Black Africa a Decade Later

THE ritual was staged again and again a decade ago. The stadium would fill with cheering Africans. The band would play a tattoo. Schoolchildren would scramble forward to slay papier-mache dragons representing poverty, ignorance and disease. Fireworks would ignite the southern sky. At midnight a throaty cheer of "Uhuru!" (Swahili for "freedom") or "Kwacha!" ("dawn" in Bemba and Nyanja) would shake the ground as the flag of the colonial power was lowered and the colors of the new nation raised.

In all, 17 of Black Africa's 34 countries (see map) marched to independence in 1960, and 13 have followed since. As the continent was swept by a "wind of change," in Harold Macmillan's famous phrase, one former colony after another set out on its own. buoyed by unreasonably high hopes. Few captured the heady mood more eloquently than Julius Nyerere, who marked Tanganyika's independence in 1961 by sending an expedition to plant a flag and a torch atop Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak. "It will shine beyond our borders," said Nyerere, "giving hope where there was despair, love where there was hate, and dignity where before there was only humiliation."

For Tanzania, Nyerere's rechristened nation, and for the rest of the countries that entered the 1960s with such great expectations, the torch has proved a flickering beacon. Some of the dreams of uhuru have been shattered; a very few, such as the founding of the Organization for African Unity in 1963, have been fulfilled. Black Africa is embarking on its second decade of independence with a more realistic outlook and sounder, brighter hopes of genuine progress. But the prediction that the Duke of Gloucester offered to the leaders of Nigeria in 1959 still rings true: "The future may not be easy. You have a heavy task before you."

Uneven Leadership. Since then, civil wars have ravaged two of Black Africa's biggest, most populous and potentially richest nations, the Congo and Nigeria. No fewer than 28 countries have experienced either a coup or a serious disturbance. Ten have been forced to call in foreign troops for help. Last month Guinea was invaded by a 350-man band that may have included Portuguese troops as well as Guinean dissidents.

Some of Africa's failures can be traced to the shortcomings of its leaders. As in most new countries, the first Presidents and Premiers were primarily freedom fighters, with scant experience in statecraft. Still, few nations have leaders more dedicated or imaginative than Tanzania's Nyerere, Niger's Hamani Diori and Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda. Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, like Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie, is an elder statesman who has imposed a degree of stability on his heterogeneous country. Of the soldiers who now rule nine African nations, at least two--Nigeria's Yakubu Gowon and the Congo's Joseph Mobutu--have restored order to their countries after years of chaos.

The casualties among Africa's first generation of leaders have been heavy; Nigeria's Sir Abubakar Balewa, Togo's Sylvanus Olympio, the Congo's Patrice Lumumba were all killed. Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966; Kenya's brilliant young Tom Mboya was assassinated in 1969.

On the other hand, many popinjays have endured. In Lesotho, Prime Minister Chief Leabua Jonathan, 56, engineered a coup last year after he was voted out at the polls. Nyerere's Vice President, Abeid Karume, 64, runs Moslem-dominated Zanzibar as an island unto itself, despite its 1964 incorporation into Tanzania; Karume has instituted "reforms" like forcing 14-and 15-year-old Zanzibar Asian girls to marry black Revolutionary Council members, including himself. In Equatorial (formerly Spanish) Guinea, following a business dispute with a West German pump manufacturer, President Francisco Macias Nguema seized the industrialist's wife last month and released her only two weeks ago for a ransom of $1,600,000.

Desperate Poverty. Despite Africanization programs aimed at placing political and economic power in indigenous hands, a grating degree of dependence on Europe persists. Small wonder: when the Belgians withdrew, the Congo had 13 college graduates; when the French left, Gabon had none. Of 34 Black African airlines, only Ethiopia's uses black captains on its major runs (though several use African pilots on local flights).

British Africa is still very British in some respects. Malawi's Supreme Court is all white. British experts run Zambia's communications systems and serve as advisers to many of Kenya's ministries. Kenya's farming system is basically run by whites, as are Zambia's vital copper mines.

Reliance on whites is even stronger in former French Africa. French con-seillers techniques swarm over Gabon, and as one of them puts it: "We no longer rule, we only advise. But if they don't take our advice--phfft! It's their country." In Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, there are more than twice as many Frenchmen as there were in 1960. Ministerial office suites are constructed with two offices of equal size, one for the minister, the other for his French "seconder." In Niger, as elsewhere, students in the French-controlled schools are required to study the same subjects at the same levels of proficiency as children in Paris. Complains President Diori: "Our schools are programmed for the one student who will go on to university, not for the 999 who should be studying farming."

Economically, Black Africa has fared badly. It has 221 million people, or 8% of the world's population, but only 1% of the world's gross national product. Its per-capita income has increased only 1.5% a year in the past decade, and its share of world exports has declined from 2.6% in 1963 to 2.3% in 1969. Much of its economic malaise can be traced directly to the dizzily fluctuating prices of its export commodities. Copper (94% of Zambia's export and 60% of the Congo's) dropped in value from $1,600 a ton last March to $1,140 in August. Sisal (once Tanzania's leading export) has dropped from $18.16 per 100 Ibs. in 1963 to $6.64 last August. Statistics about Africa are woefully inadequate; economists differ over whether Nigeria's per-capita income is $120 or $80. But the figures underscore the fact that Africa is desperately poor. "Our society," says Diori, "has not yet found the means to guarantee our citizens the minimum needs of life."

In the coming decades, Black Africa may have to rely heavily on itself for economic development. Private investment has always been inadequate, except in exploiting proven natural resources--Nigeria's oil, Zambia's copper, the Congo's minerals. Foreign aid will be harder to get and more expensive to accept than ever. In the face of what they regard as apathy from the West, some African governments have turned to the Communist powers for help. Tanzania and Zambia have begun construction of a 1,161-mile, $450 million railway that is being paid for with an interest-free loan from China; the Western powers declined to help.

Virtual Satellites. Throughout the 1970s, Black Africa's most serious political problem, apart from internal instability, will be its relationship with the white-ruled countries south of the Zambezi River (South Africa and Rhodesia) and with the Portuguese territories. At the time of independence, many Black African leaders predicted that the white regimes would be toppled within five or ten years. Now they know better. Guerrillas have harassed Portuguese Guinea, Mozambique and Angola, but there is no indication that Lisbon is ready to withdraw.

South Africa remains rich and strong, and has made virtual satellites of four small black states that lie near by or within its borders: Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and Malawi. But in the long term, the Africans believe, time and the birth rate are on their side. Rhodesia's population today is black by a ratio of 21 to 1; by the year 2050, it will be 156 to 1.

The ideal of Black African unity seems as remote today as the fall of Pretoria. A few regional organizations--for example, the East African Community, a common market comprising Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda--have been moderately successful. But the African Development Bank, created to finance regional cooperation schemes, has little money to lend because only nine African states have paid up their allotted subscriptions. "What are we supposed to share?" asks the Ivory Coast's President, Felix Houphouet-Boigny. "Each other's poverty?"

Is Black Africa to be despaired of, then? By no means. As TIME Nairobi Correspondent John Blashill notes: "Independence has not brought prosperity, nor even, in many cases, political freedom. But neither has Black Africa collapsed, as the South Africans had forecast and many Belgians, among others, had hoped. Its leaders have become less dogmatic, more realistic about what they can do and how fast. In the long run, their prospects are bright. Africa is rich, salted with minerals, blessed with vast stretches of fertile land. It is underpopulated and underexploited. Properly cultivated, it could feed the world by itself."

Real progress will depend on many complex factors: more efficient farm tools, better nourishment, the conquest of debilitating disease. Most important may be education. As Niger's eloquent President Diori puts it: "What's left after ten years of independence? The need to learn, and the need to be prudent.

We can't all have expressways and airports."

The school population, which has already doubled and even quadrupled in many countries since independence, will continue to grow but will be hampered by limited funds. Tanzania, for instance, announced in 1969 that it would not achieve universal primary education until 1989. More curriculums throughout Africa will aim at producing scientific farmers rather than scholars, and more countries will quit trying to force the process of industrialization and will gear their development to the slow pace of peasant agriculture.

Tribal Rivalries. Even tribalism, that chronic cause of many of the area's ills, may not prove indomitable. To be sure, it was at the root of the Nigerian and Congolese civil wars; it pitted Watutsi against Bahutu in Rwanda and Burundi, Kikuyu against Luo in Kenya, and Somali tribesmen against the armies of Kenya and Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa. Eventually, urbanization --with all its ills--may "cure" the problem by destroying the ties of family and tradition that bind tribes together.

Politically, too, the outlook is per-haps more hopeful than at any other time since the beginning of the 1960s. One-party states have multiplied, partly because the parties were outgrowths of independence movements, and partly because they provided necessary undergirding for fragile governments. Africa now has 26 one-party states. In the future, more and more of them may em- ulate the experiments of Tanzania and Kenya. Both have managed to conduct one-party elections in which as many as 60% of the incumbents were defeated. In November's elections in Tan- zania, Nyerere was reelected, unopposed, to another five-year term, but a dozen members of Parliament and two of his 16 Ministers were beaten.

Artificial Units. Reflecting on Black Africa's first decade of independence, Nyerere told TIME'S James Wilde and Eric Robins: "After independence, we disappointed the Western countries. We did not become what they wanted us to become." But Nyerere pointed out: "These new countries were artificial units, geographical expressions carved on the map by European imperialists. These are the units we have tried to turn into nations. Well, we have achieved our independence; we have achieved maturity. Given those limitations, I think we have done extremely well."

To some, that appraisal may seem unduly optimistic. Yet it is also true that scarcely a century has passed since Arab dhows called regularly along the crystal coastline of Dares Salaam, Julius Nyerere's capital, to carry chained black men into slavery.

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