Africa since Independence

Colin Legum

Description

Distilled wisdom on what has happened on the African continent in the last fifty years by a well-known journalist and scholar.

Activist, scholar, and political journalist Colin Legum assesses Africa's experience since independence and offers judicious predictions about the continent's future. Covering 50 years of sweeping change, this provocative and insightful book examines Africa's struggle for democracy, mounting economic problems, and AIDS.

"The Romantic Period, 1939-1970"
"The Period of Disillusionment, 1970-1985"
"The Period of Realism, 1988-?"
"A Period of Renaissance?"

Sujets

• African Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• África
• General officer
• Politics
• History of Africa
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 novembre 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253027689
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Africa since Independence
Africa since Independence
Colin Legum
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
T HIS BOOK IS A PUBLICATION OF I NDIANA U NIVERSITY P RESS 601 N ORTH M ORTON S TREET B LOOMINGTON IN 47404-3797 USA
HTTP://WWW.INDIANA.EDU/~IUPRESS
T ELEPHONE ORDERS 800-842-6796 F AX ORDERS 812-855-7931 O RDERS BY E-MAIL [e-mail] © 1999 BY C OLIN L EGUM
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T HE PAPER USED IN THIS PUBLICATION MEETS THE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF A MERICAN NATIONAL S TANDARD FOR I NFORMATION S CIENCES —P ERMANENCE OF P APER FOR P RINTED L IBRARY M ATERIALS , ANSI Z39.48-1984.
M ANUFACTURED IN THE U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA .
L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA
L EGUM , C OLIN
A FRICA SINCE I NDEPENDENCE / C OLIN L EGUM
P.      CM .
I NCLUDES INDEX .
ISBN 0-253-33588-4 ( ALK. PAPER ).—ISBN 0-254-21334-7 ( PBK. : ALK. PAPER )
1. A FRICA —P OLITICS AND G OVERNMENT —1960–1. T ITLE
DT30.5.L44 1999
960.3’2—DC21                             99-29505
1   2   3   4   5   04   03   02   01   00   99
For my wife Margaret
My sternest and most valued critic
Contents
Acknowledgments
I. THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, 1939–1970
II. THE PERIOD OF DISILLUSIONMENT, 1970–1985
III. THE PERIOD OF REALISM, 1988-?
IV. A PERIOD OF RENAISSANCE?
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
This book had its origins in a series of lectures I wasprivileged to give in 1997 as a Distinguished Fellow of theInstitute for Advanced Studies at Indiana University inBloomington.
My wife and I are grateful to Dave and Ruth Albrightfor their help in organizing our Fellowships, and to theInstitute's remarkable director, Henry Remak.
February 1988
KOB Cottage
Kalk Bay
Cape Peninsula 7975
South Africa
Africa since Independence
ONE
 
The Romantic Period, 1939–1970

Oh sons and daughters of Africa,
Flesh of the sun, and flesh of the sky,
Let us make Africa the tree of life.
Let all of us unite and toil together
To give the best we have to Africa
The cradle of mankind and fount of culture.
Pride and hope at break of dawn
—Last two verses of the Anthem of the
Organization of African Unity
Africa has passed through three phases in its learning cyclesince independence: the innocence of inexperience and theeuphoria of the early romantic period; the disillusioningexperience of adolescents (in this case, young nations)growing up in an adverse environment; and, finally, comingto terms with reality.
The modern period of African romanticism coveredroughly a quarter of a century from the end of World WarII to the early 1970s. In the West, no less than in Africa, itwas a time of optimism and high hopes for the renaissanceof a continent.
At the end of the war, there were only four independent states in the continent—Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and SouthAfrica; over the next fifteen years the number almost quadrupled,but the hardest part of the decolonization process stilllay ahead—in Algeria, South West Africa, Rhodesia, the Portugesecolonies, and South Africa. Even though romanticismbegan to lose some of its optimistic innocence after the mid-1960s,confidence was still growing in the freshly sovereignstates that their demand of “Africa for Africans” was irresistible.Economic growth, averaging between 6 and 8 percent,promised a brighter future.
What is the Africa we are talking about? Is it the Africaseen through Western eyes—a huge underdeveloped landmass that is home to 650 million people (11 percent of theworld’s population); a continent which has slid into economicruin, corruption, despotic rule, coups, and civilwars? Or is it a continent seen through African eyes? If so,which African eyes? To read about Africa as described byAfrican poets and intellectuals is not to read about the conditionof one continent, but rather the conditions of manysocieties at different levels of political, social, and economicdevelopment. Allowing for errors arising from generalization,there are broadly speaking only two attitudes aboutwhich it can be said there is an African consensus—tworefrains which I hear wherever I travel in the continent. Thefirst is that at the core of independence is the assertion ofdignity of a Black people which was relentlessly assaultedby colonialism, but never destroyed, not even by the worstform of colonialism—slavery; the second refrain is that theWest is to blame for the poverty and fragmented disarrayfound in Africa. Nevertheless, attitudes to the West arestrongly ambivalent, expressing both admiration of Westernachievements and hatred of its hypocrisies and Eurocentricselfishness; this ambivalence is matched by Westernattitudes and feeling toward Africa and Black people ingeneral. The Indian poet Tagore traced the source of this ambivalence to the civilization of the West—the upholdingof dignity and of human relationships had no place in theadministration of its colonies. Tagore’s explanation wasreduced to a brilliant single Shavian sentence by Nehruwhen asked what he thought of Western civilization. “Itwould,” he replied, “be a good idea.”
To understand contemporary attitudes in postcolonialAfrica and the West it is useful, indeed necessary, to keepin mind this love-hate relationship between the formerlycolonized people and the colonizers; the former believethere has been no proper recognition of, nor retributionfor, the injury of colonialism; while the latter feel let downbecause Africa has not lived up to the expectations ofEuropean liberal values; and, of course, Western racialists—anancient and self-perpetuating breed—see all theirown prejudices about Black people justified by the selectiveheadlines provided for them by the myopia of a mediasociety which traps them in non-thinking stereotypes suchas presenting Africa as “a basket-case continent.”
Few writers, in my experience, express more clearly—and more elegantly—an African view of the continentthan does K. Anthony Appiah—himself the son of a cleverif mercurial Ghanaian politician, and grandson of a formerBritish Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps:
We are speaking of a continent of hundreds of millionsof people. We are talking of hundreds of languages.A thousand years of Christianity before it was establishedin most of Europe, and before Islam was settled in Egypt.African Kingships were millennia old. Africans worshippedthousands of gods whose posterity remains inshrines all over the continent. Long before Charlemagnewas crowned, the ancestors of San people in SouthernAfrica were living in nomadic communities free of rulers.Female regiments in Dahomey (now Benin), matrilinealkingdoms in Asanti, and patrilineal kingdoms in Yoruba.Religious diversity, political diversity, diversity in clothing and cuisine—Africa has enough diversity to satisfythe wildest “multiculturist.” 1
Except for the Dahomeyan female regiments and thematrilineal kingdoms of Asanti, this description of a continentrich in cultural diversity survives to this day, and isreflected in the characteristics of political parties and societiespeculiar to each of Africa’s fifty-three states. To speakof Africa as a single continent is accurate only in geographicterms. In other aspects, Africa is even more diverse than Europeor Asia.
In earlier times, Westerners drew a dividing line betweenthe Islamic states of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, andEgypt, and the largely non-Islamic states of Sub-SaharanAfrica. This dividing line between what the French called Afrique blanc and Afrique noire makes no more politicalsense than the Mason-Dixon line. There are, today, almostas many Black Muslims living around the southern andeastern perimeter of the Sahara as there are to its north.
Except for four hundred years of Portuguese rule overtheir few territorial “possessions,” and three centuries ofDutch and English rule in the Cape, colonialism had shallowhistoric roots in the continent. Most colonialism inAfrica began just over a century before its end. Long beforecolonialism, much of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was devastatedby the slave trade, first with the Arab states of theMiddle East, and later with the colonizers of the NewWorld. (There is a tendency, today, to speak only of the slaveryin the New World.) Slavery stretched from the Sudanand Mauritania in the north to the Eastern Congo andMalawi in the south, and along both the Indian Ocean andAtlantic coasts. In his Biography of the Continent (Knopf1999), the historian John Reader calculates that withoutthe slave trade, Africa’s population might have been anythingfrom 40 to 100 percent larger in 1850 than theactual figure of 50–60 million. I know of no adequate study into the effects of the slave trade on African minds andsociety. Even today it remains embedded in the Africanpsyche, sometimes expressed as anti-European or anti-Arabattitudes and feelings, and sometimes in