict.” He spoke of the 2005
election and the resulting denial and repression of those he termed
the “winners” and lamented the current situation in which, as he
put it, the third largest ethnic group rules over the rest of the “80
tribes” that live in Ethiopia.
It is easy to see
why someone might see Africa – mired in poverty, corruption and
violence – as a land without much of a future. It's hard to name
one functioning multi-ethnic democracy on the continent. Some
countries have elections but these serve either to anoint those
already in control and holding all the advantages of state power –
official and otherwise – or to simply provide a patina of
legitimacy for autocratic, tribally based rulers and cliques.
African countries remain on the periphery of the global economy. As
such they must earn their living in an environment where rapid
technological change and the built-in advantages of the already
developed core leave them little room for much more than the export
of raw materials and the importation of finished goods. This may
produce some wealth but it runs into the hands of those with the
local monopoly. At best, it may feature as a form of primitive
capital accumulation but even then the trickle down cannot keep up
with rising populations and expectations. It would take an
extraordinary amount of good governance, popular support and patience
for even gradual economic development to lift these countries to the
level of societal well-being basic to sustaining democratic norms,
procedures and results.
History dealt Africa
two cruel blows. The first was the slave traffic. Slavery certainly
existed before the outsiders – European and Arab – brought it to
the continent. But the tremendous demand created especially by the
traffic to the New World magnified the level of violence already
existing among the many native groupings. Slavery also was the entry
point of European expansion into Africa, followed by the exploitation
of natural resources and colonization. This was the second blow, the
carving up of Africa into territorial units that took no regard of
existing tribal patterns and political arrangements. There had been
empires and nascent states before colonization but these were based
on local realities with their own ebb and flow. Once this was
super-ceded by the state boundaries drawn up by the Europeans,
disparate peoples found themselves lumped together inside arbitrarily
chosen fences. After independence – with almost no experience of
political participation or democracy – they were left in the hands
of those willing and able to use identity politics and violence to
seize and hold power. Corruption, poverty and repression within the
framework of tribally-based competition for space – economic and
political – became the norm.
Some
see democracy as the way to move forward. But democracy requires
a level of economic development and political maturity (especially a
willingness to see someone not like yourself win power). In a
context of scarce resources, winner-take-all, tribal politics
democracy is likely either to fail or simply produce further conflict
between winners and losers. It would be nice if some model of
power-sharing might work within federal or confederal arrangements.
But such mechanisms also require an extraordinary degree of tolerance
and political experience to function in a sustained fashion,
especially in the context of economic underdevelopment.
In the history of
Europe, stable states grew from heterogeneous tribes only through the
growth of centralized states imposing a “national” culture and
language. For the future of Africa, it may be necessary for the West
to temper efforts to export “democracy” with an understanding of
its own history. Acting against genocide or gross human rights abuse
is an
international responsibility. But it will also be necessary to
recognize that over the next decades that African states will have to
find their own way of constructing nations within the confines of the
colonial fences left them.
