Text 1303, 123 rader
Skriven 2004-08-14 07:41:14 av Stephen Hayes (5:7106/20.0)
Ärende: Generalisations about Africa
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THE SHACKLED CONTINENT: AFRICA'S PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. by Robert Guest (Pan
Macmillan) R142

reviewed by Bryan Rostron, "The Sunday Independent", 8 August 2004.

Europeans, despite conquering almost the entire world, remain primitive people:
acquisitive, materialistic; so greedy that many die of overeating. They are
puzzlingly cruel, having developed the art of war to industrial efficiency in
order to slaughter each other in unimaginable millions in two world wars. They
still invade distant countries...

Offensive? If so, why do so many western politicians and writers persist with
sweeping lumpen generalisations about "Africa" and "Africans" that are as
helpful as the above lampoon? Even the fastidiously conservative writer VS
Naipaul once remarked how extraordinary it was that Europeans, for all they
took, never thought they could learn anything from Africa. Such swaggering
conceit persists.

_The shackled continent's_ sub-title promises "Africa's past, present and
future", yet all we get of the past is the repeated admonition: quit
bellyaching
about colonialism and apartheid and get on with it. Only one paragraph is
devoted to the Congo's his- tory, for example. Author Robert Guest says it has
a
long history of being "badly governed" and that Leopold II's men enslaved
locals
and "sliced off slackers' hands". That's a glibly callous way of avoiding the
psychotic viciousness of the Belgian occupation.

An estimated 10 million died between 1880 and 1920, with the world's leading
expert on the subject, Professor Jan Vansina of Wisconsin University,
estimating
that the Congo's population was cut by at least half". Try Guest's summation of
that in relation to the Holocaust and see how it sounds. (Hannah Arendt, coiner
of the famed phrase "the banality of evil", believed -- less famously --that
the
"wild murdering" of European imperialism was a precursor to the later
totalitarian madness in Europe).

Guest's Congo paragraph ends by saying President Mobutu Sese Seko "looted the
state into paralysis", without mentioning he was massively bankrolled by the
West, led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, with an
average
of $542 million a year between 1985 and 1994, or that a former director of
African affairs in the US National Security Council estimates that Mobutu was
given $550 million during his first decade by the CIA.

If you are going to lambaste, quite rightly, many African leaders for their
dictatorial profligate misrule, while extolling the role of the World Bank and
the IMF, it seems a tad dishonest to slide over such episodes. But that, no
matter how recent, is the past... and Guest writes that African intellectuals
are "consumed by the past" (identifying Thabo Mbeki as one of the loudest
"grievance-shouters"), comparing this with South Korea, which has not been
"held
back" despite the fact that "some Koreans have still not forgiven Japan for
invading Korea in 1592".

Perhaps only a clever young Englishman educated at Oxford could be so casually
offensive. How often the rich, powerful and usual- ly expensively educated pay
lip service to the importance of his- tory, readily repeating cliches like
"never again" and "we must never forget", then as soon as their own interests
are threatened snap: oh, get a life!

So why should we pay a second's more attention to anyone claiming to write
about
Africa's past who could lobotomise Africa's sub- jugations, from Leopold's
Congo
atrocities (not to go too far back) right up to apartheid, as though they
happened in 1592? One reason is that Robert Guest is the Africa editor of "The
Economist", and another is that his book is currently number 12 on South
Africa's top-seller list -- so it is clearly telling some people something they
want to hear. What could this be?

Aside from erasing the past, this book doesn't tell us much about the future
either. There's nothing to compare with the recent "Africa 2025: What possible
future for sub-Saharan Africa?" containing scenarios ranging from the
[pessimistic to the optimistic, but packed with insight, research and
alternatives, all lacking in Guest's hackneyed effort.

He tells us that the future is dire unless Africa bows to the crudest of
current
neoliberal economic orthodoxies: just privatise and get with the global
programme. There is no subtlety or nuance here. He proposes economic medicines,
as prescribed by both the IMF and the World Bank, that have failed again and
again.

You might have expected the Africa editor of "The Economist" at least to
buttress his views by rebutting the views of, say, for- mer World Bank chief
economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who accuses the IMF of being
trapped in what he calls "free-market fundamentalism".

Guest admits rich countries "unfortunately" can be protectionist, but his
message, the maxim of all abusive relationships, is simple: don't do as I do,
do
as I say.

There is much hideously wrong in Africa, millions leading desperately
impoverished lives. But you won't find any fresh insights here  -- just a
pedestrian jog through the horror trouble-spots and a bludgeoning unqualified
free-market remedy.

If South Africa followed his raw free-market prescriptions, the ANC would
probably be faced with a genuine popular uprising.

Amusing as it is to imagine The Economist's correspondent as some kind of
Trotskyist provocateur, the question is: why are so many here reading this
glib,
ahistorical book? The answer must be that it is telling them exactly what they
want to hear -- and that, like the tyrants and kleptocrats Guest denounces,
such
readers do not want to rethink failed ideas or policies.

It's the mirror image of all Guest denounces: arrogant, blinkered,
self-righteous. Which goes to show, despite the air miles, that travel doesn't
always broaden the mind.

 
Steve Hayes
  WWW: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
  E-mail: hayesmstw@hotmail.com - If it doesn't work, see webpage. 

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