Africa: the Scramble for Survival

By LANCE MORROW

The Great Rift Valley can be seen from space. It shears down the eastern shoulder of Africa, a vast geological gash, one of the mysteries of the continent's power. Human life began in the Rift, as if it were gleaming up through a crack in the world.

Africa has a genius for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable.

Africa -- sub-Saharan Africa, at least -- has begun to look like an immense illustration of chaos theory, although some hope is forming on the margins. Much of the continent has turned into a battleground of contending dooms: AIDS and overpopulation, poverty, starvation, illiteracy, corruption, social breakdown, vanishing resources, overcrowded cities, drought, war and the homelessness of war's refugees. Africa has become the basket case of the planet, the "Third World of the Third World," a vast continent in free fall.

In the face of political instability and disintegrating roads, airports and telephone networks, and other disincentives, investors from Europe, America and Japan are withdrawing from sub-Saharan Africa and looking elsewhere; Africans too are pulling out their money. Why risk expropriation or failure in a continent with a weakness for one-party kleptocracy, where drainage by corruption often equals or exceeds the legitimate intake?

Cynics in Kenya refer to President Daniel arap Moi's mining interests as "That's mine! That's mine! And that's mine! . . ." Expatriate businessmen estimate that wealthy Nigerians have enough money in personal deposits abroad to pay off the country's entire foreign debt, more than $36 billion. Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko has a personal fortune that has been estimated from $4 billion to $6 billion, not far below the level of the country's external debt. He has isolated himself from his people -- and from gathering political unrest -- aboard a luxury yacht that cruises the Zaire River.

If it is to recover, Africa in the coming years will need all its mystical powers of resilience. AIDS is devastating the continent's population. It has hit as hard among the cosmopolitan, educated elite as among the villagers, a fact that threatens continuing development. If the rate of infection continues to increase, the effect could be like that of World War I upon the youth of Britain, France and Germany. Yet in the strange arithmetic of apocalypse, aids will not serve as an ultimate check on over-population. According to World Bank projections, sub-Saharan Africa's population will rise from 548 million today to 2.9 billion by the year 2050. The huge increase in mouths to be fed threatens to swamp any foreseeable economic growth and force living standards ever downward.

There are 160 countries on the United Nations' annual development index, a measure of comparative economic and political progress: 32 of the lowest 40 are in Africa. Between 1960 and 1989, Africa's share of the world's gross national product dropped from 1.9% to 1.2%. Since 1980, sub-Saharan Africa's external debt has tripled to about $174 billion.

For decades, Africa could count on the cold war as an economic resource. The U.S. and the former Soviet Union muscled each other through African proxies, pouring in money to prop up pro-Western or pro-Communist surrogates. Now the big powers' priorities have gone elsewhere. Russia's most prominent expert on African economies, Sergei Shatalov, devotes his attention to his own country's debt problems. Europe's available investment capital is being diverted to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states.

Americans are thinking more about their own problems as well. Says Herman Cohen, the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs: "What the Africans really have to worry about is not competition for our resources from the former Soviet Union but from Los Angeles and the Third World that lives in the U.S."

Business investors make hard calculations. Companies building plants to take advantage of cheap labor, an African plus, look for other assets as well: a reliable infrastructure, basic security and some hope for good returns. Capital and operating costs in African countries are 50% to 100% higher than in South Asia, where the return on investment is nine times as great; 25 years ago, the regions were even.

The external world's interest in Africa threatens to become merely charitable -- a matter of humanitarianism, a moral test for the West. Should the wealthy nations allow Africa to drift further and further into the margins? Says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution: "I don't think we could live with ourselves, or would want to, if we sat by while millions of people of a different color are condemned to misery and death."

But even doom has nuances, and like Africa it has a thousand layers of meaning. The "margin" of one thing is also the center of something else. Africa has its own "centers," its resources of vitality and resilience. It operates by its own inner dynamics and metaphysics. Africa looks hopeless, but it is not. In many ways the continent is headed in the right direction for the first time in centuries. Real changes for the better are occurring. Africa is evolving African solutions.

The continent's inner rhythms of development were shattered 400 years ago by the intrusion of Europeans, who brought in alien controls, boundaries and forms of government. But for the first time since 1444, when the Portuguese sailed into the "land of the blacks" to establish slaving forts, Africa is mostly free from outside interference. Despots are falling; here and there, democracy precariously takes hold. Improvised alternative economies flourish.

The continent remains connected to its powerful and -- to outsiders -- mysterious genius. Africa is different, still an inchoate self. There is a Europe, with its shared history, shared culture, shared economies -- all . accomplished the hard way, over many centuries. There is not -- yet -- an Africa of defined, stable boundaries and economies, not yet a sense of shared destiny.

Jung once wrote, "Different people inhabit different centuries." Something in the African clock of development got smashed when Europe broke into the continent. And when the colonialists pulled out, they left the economic, political and cultural infrastructure reconfigured in such a way that the new countries served Europe better than they served one another. This result was not necessarily intentional but was profoundly damaging nonetheless. Robert Ruark touched on the cultural destruction in his novel Something of Value: "If you change a man's way of life, you had better have something of value with which to replace it."

Who knows what Africa would have become had it been left alone? In any case, Africa today is changeable and still shattering into new configurations. There is now a Burkina Faso, an Ivory Coast, a Kenya, a Nigeria, but the nation- state has been an imposition from the West, and a sometime thing. Once there was a Liberia (founded in the early 19th century by freed American slaves); now Liberia is splintered in feudal fashion. There are two Sudans, each at war with the other.

The nation-states were dictated more by a European cartography of power than by any internal dynamic of allegiances. What is often missing is a social contract between the governing and the governed. In fact, millions of Africans have found that their economic energy, their sanity and even their survival depend on how they succeed in outmaneuvering the state.

Zambia, called Northern Rhodesia in its colonial incarnation, has begun to work hard in forming a social contract with its people. The country's story is a synopsis of some of the things that have gone wrong -- and something of an object lesson.

At the time of its independence from Britain in 1964, Zambia was the richest black country in Africa south of the Sahara. It had $1.1 billion in foreign reserves, plus the world's second largest copper-mining industry. It also had emeralds, other gemstones and immense fertile areas. It had the potential to become southern Africa's breadbasket, and President Kenneth Kaunda promised every Zambian a pint of milk and an egg a day by 1970.

Arriving in Lusaka today, a visitor might think Zambia is a country emerging from war. Stretches of road in the capital look as if they have been under mortar bombardment. Buildings are dilapidated, vehicles rattletrap. Thousands live in tin-shelter shantytowns. Unemployment and crime are running high. Zambia has become one of the poorest nations anywhere, with one of the world's highest per capita foreign debts -- nearly $1,000 for each of its 8 million people; average annual income per person is less than $290. As in many African countries, a small layer of extremely wealthy people flourishes above the impoverished mass.

Kaunda ruled for 27 years, then gambled on elections last year and lost. When the Movement for Multiparty Democracy government took over last November, its members were stunned by the decay and confusion they found. Morale among civil servants was abysmal, corruption pandemic. The new Minister of Agriculture found his office building vandalized; employees had stolen not only the light bulbs but also the lighting fixtures.

What happened to Zambia? Complex things, most of them bad. Kaunda took some principled stands against Ian Smith's white-dominated Rhodesia, which later became Zimbabwe, and against South Africa, but these acts vastly increased the cost of transporting Zambia's copper. In 1968 Kaunda announced the nationalization of 20 foreign companies; in 1969 he began a takeover of the copper industry. Nationalization undermined the confidence of private companies and discouraged foreign investment.

Assistant Secretary of State Cohen argues that African independence leaders were often close to European left wingers, "who implemented in Africa the biggest socialist fantasies that they weren't able to implement in their own countries -- mainly government ownership of everything and government engineering of the economy at every level." Here formed a destructive paradigm: the state came to own and manage 80% of the formal economy. Senior managers were appointed for political reasons, not for competence; the enterprises, incompetently run, lost money. Tribalism, provincialism and nepotism flourished and led to overemployment -- along with resentment and low morale. Kaunda, like other African leaders, used the bloated public sector to keep politicians happy and to balance rival tribes.

Then the arrangement began to collapse. In the early '70s OPEC multiplied the price of oil severalfold, and world copper prices tumbled -- a disaster for Zambia, since copper exports had never accounted for less than 90% of foreign exchange earnings. Foreign debt began to mount. In the end, copper production dropped from 700,000 tons at independence to less than 450,000 tons today, partly because of serious underinvestment; equipment is old and inefficient.

The Kaunda regime, for political reasons, neglected to diversify, especially to encourage agriculture. Today, with only 5% of its arable land cultivated, Zambia is still considered one of the world's few real farming frontiers. But to stay in power and appease the urban masses, Kaunda kept food prices low, thereby encouraging rural people to come to the towns while discouraging those who remained in the countryside from growing crops for sale. Result: Lusaka's population has increased tenfold to 1.2 million since independence.

In the Ivory Coast the surface is much different. For years it was one of Africa's success stories, an exception, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny's French-veneered miracle.

Step off a plane at Abidjan's international airport into the liquid heat of an African morning, and the veneer still seems to be there. An advertisement framed in a distinctive aluminum-and-glass case beckons: BENSON & HEDGES. decouvrez l'or. The two hands languidly reaching for a cigarette in the ad are white.

It is a glimpse of a country caught between Europe and Africa, with a certain dead-end, alienated aping of French elites, something that does not work anymore -- if it ever did. The Ivory Coast is still charming and agreeable, with an endearing -- to foreigners -- Frenchness. Almost everyone speaks French in Abidjan. Paris has Le Drugstore; so does Abidjan, along with a cafe named La Rotonde and the Charles de Gaulle Bridge.

But the Gallic lamina is thin. The Ivory Coast's population, 13 million, consists of 80 ethnic groups, each of which speaks a different dialect. The miracle country is growing somewhat threadbare. Throughout most of the 1970s, the Ivory Coast enjoyed annual economic-growth rates of 6% to 7%, the most vibrant in former French West Africa. The trend has reversed since coffee and cocoa prices collapsed in the 1980s. High oil prices mean a gallon of gasoline sells at $5. From 1986 to 1989, export earnings dropped from $3.2 billion to $2.5 billion, while costs continued to rise. Total debt, $12 billion, rose from 37% of gross domestic product in 1979 to 130% in 1991, effectively crowding out the private sector's ability to tap into domestic credit sources. "They mortgaged their soul to the West," says a diplomat. Now, with an integrated European market about to become reality, the attention of French businessmen is being distracted away from Africa. And a unified European Community may force Paris to adopt a Europe-first policy, denying the Ivory Coast its privileged position within France.

Billboards picturing Houphouet-Boigny, 86, are everywhere. They show Le Vieux in a charcoal-gray leisure suit surrounded by enthusiastic young Ivory Coasters, the camera angle chosen to make the tiny President look as tall as everyone else. Houphouet is regarded as a master politician. Says a Western diplomat: "When the Ivory Coast won a regional soccer game, everyone was convinced it was because Houphouet managed to buy off the other teams. They feel he is capable of anything."

But Le Vieux, many Ivory Coasters believe, is surrounded by corrupt advisers. Although his policies helped make the country richer than its neighbors, he also stripped his government of credible economic alternatives and virtually guaranteed that the politicians who come after him will not be able to sustain the prosperity.

One symbol of the Ivory Coast's profound cultural disjunction is a huge edifice that rises from flat green fields at Yamoussoukro, Houphouet's native village: the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, which cost some $175 million, a gesture of lifeless grandiosity. Amid the grazing goats and the lagoons, the basilica looks like an ill-shapen mushroom, massive from a distance and strangely sterile up close. Ismail Serageldin, director of the technical department at the World Bank, observed during a recent Cairo lecture dealing with culture shock that there were "certain symbols of a society dissociated from its own people." The most spectacular of all, said Serageldin, "may be the basilica in the Ivory Coast. In all the mosaics, the only black person is the portrait of the President." Yet a young local woman asks a Westerner, "Do you think a poor country like this shouldn't have the right to something that grand?"

Houphouet-Boigny is old. Forty-three percent of his country's population is age 15 or younger, and most are uneducated. Last year university students rioted, and an elite military assault team attacked their dormitories. The army sees the students as pampered rich kids. Class differences are rising. The future may belong to the educated young -- or it could be dictated by the embittered, uneducated masses from which the army and the gendarmerie draw their recruits. As elsewhere in Africa, there are two deadly races: economic growth against population, and basic education against ignorance.

There was much optimism in Africa in the 1970s, in the first full decade or two after the granting of independence. Africa had its Golconda of commodities -- cocoa, coffee, copper and palm oil -- and their prices were high. Africans borrowed against those prices; the world happily lent. Unlike other countries now heavily indebted, African nations owe the bulk of their debt to First World governments, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank rather than to commercial banks and other private creditors.

The cheerleading slogan for Africa, coined by Tanzania's Julius Nyerere shortly after his country won its independence, was "We Must Run While They Walk." It caught the mood of euphoria and ambition, the dash of social heroism. Now the sense of heroic hope is mostly gone. Vast stretches of Africa are in worse shape than when they became independent. People routinely live at subsistence levels. Says Denys Lawrie, a mining consultant who works in West Africa: "Africans have wasted 20 years." The world's attention has gone elsewhere, and African leaders know their rations of aid will be smaller.

What is the danger if the industrialized world withdraws all help? Senegalese President Abdou Diouf has warned that allowing Africa to fall apart could lead to a population surge toward Europe and the U.S. Perhaps. On the other hand, neglecting Africa carries no immediate, urgent threat to the rest of the world. Black Africa has no nuclear powers. Why pour in more money to be misspent or rerouted to private Swiss accounts?

Perhaps in reaction, a new sense of realism has become the vogue in Africa, and the slogan for the continent's chastened '90s might be "Learn to Walk Before You Try to Run." In 1989 the World Bank issued a landmark report titled Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. It warned that if Africa's slide into underdevelopment continued, some countries would soon find themselves in worse poverty than the most stricken Asian lands in 1900.

The assessment marked the end of the era of Mau-Mauing Westerners into a chic guilt. The World Bank, the IMF and the so-called donor countries made it clear they wanted to wean African countries from thinking of aid as a permanent fact of life. Part of the trend, especially in West Africa, has been to move African executives trained at the World Bank into key decision-making posts within national governments. The Ivory Coast's Prime Minister, Alassane Ouattara, for example, worked for the IMF for nearly two decades before taking a post at home.

The World Bank report looked at the African regression: modest development after independence in the '60s, stagnation in the '70s, decline in the '80s. Factors such as drought and the oil crisis obviously played a role. But the principal cause of the continent's wasting disease was seen as a fundamentally wrong approach to economics. Instead of developing and diversifying agriculture, most African countries tried, often ineptly or corruptly, to industrialize at a time when much of the world was already on its way into the postindustrial age. African industrial products never had a chance to compete in a high-tech world. Farmers who could not overcome unrealistic price controls, or simple neglect, moved into overcrowded cities. That meant enormous quantities of food had to be imported and paid for in hard currency.

Ingenious capital schemes were concocted to finance new projects. Socialized, centrally directed economies -- dressed up in ideological pretensions and encouraged by guilt-ridden sympathizers in the First World -- enabled Africa's traditional grafters to operate on an industrial scale.

The World Bank's Serageldin draws a fascinating graph. The vertical y line represents bonding -- quite literally the ties that bind a society together. The horizontal x axis represents options and opportunities -- freedom. Each society and each individual must make a trade-off, represented by an oblique line that angles up between the x and y coordinates. Someone who opts for traditional social bonds loses opportunities, but someone who chooses total freedom risks losing the social ties that give his life meaning. The U.S. and other developed countries rank high on options and opportunity, low on social bonds. Traditional societies like Africa's usually rated strong on bonding, are low on options and opportunities. "We have visions of reality that are different," says Serageldin. Therein lies the problem. "Bonding, imposed on a modern, institutional structure, becomes nepotism" -- a universal African practice. The worst outcome, he says, is to have neither one nor the other: "If we trade bonds for options but do not succeed economically, we risk catastrophe" -- precisely what has happened in the American big-city ghettos.

Despite 30 years of failure in Africa, many of the social ties still exist. How long they can endure is another question. "There is a mood of Afro- pessimism," says Serageldin. "It is sustained by press images of famine and slaughter that tend to swamp the positive achievements."

Much of the real energy of Africa, and its future, lies outside present government structures. Africans have been even quicker than Western donors to cut themselves off from corrupt government and nonfunctioning states. They simply ignore their governments because they have their own economy. Variously called the "informal sector" or the "parallel" economy, it is the real engine of life.

The U.N. International Labor Organization has estimated that the informal sector employs 59% of sub-Saharan Africa's urban labor force. If this sector is included, the size of Zaire's economy increases threefold. In many respects Africa is ahead of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe when it comes to free markets and regional economic ties.

Salaries in Africa become living wages only by unofficial dealing -- by baksheesh, bribing, finagling, operating off the books, bartering, finding a thousand intricate routes around the occlusions of law and bureaucracy. A telephone-company repairman in Lagos earns $60 a month. Therefore, the only way one can get a phone repaired is to "offer him a little something" on the side; in one day the repairman can pocket his official pay. No tip, no repairs -- which may be why most phones in Lagos do not work.

The second economy is endlessly inventive. It embraces everything from street vendors selling cigarettes and candy in a Dar es Salaam market to the intricate border smuggling of Zambian gemstones. At least 10 million of 26 million Kenyans make a living from small-scale cash-crop farming, carpentry, metalworking, tailoring, illicit brewing and running private transport. Secondhand clothes are imported from Europe and America and sold by the roadside. Packing cases are fashioned into furniture. Oil drums are made into roofing sheets, frying pans, barbecues, stoves, knives and lamps. Cars that cannot be repaired are salvaged piecemeal and turned into donkey carts. Much of this unofficial labor is carried out in the open air and is called jua kali -- "hot sun." As multinational companies are driven away by government policies and demands for kickbacks, as state enterprises fail and lay off workers, the jua kali economy is booming.

The official minimum monthly wage is 5,000 shillings ($17) in Tanzania, where a loaf of bread costs 190 shillings and a pair of trousers 4,000 shillings. "Nobody in Tanzania expects to survive on his salary," says Thomas Mrima, a truck driver who plies between Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. "Everybody makes money with everything he can lay his hands on. They steal government stores and sell them over the border. They use government machinery for private building contracts." Ripping off the government has become a popular sport: it is thought of as stealing from thieves.

So Africa improvises its own unofficial social contract, one deal at a time. People are brilliant at adapting to the impossible conditions created by their governments. That is the difficulty: such adaptation has allowed ramshackle government practices to continue too long, postponing the catharsis the continent needs to purge itself of corruption and incompetence.

Frustration over Africa has led some outsiders to the conclusion that Africans are hopeless at organizing anything. The reverse is true: they are ingenious organizers and able businessmen. The problem is bad government.

The trouble has arisen in part because of the gap between national aspirations and the practical problems of putting together a working government. Says Cyrus Reed, head of the African Studies Center at the American University in Cairo: "These countries were extremely fragile, yet they set goals that even the most organized governments would have had trouble fulfilling." Nearly all African leaders realized the first challenge of government is keeping the loyalty of the people; the solution was patronage. As that became more expensive and resources dwindled, the leaders turned toward the World Bank and the IMF to bail them out. So the countries went deeper into debt and dependence.

Now they are beginning to find ways out. If the '80s were the lost decade, the '90s show signs of hope. In 1990 more African nations introduced multiparty politics than in all the previous 25 years. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, 38 of Africa's 47 states were ruled by one party or by military juntas; today about half those countries have held free elections or adopted democratic reforms. Many Africans are talking about a second revolution.

Mali, Liberia and Congo have announced legal moves to recover assets they say were stolen under previous one-party regimes. In the case of Mali, the Swiss Foreign Ministry has decided to reroute part of its country's aid to Mali to pay for Swiss lawyers -- clever rerouting -- to investigate whether Swiss aid money was wrongfully deposited in Swiss banks during the 23-year reign of deposed President Moussa Traore. Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida has a bolder if unrealistic idea: he suggested last year that African states might demand reparations from the West for the damage done by the slave trade. The estimated cost: $130 trillion in loss of people and production potential over the centuries. The estimated chance of success: zero.

Europeans, as the historian Basil Davidson writes, destroyed the moral universe of the continent. Colonialism imposed a different cultural universe with its alien definitions of God and progress and the rule of law. Now postcolonial Africa is defined as being on "the margins" of that universe. But, says Babacar N'Diaye, the president of the African Development Bank, "even if marginalization is true, it is not my concern. What I have to do is to create my self-respect. To create my self-respect is to put my house in order. There is a tremendous venue for intra-African trade we have not developed. We can cut our military expenditures and develop health and education. I don't like the word marginalization because Africans are using it to make demands from the developed world to pay attention to Africa. I think we must pay attention to ourselves."

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, by contrast, embraces the word. "A little neglect would not be bad," he says. " The more orphaned we are, the better for Africa. We will have to rely on ourselves. We have to go back to the year 1500, where we left off building an economy integrated in itself, able to produce its own food, its own tools, its own weapons."

It seems a plausible, even indispensable vision: Africans reunited at last with themselves, with their cultures and governments, brought home after centuries of terrible alienation. But then Museveni goes on, "Today 50 out of 100 Ugandans can't read or write. If 90 out of 100 can read and write and start to be guided by science and rationality, that's the day of liberation."

It may be a long swoop from Africa's year 1500 to European-sounding formulas about "science and rationality." In 1961, with civil war erupting around him and his own assassination only days away, Patrice Lumumba, the newly independent Congo's first Prime Minister, wrote a letter to his wife in which he conjured a splendid vision: "History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations . . . Africa will write her own history, and . . . it will be a glorious and dignified history."

Perhaps. For the moment, African glory lies around a historical bend of the river, in some unseeable future.

With reporting by William Dowell/Abidjan, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Marguerite Michaels/Nairobi