[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 148 (Wednesday, November 30, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: November 30, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                             AFRICAN GOTHIC

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, in the magazine Vanity Fair, there 
is an article by Christopher Hitchens about the African scene.
  The article is, in my opinion, unduly pessimistic, but it brings a 
grim reality about much of Africa that is accurate. And it shows that 
we ought to paying more attention to Africa. And by ``we'' I mean the 
United States and the other industrial nations.
  The continents of the world are gradually increasing their standard 
of living and quality of life, with the exception of Africa. That can 
change, but Africa needs assistance to change it.
  Listen to this paragraph in the Christopher Hitchens article:

       Statistics do their usual job of confirming initial 
     impressions. Of the 20 most impoverished nations in the 
     world, 18 are in Africa. Per capita GNP declined at the rate 
     of almost 2 percent per year in the 1980's. Though it 
     contains one-eighth of the world's population, the 
     continent's share of world trade had dipped to just above 2 
     percent. But these paltry 2 percents balloon into terrifying 
     figures when the downside is being measured. The sub-Saharan 
     African debt was 110 percent of the total GNP of all its 
     nations in 1991. Of the people diagnosed as having the AIDS 
     virus, two-thirds are in Africa.

  The other side of the picture is that democracy is spreading in 
Africa.
  Christopher Hitchens does look at Eritrea, one of the brighter spots. 
Attention could have been paid to Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and 
other nations with better news.
  Angola may be on the verge of signing a peace agreement, and if it 
holds, within 10 years, you will see a fairly dramatic improvement in 
the quality of life of the people of Angola, if the government and the 
opposition forces use self-restraint.
  I ask that the Christopher Hitchens article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                             African Gothic

                       (By Christopher Hitchens)

       Whoever he was, and whatever happened to him, he will 
     certainly never read this. He was clad in nothing but an 
     outfit of ragged trousers, and he was being pulled across the 
     road by a half-dozen other men. If it hadn't been nighttime I 
     might barely have noticed, but there isn't much street light 
     in Kinshasa after dark, and your headlights make a tableau of 
     anything that's visible. There was a shantytown hunched in 
     blackness on one side of the pitted street, and another 
     shantytown slumped on the other side, and the gang needed or 
     wanted to drag the guy from the first to the second. He 
     looked as if he badly didn't desire to cooperate. My driver 
     floored it as soon as he took in the scene, and as the pickup 
     shot past I could register the external details: mouth open 
     in a wordless yell, eyes rolling in the face, muscles and 
     tendons bent in resistance--a man headed for some unnameable 
     appointment.
       In the capital city of Mr. Mobutu's Zaire, whom was I going 
     to call? The police? Even if the rugged-looking crew didn't 
     turn out to be the police, the telephones have been out these 
     many years. And no Zairean, such as the pickup driver from 
     whom I'd hitched the ride, would think of intervening in such 
     a macabre but routine sideshow.
       Anglo-Saxon tribal lore tells the parable of the sparrow 
     that flies into the dining hall at night, flutters about for 
     a moment, and then wings out again. Its brief time in the 
     light, and the darkness from which it comes and to which it 
     goes, provides the allegory of a human life. I know less 
     about that Zairean's life than my forefathers knew about the 
     sparrow's. And Africa today is relayed to the rest of the 
     world in similar fashion, by brief and sad or shocking images 
     that stay for a moment on the retina before fading away 
     again. The swollen infant, the milkless mother, the hoarse, 
     red-eyed street fighter or jungle combatant, the operatic 
     dictator, the chaotic and miserable crowd--these are the 
     Africans we feel we ``know.''
       And while images from the rest of the world are grim enough 
     in all conscience, there can be something weird and neolithic 
     about African traumas. General Idi Amin did keep human heads 
     in his freezer. Samuel Doe of Liberia was videotaped having 
     his ears cut off by the transition team of the incoming 
     administration. Murders in Rwanda and Somalia were, 
     perhaps, not morally different from or worse than murders 
     in Bosnia or Ulster but seemed somehow more primitive, 
     carried out as they were with clubs and axes, or with bare 
     hands and by dancing, gibbering crowds.
       Moreover, run the rule across Africa and see if you can 
     find, anywhere in the entire forsaken continent, anything 
     like a success story. The economies are used to scare the 
     children of World Bank officials. (When I was last in Zambia, 
     there was a national day of prayer for the local currency. 
     Prayer was not answered.) The famines, plagues, and epidemics 
     are, from old-style locusts to ultra-modern AIDS, the most 
     sweeping and devastating. The clan wars and the wars of 
     religion are the most bitter and pitiless. Human life is at 
     its nastiest, most brutish, and shortest.
       Statistics do their usual job of confirming initial 
     impressions. Of the 20 most impoverished nations in the 
     world. 18 are in Africa. Per capita G.N.P. declined at the 
     rate of almost 2 percent per year in the 1980s. Though it 
     contains one-eighth of the world's population, the 
     continent's share of world trade has dipped to just above 2 
     percent. But these paltry 2 percents balloon into terrifying 
     figures when the downside is being measured. The sub-Saharan 
     African debt was 110 percent of the total G.N.P. of all its 
     nations in 1991. Of the people diagnosed as having the AIDS 
     virus, two-thirds are in Africa.
       As I embarked on my voyage from the Horn of Africa 
     southward, crossing the continent at its tip and working my 
     way back up the western coast. I had every chance to get 
     bored by the stock farewells. ``Take care in darkest Africa/
     the dark continent/the heart of darkness . . .'' No wonder 
     people are so fond of Nelson Mandela--he's practically a 
     Westerner.
       Almost all current writing about Africa depends on a blend 
     of Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh: the brooding, throbbing 
     stagnation of the Congo and the sinister farce of egomaniacal 
     ``Afrocentric'' politics. (V. S. Naipaul is sometimes 
     successful in achieving a literary synthesis of the two). In 
     no country is this journalistic temptation harder to resist 
     than in the original Congo itself (now pointlessly renamed 
     Zaire), where I had my haunting brief encounter on the 
     roadside. Here, where Conrad's river could be like the 
     Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Rhine, or the Mekong-a great 
     waterway of trade--you find instead a huge, sweltering 
     ditch, studded with eroded hulks and sunken barges in 
     which, as in every crevice of African decay, some wretched 
     people have tried to scratch out a home. Attempting to 
     make sense of my chance sighting of the man I couldn't 
     help, I struggled to widen the small pool of light in 
     which I'd glimpsed him.
       Great place, Zaire. It's as large as the United States east 
     of the Mississippi, and it's the second-largest French-
     speaking country in the world. It has colossal resources, 
     built as it is on vast reefs of copper, cobalt, and diamonds, 
     to say nothing of its immense river network and its wealth of 
     game and arable land. It has been the recipient of tremendous 
     generosity from every kind of lending institution. It could 
     have broken out of the ``Third World'' a generation ago. But 
     instead it became a demonstration case of the deliberate uses 
     of underdedvelopment--something neither Waugh nor Conrad 
     bothered even to imagine.
       Initiation begins at the airport. International airlines 
     will not let their aircraft spend a night in Kinshasa, 
     because they are not sure the planes will still be there in 
     the morning, and because no insurance company in the world 
     will cover them for the stopover. As I stepped off the plane, 
     I was grabbed and surrounded on the tarmac between the stairs 
     and the ``terminal.'' My passport was seized by one 
     official--at least he said he was an official--while a brisk 
     auction of my belongings was begun by other, rival 
     bureaucrats and assorted freelances.
       The filthy, airless arrivals building was awash with 
     garbage and pools of fetid water, as well as with predators 
     of all kinds who, I later learned, were off duty cops in 
     search of an income supplement. If not for the aid of a big 
     and kindly Zairean doctor I had met on the plane, I might be 
     there still. And not even he could get me out of the parking 
     lot, which was a wasteland of rusting cars and jagged 
     potholes. The uniformed goons of the Zairean army, guns and 
     bayonets to the fore, simply placed their jackboots against 
     the doors of the creaking and springless taxi, preventing the 
     driver from getting behind the wheel until he had handed over 
     a wad of dirty bills. This tax is passed on to the consumer, 
     as I later found.
       One of the soldiers, very much the worse for drink, 
     insisted on getting into the taxi so as, he explained, to 
     guarantee my safety on the ride to the hotel. Upon arrival he 
     demanded $1,500 in cash for the privilege, and followed me 
     angrily into the lobby when I refused to pay. His breath was 
     undoing my tie. Nobody in the hotel offered to take my side.
       General Mobutu Sese Seko, the cunning bandit who presides 
     over the country (his titles variously translate as ``the 
     cock that leaves no hen untouched'' and ``the all-powerful 
     warrior who, because of his inflexible will to win, goes from 
     conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake''), is not a 
     subtle man. One of the main streets in his capital is named 
     for Emperor Bokassa, the deposed tyrant of the neighboring 
     Central African Republic, who practiced cannibalism and 
     murdered hundreds of schoolchildren who refused to wear 
     his choice of uniform. In the eastern part of Zaire, a 
     large stretch of water is named in honor of Idi Amin.
       I quote from a brochure of the state tourism industry: 
     ``Thanks to the great number of hippos, the fish in Lake Amin 
     benefit from a rich and abundant diet provided by their 
     excrement.'' The same point is emphasized a little lower 
     down: ``Lake Idi Amin Dada, extraordinarily rich in fish 
     thanks to the defecation of a myriad of lake hippos.'' One 
     wants to picture the planning meeting. ``Tourism is slow. The 
     numbers are down badly. We can't do much about the airport. 
     But what if we offer them a fish dinner, stressing the hippo 
     shit and reminding them twice of the enticing name of the 
     lake?''
       I thought that the author of Scoop and Black Mischief could 
     have made something of that. And Conrad would have had no 
     difficulty recognizing the rotting, crashing decay of the 
     equatorial interior. When the Belgian colonists departed in 
     1960, the country could boast 88,000 miles of decent road. By 
     1985, this had contracted to 12,000 miles, of which only 
     1,400 were paved. Today, the smallest trip outside Kinshasa 
     requires an all-terrain vehicle. The back country and the 
     forest have lost all connection with the capital and the 
     coast.
       To this, however, can be added some strictly modern 
     horrors. I spent part of an afternoon at the suburban villa 
     of Etienne Tshisekedi, the veteran opposition leader, who, on 
     the previous day, had been subjected to an attack by one of 
     Mobutu's private militias. The windows in his study had been 
     shot out, and a litter of grenade shells and cartridge cases 
     had been collected by supporters as evidence. Here was a 
     scene recognizable from Bosnia or El Salvador or Lebanon: the 
     civilian and nontribal politician trying desperately to 
     survive in a welter of mayhem and superstition.
       In the garden, a large black cock was playing a vicious 
     game of cat and mouse with a crippled frog, something I 
     didn't know poultry had the wit or the cruelty to do. As the 
     pecking torture went on, I listened to aides of Tshisekedi, 
     who was legally made prime minister in 1991 and who enjoys 
     vast popular support, but who--if only because he can hardly 
     leave his home--is failing to make any headway against the 
     vast corruption and lawlessness of the Mobutu state. ``Our 
     leadership comes from every main national group and tribe, 
     while Mobutu's entourage is all from the Ngabandi clan,'' I 
     was told by Frederic Kibassa, one of the toughest and most 
     outspoken of the dissidents. ``Mobutu's political family is 
     corrupted through and through.'' Estimates by Western 
     diplomats of the private fortune Mobutu has hijacked from the 
     central bank fluctuate between $4 billion and $11 billion: 
     ``At any rate,'' an American envoy to the country told me, 
     ``he could clear the national debt by writing a personal 
     check.''
       But Mobutu's larger achievement is to have corrupted an 
     entire society and made it complicit with beggary, 
     embezzlement, and theft. An elevator attendant in one run-
     down government ministry wanted a bribe to take me from the 
     18th to the 19th floor. Passport Control extends an 
     imperative palm just as your plane is boarding. Policeman 
     farm their beats. I was detained with my photographer 
     companion, Ed Kashi, as we tried to get some pictures of the 
     Congo river bank; two separate teams of police and customs 
     officials disputed the extortion rights over us and 
     threatened to take the camera equipment before settling for a 
     compromise price. ``I am afraid, Mr. Christopher,'' said my 
     guide sadly at one point, ``that my country is a jungle. A 
     jungle.'' This was no sarcastic white settler talking with 
     condescension about Mau Mau land. It was a man genuinely 
     embarrassed by the abject shame of his country.
       He actually said this to me after he'd shown me the 
     Kinshasa zoo. I had not especially wanted to go, since I'm 
     fed up with reading articles that describe Africa as being 
     either a safari park or an elephants' graveyard, but I soon 
     understood why he wished me to see it. After being 
     contemptuously fleeced by a couple of bored gatekeepers, we 
     were admitted to a tiny hell. Baffled bears with sore-covered 
     muzzles were moldering in dirty, waterless pens. A scrofulous 
     eagle sat in a dropping-spattered cage. A lioness sported a 
     suppurating stump where her tail had been.
       It was the very essence of a country that has forgotten 
     self-respect and that cannot be bothered to safeguard even 
     its natural patrimony of charismatic wildlife. As we drove 
     sadly away, my Zairean friend still apologizing for the wreck 
     and squalor, we passed a few roadside food stands where sat 
     clutches of roadkill vendors. You could get a squashed fox 
     for a few grubby bills, and some live pangolins were being 
     roughly handled for curious potential buyers. Everything was 
     coarse, brutal, and cheap, and nothing worked. It wasn't just 
     worse than when the much-hated Belgian racists had departed. 
     It was worse than before colonialism began at all.
       Portuguese explorers in the first decade of the 19th 
     century reported on the kingdom of Kazembe, which occupied 
     the part of Zaire now called Shaba or Katanga Province. The 
     kingdom, they said excitedly, was ``rich in food and strongly 
     governed.'' Today, malnutrition is a leading cause of death 
     among Zairean children, and a warlord system runs Shaba 
     Province. The once fabulous mining operations have been 
     virtually shut down, as the skilled Baluba workers, who knew 
     how to run them, are being ethnically cleansed from the area.
       ``Don't be deceived by the chaos,'' said one experienced 
     Western businessman. ``Mobutu likes it this way. With 
     hyperinflation it's easy for foreigners to make money, and 
     it's the cut from foreigners that fills his pockets. With no 
     roads, the army can never topple him. With no communications, 
     the opposition can never organize. With total corruption, 
     it's every man for himself and people can be picked off one 
     by one.'' The uses of underdevelopment.
       As I went around the markets and streets of Kinshasa, I was 
     often asked if I was French. This was not a compliment to my 
     poor usage of the tongue, and it wasn't asked in a friendly 
     way. What people turned out to mean was that if I was French 
     they wouldn't talk to me. Popular hatred of France for its 
     open support of Mobutu exceeds even the dislike of the C.I.A. 
     for installing him, in a coup in 1965, in the First place. 
     The French intervention in Rwanda was widely seen as a 
     scheme to help both Mobutu and the blood-stained Rwandan 
     officers who carried out the genocide of last April. After 
     the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans left their 
     country by way of the river system, the embalmed corpse of 
     Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was unloaded at 
     Kinshasa airport by the very officers who had used his 
     death as a pretext for massacre. Even as they broadcast 
     appeals for panic-stricken Rwandans to flee to the 
     nightmare of the Goma refugee camp, they themselves were 
     setting up shop in Zaire's finest hotels and most fragrant 
     banks. Mobutu's soldiers. meanwhile, were robbing the 
     refugees at the frontier and charging international relief 
     aircraft 300 bucks a flight--cash--for the privilege of 
     using the Goma strip. I could have warned them.
       Several times I was told that ``what happens in Algeria 
     will happen here''--that soon foreigners would be killed on 
     sight. The Zairean people are probably too gentle and too 
     welcoming, as individuals, ever to make good on such threats. 
     But there is an almost bottomless well of humiliation and 
     frustration to draw upon, and though episodes of violence 
     have been infrequent, they have been very ferocious. The 
     certainty in any case is that if things do turn nasty we will 
     see Zaireans in the raw, untreated state in which their 
     fellow Africans are presented to us now--stripped of cover 
     and dignity and occupying certain well-worn categories. The 
     Refugee. The Beggar. The Slum Dweller. Just like the nameless 
     man who was dragged across my headlamps.
       But now take another look at that guy. There's no God-given 
     reason why he isn't dressed in a good suit of clothes, 
     supporting his family by working for a thriving mining 
     company at a standard of living higher than that of southern 
     Italy or northern Portugal. Or why, on weekends, he isn't 
     taking the children on a cruise upriver, perhaps to see a 
     well-run game park or maybe to explore the wonders of the 
     rain forest, where careful and judicious logging provides a 
     healthy income to farmers who would otherwise move hungrily 
     to the townships, while preserving the canopy and the older 
     growths for--among other things--innovative research into 
     tropical medicine.
       This is no Utopian area. The material conditions for this 
     other Zaire already exist. And there are men and women 
     qualified to administer it, except that they tend to be 
     either in prison or abroad. (In the 1980s, at least 100,000 
     educated and professional Africans fled the continent.) The 
     current situation is almost completely determined by 
     outsiders, who have shored up Mobutu as a ``friendly power,'' 
     who have bought the raw materials cheap, who have supplied 
     the guns and trainers to the swollen and unnecessary army, 
     and who have set the percentage rate at which Zaireans will 
     work--or not work--to repay their debt. If the ``new 
     globalism'' means anything, it means that, outward 
     appearances to the contrary, the man I saw is part of the 
     same political economy as I am.
       The fact is that, unfair as it may seem, Africa desperately 
     needs that success story I mentioned earlier. Not everyone is 
     as crude as the late Richard Nixon, who confided to H.R. 
     Haldeman that American blacks were no good because Africa 
     itself was no good and had never produced a workable or 
     civilized society. (``The worst,'' he added viciously, ``is 
     Liberia, which we built.'') In common with far too many 
     educated people, Nixon knew less about Africa than he did 
     about the north face of the Eiger. But his cynicism finds a 
     partial echo in the weariness with which rationalizations for 
     African failure are received.
       Yes, we know that colonialism was devastating and 
     disruptive. Yes, we know that the political borders of Africa 
     make no sense and were drawn without regard to human reality. 
     Yes, no doubt the international-trade deck is stacked against 
     African products. But does this explain why there is still 
     slavery in Mauritania and southern Sudan (often but not 
     always Islamic enslavement of Christians, and what do Mr. 
     Farrakhan's Black Muslins have to say about that?)? Does it 
     explain why millions of young girls are gentially mutilated? 
     Does it explain why the Wa-Benzi--a brilliant street term for 
     the local class that rides in the imported Mercedes 
     limousine--are greedier and less productive than any 
     privileged elite in Asia or Latin America?
       Like my Zairean guide, who referred angrily to his country 
     as a jungle, Africans are often their own sternest critics. 
     In the Ivory Coast, where I attended a conference of 
     political parties, the chairman of the meeting. Achi Koman, 
     gave me a copy of his pamphlet. It turned out to contain a 
     long denunciation of sorcery and witchcraft among the 
     educated classes. He told me later that in his opinion it was 
     one of the country' most urgent problems, and that even the 
     most outwardly sophisticated university graduates were often 
     in thrall to some village feticheur.
       The Ivory Coast is actually a very good place to 
     comptemplate the persistence of cultism and its frequent 
     counterpart, the glorification of the chieftain or leader. 
     The capital, Abidjan, is a well-run Frenchified coastal city 
     with numerous chic shops and restaurants and functional if 
     overlarge bureaucracy. But it is not, technically, the 
     political capital of the nation. That honor belongs to the 
     provincial town of Yamoussoukro, birthplace and ancestral 
     village of Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Until his death in 
     1993. F.H.-B. ran the country like a private estate. And 
     if you make the three-hour journey north by road to 
     Yamoussoukro, you can see his memorial.
       Soaring directly out of the red dirt and the scrub is an 
     immense Roman Catholic cathedral (perhaps 15 percent of 
     Ivorians are Catholic in name) which was designed 
     specifically to be taller than St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. 
     For some reason you need a military permit to enter the 
     place, but on the day of my visit that was a pointless 
     preliminary because I was the only person there. The vast 
     domed structure with its inhuman scale had the look of 
     something that had recently landed from a Steven Spielberg 
     set. Lizards fooled about. A guard dozed stertorously in the 
     men's room. A mongrel was attempting to administer itself a 
     blow job on the steps, but abandoned the effort either 
     because of the heat or from a feeling that the surroundings 
     were inappropriate.
       Yamoussoukro is eerie, because its huge Stalinist 
     boulevards and avenues lead nowhere, and because its vast 
     ``Institute'' dedicated to the study of Houphouet-Boigny 
     ``thought,'' is completely bare of books and papers. Here, as 
     elsewhere in Africa, you get a queasy sense of the jungle 
     creeping unstoppably back. Meanwhile, what has been built is 
     a sort of unsatisfying and discordant compromise between 
     opportunistic capitalism and tenacious tribalism. The 
     contract to build the wasteful and hideous basilica (at a 
     cost which is not disclosed but which consumed a sizable 
     fraction of the country's budget) went, as most local 
     contracts do, to the French construction conglomerate 
     Bouygues, which is to France what Bechtel is the United 
     States. That was one of the many pourboires which sweeten the 
     relationship between Paris and its African client states. Yet 
     smack in the middle of this neglected hellhole of concrete 
     and glass and marble modernism, there is a large artificial 
     lake dedicated to the care and feeding of sacred crocodiles. 
     This in turn is right next to the immense presidential palace 
     which F.H.-B awarded himself. Interestingly, the saints and 
     martyrs in the cathedral stained glass are all conspicuously 
     white. But stationed close to the Redeemer in one panel is a 
     black man whose face is well known from official portraits.
       As I watched the crocs plying to and fro in that way they 
     have, I was thinking of a conversation I had had in the 
     capital the night before. ``F.H.-B got the Pope himself to 
     come and consecrate that basilica'' I was told. ``But then 
     when he died he wasn't buried in it. Everyone thought it was 
     supposed to be his mausoleum, but he had arranged for his 
     body to be handed over to the traditional medicine' priests. 
     The funeral was in secret. On these occasions, cher ami, the 
     witch doctors are supposed to take back the power they 
     conferred on the big chief when he was alive. That usually 
     means human heads--up to 40 of them for a really major 
     chieftain.''
       Oh come on, I thought (and indeed said). Wouldn't people 
     notice that there were--to take one objection at random--some 
     missing persons? ``Ah, but who counts the peddlers who wander 
     over the border from Liberia or Guinea? Who will miss the 
     occasional refugee, or ask any questions?'' These were 
     Africans talking. Europeans in Abidjan, some of whom thought 
     it was politically nonkosher to suggest human sacrifice at 
     the presidential level, nonetheless confirmed that their 
     servants had been nervous, and had gone around checking on 
     stray or missing members of their families. Impressive, at 
     any rate, was the number of people who believed the story.
       Superstition can take more than one form. Houphouei-Boigny 
     was a French client. Joaquim Chissano is the leader of a 
     revolutionary and secular party in Mozambique--a former 
     Portuguese colony that tore itself away by armed struggle, 
     and until recently proclaimed the slogans of socialist 
     internationalism. Today, president Chissano greets visiting 
     diplomats and dignitaries by bending their ears about 
     Transcendental Meditation, and has awarded millions of 
     hectares of prime land to ``the Maharishi Heaven on Earth 
     Development Corporation.''
       In the past two decades, Mozambique has been through an 
     anti-colonial revolution, swiftly superseded by a vicious war 
     of attrition with South Africa in which perhaps one million 
     Mozambicans lost their lives. Its economy has been heggared 
     and put into World Bank receivership. After such an acute 
     crisis of expectations, and such a numbing series of 
     disappointments, perhaps people are willing to give anything 
     a try. ``If you want to see voodoo economics,'' said one 
     rather bitter Mozambican radical, ``don't read the World Bank 
     reports. Go to the market in Maputo and ask for the black-
     magic section. They have one now. They didn't used to, but 
     that's all coming back these days.''
       On a visit to the market, which sold everything from 
     hubcaps to Johnnie Walker, I found the voodoo section without 
     difficulty and was offered a surefire male-potency enhancer. 
     It looked like a suspension of tofu in vinegar, and I felt 
     confident enough to pass it up after a brief hesitation, 
     especially since--to my relief--the vendor didn't really seem 
     to believe in it either.
       However, when people have tried everything and have 
     discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to 
     what they know best--which will often be the tribe, the 
     totem, or the taboo. There is almost no country in Africa 
     where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which 
     subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this 
     single piece of information you can trace the lines of 
     patronage and allegiance that define the state.
       The promise of political independence has soured. Economic 
     progress has not merely been arrested, it has been turned 
     back. In most countries, the state forms a thin and unpopular 
     veneer on a pain-racked society. In Nairobi, the relatively 
     clean and modern capital of Kenya, I went to a conference of 
     right-thinking people who were concerned with this very 
     subject. The seminar was on ``Democracy in a Multi-ethnic 
     Society,'' a pressing topic at any time in Kenya, which is 
     riven with tribal envy between the Luo and the Kikuyu 
     peoples, but an especially absorbing one in view of the news 
     from Rwanda. (On the edge of all political conversation in 
     Africa today, if you listen, you can hear the word 
     ``Rwanda.'')
       Though Kenya is outwardly calm, and its English-language 
     press maintains a jaunty tone, worrying news creeps in from 
     the outlying districts. There is the Somali horror show on 
     the border. There are riots in the slums. Up in the Rift 
     Valley, a crude war of clan against clan has broken out.
       The meeting took place in the Nairobi Safari Club, in a 
     highly urbane and relaxed atmosphere. It had something of the 
     feel of an old British colonial gathering, called to discuss 
     signs of restlessness among the natives. But with the 
     exception of a German social Democratic team who were helping 
     sponsor the event, all present were Africans. There was some 
     nervous joking about the morning's headlines, which featured 
     a denunciation by President Daniel arap Moi of all such 
     ``Democracy conferences,'' which he accused of being anti-
     Kenyan activities sponsored by sinister forces overseas.
       This was likely to be more than mere rhetoric; President 
     Moi has an imperious way with dissent and uses his police 
     force with a heavy hand. Moreover, he is from a minority 
     tribe himself and is given to consolidating his position 
     by playing off the principal tribes against one another. 
     The word at the meeting was that the fighting in the Rift 
     Valley was probably state-instigated as part of a divide-
     and-rule strategy. And in Kenya, l'etat c'est Moi.
       The day's keynote speaker was Professor Ali Mazrui, a 
     smooth-as-silk Kenyan-born academic who now holds a chair at 
     the State University of New York at Binghamton. He appeared 
     to get straight to the point by stressing the abattoir 
     conditions in Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Angola, Burundi, and 
     elsewhere. ``Is the old slate of the colonial order being 
     washed clean with buckets of blood?'' he asked. ``Or is the 
     blood in fact spilling in the maternity ward of history as a 
     new Africa is trying to breathe amidst the mess of convulsive 
     birth pangs?''
       I could think of a question much scarier than these. What 
     if it's neither of the above? What if all the bloodshed is 
     for nothing? What if Africa is neither being cleansed in 
     blood nor giving birth in blood, but just plain drowning in 
     blood? What if it's rocketing back into the primeval, using 
     20th-century techniques to accomplish its own destruction? 
     Well, I only asked.
       This was a gathering sponsored by, among others, the 
     National Concerns Council and a group called Gender Sensitive 
     Initiatives, which God knows is needed in a continent where 
     on every road you see men leading strings of women like pack 
     animals. But I wondered if such nicely named outfits would 
     care to look reality in the face.
       Actually, Mazrui improved as the morning wore on. He 
     proposed six tests for a minimally successful state. Does it 
     control its territory? Is it sovereign over its own 
     resources? Can it collect revenue? Does it maintain an 
     infrastructure of roads, railways, and telephones? Can it 
     provide services such as health, education, and sanitation? 
     Is it able to guarantee law and order? There is a seventh 
     question which he touched upon. Does it control some areas by 
     day but surrender that vestigial power at night?
       By any or all of these tests, including the informal and 
     crepuscular seventh one, the majority of African states are 
     not states at all, just entities with occasional impact on 
     the lives of the people who dwell in them. South Africa 
     qualifies as a proper state, as does Botswana, and as do 
     Namibia and Zimbabwe. But that claim would still come as news 
     to millions of their citizens, who live outside the charmed 
     circle of development and ``the market.''
       And to their noncitizens. Much of South Africa's mining 
     labor force comes from impoverished Mozambique, which in 
     effect lives by the export of people. Perhaps one in seven 
     inhabitants of the Ivory Coast is a hungry immigrant from a 
     neighboring country. Even before the terrifying events of 
     April 1994, 200,000 or so Rwandans lived as refugees in 
     Uganda. Eritrea is trying to repatriate a large chunk of its 
     population from Sudan, which in its turn is creating a mass 
     of internal refugees as the Muslim-Christian conflict becomes 
     more acute.
       Solzhenitsyn once wrote of the prison population of the 
     U.S.S.R. as a nation apart, with its own rules and even its 
     own economy. In Africa, the displaced person is a special 
     category of citizenship, or at any rate of existence. Nobody 
     really knows how many millions there are. On a dusty and 
     glaring day, I went to visit the Boane camp in Mozambique, 
     which is supposed to be a clearing center, operated by the 
     U.N., for returning Mozambicans who fled to Swaziland during 
     the war. Of the first two men I spoke to, one was an 
     Ethiopian merchant sailor who had made his way down the coast 
     of eastern Africa by sea and had a rather confused account of 
     how he came to be in a relocation center 35 miles from the 
     Swazi border, and the other was a former Angolan policeman 
     who had left the city of Huambo, on the other side of the 
     continent, to get away from the UNITA guerrillas of Jonas 
     Savimbi. He, too, was at something of a loss to explain his 
     presence in this transient wilderness. But, for the moment, 
     it was home. And there wasn't much to go back to.
       Both men were educated, with qualifications and skills, and 
     both could speak fair English. Yet in any foreseeable future 
     they were fated to be part of a vast population of Africa 
     whose tragedy is that nobody wants them, nobody needs them, 
     and nobody knows who or where they are. As far as the world 
     economy is concerned, they might as well not have been born, 
     and might as well hurry up about dying.
       You don't get a sense of the absurdity of Africa's borders 
     if you travel by air, because customs and immigration 
     routines are the same everywhere (Zaire wholly excepted and 
     other countries partially so). But on land the arbitrariness 
     of politicall geography becomes swiftly apparent. In the 
     hills outside the town of Masvingo--formerly Fort Victoria--
     in eastern Zimbabwe is the site of the Great Zimbabwe ruins, 
     for which the country is named. After the pyramids, these 
     imposing stone marvels are the largest masonry structure in 
     Africa--not as big as the basilica in Yamoussoukro, perhaps, 
     but far more authentic and many times more absorbing.
       Until recently, it was an article of faith among the white 
     settlers that this--the Acropolis of southern Africa--could 
     not conceivably have been built by the ancestors of the 
     shiftless blacks. The country's leading archaeologist, Peter 
     Garlake, was compelled to live abroad when this dogma was 
     made official by the Ian Smith regime. It was now been 
     established beyond doubt that Great Zimbabwe was the work of 
     an African civilization of the later Iron Age, probably in 
     the 13th century but perhaps before that.
       On the day of my visit, the vast stone enclosure with its 
     beautifully curved and rounded observation tower was being 
     looked over by a group of Afrikaner tourists. Newly 
     encouraged to travel in black Africa by the amazing 
     developments in their own homeland, they had come to see for 
     themselves that Africa really does have a history and an 
     architecture that pre-dates the white conquest. They were 
     full of enthusiasm, and were writing flattering things in the 
     visitor's book. Well, I thought, I've lived to see it.
       Of course, the question arises, if Great Zimbabwe was so 
     great, why did it collapse? There's no clear answer to this 
     question, but it may have had something to do with a loss of 
     contact with the eastern coast. All the way from Masvingo 
     down to the shores of Mozambique, there are lesser Zimbabwes 
     (the word in the Shona language means both ``houses of 
     stone'' and ``venerated houses'') that used to be part of the 
     same extended civilization. But if you want to follow this 
     natural archaeological trail, you come up against a frontier 
     that was drawn during the course of a late-19th-century local 
     quarrel between Anglo-Saxon empire builder Cecil Rhodes and 
     the Portuguese.
       At the frontier, which cuts across the road with hardly any 
     notice, signs in English and Portuguese warn of land mines. 
     But there is no reason that a mine field should separate the 
     populations on either side of the Zimbabwe--Mozambique 
     border, who are both from the Shona nation and are in fact 
     the same people with a common local language. Nor does it 
     make sense, at a particular bend in the road, for the Shona 
     people to stop going to schools that teach English and start 
     attending schools where the medium of instruction is 
     Portuguese.
       Zimbabwe is the country where the young Doris Lessing wrote 
     her first stories--The Grass Is Singing and This Was the Old 
     Chief's Country. For decades after, she was persona non grata 
     in what was then Rhodesia and, returning after independence 
     to write her book African Laughter, she was amazed to find 
     the settlers engaged in the same conversation they had been 
     having when she left.
       I had a sample of that very conversation at that very bend 
     in the road at the Zimbabwe-Mozambique crossing. Standing at 
     the border post was a trio of tough, blond young men. They 
     were South Africans, but not in the least like the friendly, 
     mellow Afrikaner families I'd encountered at the Zimbabwe 
     ruins. They looked more like San Diego surf nazis, and they 
     were in a foul mood. Since they had arrived without troubling 
     to acquire visas, the border guards wouldn't let them cross. 
     More insulting still, the guards would not take money to bend 
     the rules. They were polite but firm in this refusal. 
     ``Christ, man, I thought that in Africa everyone took 
     bribes,'' remarked the tallest of the three charmers. Yes, 
     that's right, I thought venomously, push your way into one of 
     the few honest countries left in Africa, start throwing 
     bribes and foreign currency about, and then go home and 
     complain that everybody is on the take.
       An unsatisfactory conversion ensued. ``Vanity Fair--isn't 
     that a pornography magazine?'' Well, I mean to say, really! I 
     changed the subject with what I thought was appropriate 
     dignity, asking them how they liked Zimbabwe. Not a bit, it 
     was a nothing country, not at all the sort of thing they were 
     used to. Oh, and what sort of thing was that? ``Well, back 
     home in South Africa we have Catseyes down the middle of the 
     road. They haven't got anything like that here.'' Weeks 
     later, in Johannesburg, I found that these youths had pissed 
     me off sufficiently to make me notice that--aha!--there 
     was a distinct shortage of Catseyes on the main roads.
       Actually, Zimbabwe has at least one foot in the First 
     World. If you fly in from any neighboring country, you see 
     the suburbs of the capital, Harare, winking with the blue 
     eyes of many, many swimming pools. The quarter-million or so 
     white settlers have abandoned their silly claim to run and 
     own the country in exchange for the undisturbed right to make 
     money in their own way, and they have been joined by a large 
     and ambitious black middle class. An American visitor can use 
     his credit cards, dial AT&T direct, and deal with gleaming 
     car-rental companies. The choice of golf clubs, safari parks, 
     and mountain resorts is extraordinary.
       But as elsewhere in Africa, and perhaps more noticeably in 
     Zimbabwe because of the contrast, you have only to walk a few 
     steps from the pool of light around your hotel, or turn your 
     car or jeep a few yards off the main road, to find yourself 
     in the Third World again.
       The AIDS crisis is actually one of the few exceptions to 
     this rule, because it strikes all classes and conditions. In 
     a ritzy discotheque in Harare, I met Alex Kaunda, son of the 
     man who until recently was the president of neighboring 
     Zambia. There has been an AIDS death in that family. But most 
     Third World afflictions are unsubtle in being income-related. 
     (Just as the Third World itself is unsubtle in making poor 
     people very thin and rich people very fat.) I began to 
     compose a sort of blank-verse ``Sub-Saharan Blues,'' in which 
     the first line of each verse ran: ``You know you're in the 
     Third World when . . .'' Thus:
       You know you're in the Third World when you see a half-
     dozen scabby, tiny, scrawny Zimbabwean children playing 
     cheerfully with the improvised toy of a simple balloon made 
     from an inflated prophylactic--the gift of a superbly sincere 
     Swedish charity. In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a 
     higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but 
     smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of 
     living.
       You know you're in the Third World when you talk to an 
     agronomist and he tells you that in southern Africa the 
     drought of 1991-92 was disastrous for food production and the 
     good rains of 1992-93 a huge relief, but that unfortunately 
     the good rains have created ideal conditions for a plague of 
     locusts.
       You know you're in the Third World when, flying up the 
     western coast on the national airline of Cameroon, you decide 
     that a visit to the men's room is in order. Reaching the back 
     of the plane and giving the door handle the usual twist and 
     tug, you are fortunate to be covered in nothing worse than 
     confusion when the whole unit comes away in your hand. (I 
     actually muttered the word ``WAWA'' at that point. Taught me 
     by the most liberal white resident I've ever met, it is an 
     unavoidable acronym which means: ``West Africa Wins Again.'')
       You know you're in the Third World when, hearing that a 
     mother in Zaire has lost two children, you tentatively 
     inquire the cause of death and are told ``diarrhea.'' (In an 
     added touch, epidemiologists have now traced the cause of 
     many deaths in that same rich country to a renewed outbreak 
     of . . . bubonic plague.)
       You know you're in the Third World when you see a child, 
     half scared and half scary, guarding some stretch of dirt 
     road or some flyblown checkpoint with the help of a rifle as 
     big as himself. Of the many cases researched for the 
     International Red Cross-sponsored report Child Soldiers: The 
     Role of Children in Armed Conflicts, most of the really 
     wrenching ones occurred in Africa. In Eritrea I was told of 
     Ethiopian conscripts, captured by the rebels, who turned out 
     to be under 14. They had sometimes been used to clear 
     minefields.
       Outside the Eritrean city of Massawa, its beautiful coral 
     streets and squares still charred and gouged from the last 
     days of the 30-year war for independence from Ethiopia, I 
     stood at the edge of a grave. Behind an improvised wall of 
     corrugated iron in the middle of some dull coastal flatlands, 
     a mini killing field had been created. Piles of ammunition 
     boxes lay stacked every which way, spilling their contents in 
     all directions. But the contents, in what I realized had 
     the makings of a nasty metaphor, were not ammunition. They 
     were the end products of ammunition.
       Yellowing skeletons were sprawling in contorted attitudes, 
     and piles of skulls went with them. Most of the skulls had 
     bullet holes either directly between the eyes or squarely in 
     the back of the neck: a 20th-century ``signature'' that by 
     now even a child (or, in these regions, especially a child) 
     can recognize. These uncountable and horribly inseparable 
     bodies had been heaped up after an execution.
       The Eritrean liberation forces had lost enough people of 
     their own, God knows, and are still looking for thousands of 
     prisoners and hostages who went ``missing.'' But this trove 
     of murder was no help to their inquiry. It belonged, rather, 
     to the war-crimes trials which the new government of Ethiopia 
     will be staging. Their skeletons, some still clad in rags of 
     uniform, almost certainly belonged to dissident Ethiopian 
     officers and soldiers who had urged an end to the dirty war 
     against Eritrea, and been shot down in heaps pour encourager 
     les autres.
       The Dergue, the Ethiopian dictatorship responsible for the 
     skeletons, was supported politically and militarily by the 
     former Soviet Union and by Cuba, which had obvious 
     geopolitical ambitions in a country so near the Persian Gulf. 
     But it was also supported politically by the United States 
     and militarily by Israel. Washington favored the continuance 
     of an imperial ``unitary state,'' and Israel opposed the 
     emergence of a new Eritrean state that seemed friendly to 
     Arab nationalists on the other side of the Red Sea.
       So the killing field of Massawa, to which I was taken by a 
     group of bright and courageous young Eritreans who had 
     returned from exile in Los Angeles, was a sort of laboratory 
     of foreign interference. Yet again, when Africans had been 
     willing to kill one another, they had found outsiders willing 
     to arm and encourage them.
       In 1960, in Tourist in Africa, Evelyn Waugh wrote, ``Even 
     now you will find people of some good will and some 
     intelligence who speak of Europeans as having `pacified' 
     Africa. Tribal wars and slavery were endemic before they 
     came; no doubt they will break out again when they leave. 
     Meantime under European rule in the first forty years of this 
     century there have been three long wars in Africa on a far 
     larger scale than anything perpetrated by marauding spearmen, 
     waged by white men against white, and a generation which has 
     seen the Nazi regime in the heart of Europe had best stand 
     silent when civilised notions are contrasted.''
       A shrewd point, and from an unexpected source. Nonetheless, 
     there is a sense in which really terrifying and elemental 
     violence is more a part of contemporary African experience 
     than it is of, say, most of Asia and Latin America. The 
     radiant Somali human-rights crusader Rakiya Omaar, co-
     director of the organization African Rights and author of the 
     definitive new work on Rwanda, put it to me like this: ``Many 
     people can imagine losing a friend or a relative or a loved 
     one. But these people have lost all their kin, all their 
     loved ones, all their friends--everyone who even knew who 
     they were.''
       Rakiya was convinced from her work in the field that the 
     final death count in Rwanda would be even higher than the 
     estimates of half a million. And this, as she pointed out 
     grimly, arises from two rather modern, premeditated forms of 
     barbarism--the broadcast of coordinated orders over a special 
     radio station, and ``the use of fragmentation grenades at 
     close range on people who had been herded together.''
       Rwanda was no frantic explosion of bloodlust, but a long-
     prepared plan to destroy an entire people. Since before 1990, 
     the Rwandan military had been buying and stockpiling an 
     arsenal of light and heavy weapons, purchased discreetly from 
     South Africa, Egypt, and the ever helpful French. Even the 
     United States did its bit, training 35 Rwandan officers and 
     NCOs in American military schools, and furnishing loans for 
     the purchase of American military equipment. In 1992 the Bush 
     administration cheerfully certified to Congress that Rwandan 
     government ``relations with the U.S. are excellent,'' and 
     announced that ``there is no evidence of any systemic human 
     rights abuses by the military or by any other element of the 
     government of Rwanda.''
       And how did impoverished Rwanda pay for the weapons that 
     would make it into one gigantic charnel house, instead of the 
     verdant and fertile upland community it had once been? In 
     order to finance a $6 million arms deal with Egypt. Rwanda 
     obtained an export guarantee from France's nationalized 
     bank Credit Lyonnais. This loan was to be redeemed in . . 
     . tea. Poor Rwanda mortgaged the future earnings of its 
     Mulindi tea plantation to Credit Lyonnais as collateral, 
     and gave Egypt a million dollars' worth of fresh tea as a 
     commodity down payment.
       Thus were the innocuous herbal products of a thriving rural 
     people turned into a Western technology transfer, which in 
     turn made a serious genocide, as distinct from a random 
     massacre, actually thinkable and doable. Wole Soyinka, the 
     Nigerian Nobel laureate, once quite properly wrote that it is 
     Africans themselves who are to blame for ``the trail of 
     skeletons along desiccated highways . . . the lassitude and 
     hopelessness of emaciated survivors crowded into refugee 
     camps . . . the mounds of corpses.'' But when these things 
     happen, the West is not entitled to watch as if they were 
     happening on another planet. The globalization of the world 
     economy means an exchange of responsibilities as well as 
     techniques and resources, and as Joseph Conrad actually did 
     write in Heart of Darkness, ``The conquest of the earth . . . 
     is not a pretty thing when you look into it.''
       ``Mozambique is in a coma,'' I was told by Jose Luis 
     Cabaco, one of the many white Mozambicans who supported the 
     country's independence movement. A long civil and tribal 
     conflict, which was also an aspect of its long war with white 
     Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, has left Mozambique 
     barely breathing.
       We were sitting in the beautiful Hotel Polana in Maputo, 
     where Graham Greene set the scene of illicit interracial 
     romance in The Human Factor. ``There is no state,'' continued 
     Cabaco, who served as minister of information in the 
     revolutionary regime and is still a member of its Parliament. 
     ``There is no economy. There is no independence. The war 
     against us was designed by anthropologists''--he practically 
     sput out the word--``who knew all our society's weak points. 
     And a coma requires an oxygen tent. This oxygen tent is now 
     being supplied by the powers that be.''
       He was right, both on the first point and on the second. 
     The tribalist contras who were financed by South Africa in 
     the bad old days were people who understood the weak spots. 
     They went for the clinics and the schools, using local witch 
     doctors to spread fear of new things, and they kidnapped 
     children and turned them into killers. Roy Stacey, an 
     assistant secretary in the Reagan-era State Department, 
     called this ``one of the most brutal holocausts against 
     ordinary human beings since World War II.'' Today, 
     Mozambique's vital signs are flickering again. But only on 
     one important condition.
       It hit me when I went to the stricken hamlet of Mohiua, in 
     the northern Mozambican province of Zambezia, to see the 
     contras being demobilized and to watch preparations for this 
     fall's multi-party elections. To get to Mohiua, I had to fly 
     first to Nampula on a Russian plane with South African pilots 
     and (a first for me, and only their second U.N. peacekeeping 
     effort) an immaculate Japanese ground crew. Then I hitched a 
     ride on a United Nations Puma helicopter which boasted a 
     British flight crew and a Bangladeshi ground crew. On arrival 
     in the bush, I found officers and soldiers from India, Egypt, 
     Spain, Argentina, and (nice to see some Africans) Guinea-
     Bissau. All along my journey from the capital, I had not met 
     a single Mozambican official. The writ of the government did 
     not run anywhere.
       The word is ``recolonization.'' It's a decision that has 
     been made for quite a few African countries. For obvious 
     reasons, it's not called recolonization, out loud, in Africa 
     itself. For equally obvious reasons, it is not called 
     recolonization in the West either, or not outside a few 
     nostalgic newspapers in London and Paris. But in country 
     after country, with Mozambique as a salient case, you find 
     that the local Treasury is a branch of the World Bank, the 
     armed forces are under the stewardship of the United Nations, 
     the electoral register is in the care of international 
     ``observers,'' the distressed citizens apply for relief to 
     outside charities and aid groups, and the choicest bits of 
     real estate are in the hands of multinational 
     corporations.
       In the scrub and dirt of Mohiua, nothing grew except 
     footprints. The ex-heroes of South Africa's surrogate army 
     stood around glowering indiscriminately. Their chief, a man 
     distinguished by his highly abbreviated pair of pink Lurex 
     hot pants, was obviously afraid of his men, or his boys, who 
     had been waiting too long for their handout of shoes and 
     rations from the foreigners.
       The atmosphere veered nastily between a sorry, unhygienic 
     torpor and an ugly, vindictive frustration. One group of 
     malcontents stood shiftily apart, showing the lopped and 
     stunted effect of a harvesting of limbs--a foot here, a shin 
     there--by land mines. They needed the crisply attired 
     foreign-aid workers, and they also hated and resented them. 
     Any trite moment, such as the arrival of a batch of cans 
     bearing the blue-and-gold logo of the European Union, or the 
     passage by of an undulating village woman, could cause a 
     cacophony of whooping or a pointless, shoving match. In the 
     command tent, where it was planned to give every man, able-
     bodied or otherwise, a machete and a plastic bucket before 
     sending him back to his home village (if he could find it), 
     and where there was some jocular unease because of the 
     Rwandan echo of the pile of machetes. I heard the ultimate 
     insult being whispered. ``They're like children, really: out 
     of temper one minute and eager for attention the next. How 
     can you deal with them?''
       This was not said by only the non-Africans present. 
     Fernando, the very personable, plump, and patient volunteer 
     from Guinea-Bissau, had the roughest time with the rabble of 
     ex-fighters. At one point, calling him a traitor to Africa 
     and other things less tender and polite, he loudly offered to 
     kill him. ``You don't believe me?'' said one young tough with 
     a vicious cast in his eye. ``I've killed plenty of people.'' 
     He looked and sounded quite believable, but after an interval 
     of menace he found his attention engaged elsewhere and sloped 
     away to do whatever the next thing was. A few years ago, he 
     had been corrupted by having too much power. Now he was 
     corrupted by having no power at all.
       In the Inhambane Province of Mozambique, in 1983, perhaps 
     100,000 people starved because the world's lending 
     institutions did not relish the ``independence'' rhetoric of 
     the government, Or, as a World Bank report rather frigidly 
     phrased it, that government's ``policy stance was, moreover, 
     instrumental in provoking a sharp decline in external 
     assistance, which further exacerbated the emerging crisis.'' 
     That lesson, anyway, has now been learned. Every country in 
     Africa has come to heel. The Structural Adjustment Program, 
     or SAP, is the only available model. Export-led growth, 
     deflation, and debt repayment are the new mantras.
       But export what? The rest of the world doesn't even pretend 
     to want the continent's main export, which is people. In 
     the Ivory Coast I read a brochure which touchingly invited 
     me to visit: ``The Banco Forest, the last trace of the 
     first forest which used to cover all the regions before is 
     now a place looked for and admired by the visitors, its 
     haven of 3000 hectares of preserved forest and of numerous 
     and varied essences.'' Behind this fractured English 
     crouched the disagreeable truth that, like much of western 
     Africa, the Ivory Coast has little to sell but its old-
     growth forests, and that these must be felled and logged 
     at an unreal pace, or else the country--a country, after 
     all, that is named for a raw material--would have no 
     ``growth'' statistics to report to its creditors. 
     ``WALA,'' to rephrase the old saying. West Africa Loses 
     Again.
       Even when externally determined policies are probably a 
     ``good thing,'' they arrive like sudden thunderstorms or 
     droughts. In January, the entire populations of 13 African 
     countries woke up one morning to discover that their 
     currencies had been devalued by 50 percent. From Senegal to 
     Burkina Faso and from Cameroon to Chad, the legal tender is 
     the C.F.A. franc (C.F.A. standing technically for Communaute 
     Financiere Africaine but known in local vernacular as 
     Colonies Francaises d'Afrique), pegged to the franc and set 
     by the French Treasury. The decision to halve the rate had 
     been made by a French prime minister, without any real 
     consultation.
       This is what recolonization has come to mean: African 
     states, and African peoples, being rescued for their own 
     good. If the policy of the outsiders is sound and consistent, 
     they wait and live. If not, they wait and die.
       To see how people can drown in powerlessness, you have to 
     understand the depth of the debt hole into which Africa has 
     fallen, or been plunged. Every year, the continent pays out 
     between $10 and $11 billion on a debt which stands at about 
     $180 billion and is climbing. While according to UNICEF, the 
     United Nations Children's Fund, only $9 billion is required 
     to underwrite the immediate health, schooling, food, and 
     family-planning requirements of the continent. Servicing the 
     debt, then, takes more out of Africa than the projected 
     outlays on social spending for the 1990s.
       But out of which ``Africa''? Most of those promiscuous 
     loans were made during the years of grandiose dictatorship 
     and one-party statism, when men like Mobutu were being 
     supported by the West, and other profligate and sanguinary 
     regimes, such as Ethiopia's Dergue, were being indulged by 
     the former Soviet Union. Now the emerging civil societies 
     (and their children) are being compelled to pay for crimes 
     they did not commit and for blundering, ecologically foolish 
     prestige projects that they had no hand in commissioning.
       Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for one, has proposed a modest 
     six-month moratorium on debt repayment, in order to provide a 
     breathing space (or at any rate a panting space) for good 
     government. ``The money saved during this time should be used 
     not to benefit the elite, but the so-called ordinary 
     people,'' Tutu said, adding that Africa needs and deserves 
     ``a second chance now that most governments have seen the 
     light and seen that democracy and freedom are cheaper than 
     oppression.''
       Most governments? Well, 13 governments out of the more than 
     40 sub-Saharan regimes have had some form of democratic 
     revolution since the great ``people-power year'' of 1989. 
     Nigeria is currently in the travail of a terrific contest 
     between junta rule and civilian authority, in which the 
     tenacity of the democratic forces has astonished the world. 
     The two most long-running and intense battles for African 
     liberation have actually been consummated only in this 
     decade: the emancipation of all the peoples of South Africa 
     from apartheid and the freeing of Eritrea from another, 
     African empire in the shape of Ethiopia. It could be a 
     mistake to say too glibly that Africa is lapsing back into 
     prehistory when its real history may have scarcely begun.
       Some African writers, like Kwame Anthony Appiah in his 
     marvelous book In My Father's House, are properly skeptical 
     of there being such a place as ``Africa'' at all. The 
     differences among Africans, as Appiah says, are as great 
     as the differences between Africans and non-Africans. 
     Nonetheless, there is an undeniable African aspiration. 
     Absurd and grotesque as it may frequently be--it chose Idi 
     Amin as its chairman in 1975--the Organization of African 
     Unity embodies the idea of a continent-wide consciousness.
       Miriam Makeba sang beautifully at the independence 
     ceremonies of many African states, and tightened a million 
     throats when she spoke of one day singing at an all-African 
     freedom celebration. In these more limited times, let's admit 
     that many Africans would settle for the single, inarguable 
     success story that I proposed earlier.
       Currently, everybody's favorite nominee for success story 
     is Uganda. This is partly because 15 or so years ago the very 
     word ``Uganda'' was a synonym for everything loathsome and 
     terrifying, for a country reduced to the uttermost 
     degradations of cruelty, ignorance, and tribal barbarism. 
     Today, I find myself talking to Toshihiro Fujiwara, a World 
     Bank economist, who is full of pleasant surprises. Uganda, he 
     says, is on its way ``back.'' ``Relations between the 
     different peoples and tribes are good. All political and 
     economic discussions are very open and very free. There is a 
     stable exchange rate for the currency, and the economy is 
     growing. The bureaucracy is easy to deal with, and it has no 
     `hidden agenda' of diverting resources to itself.'' When I 
     inquire of Fujiwara what makes the difference, he is inclined 
     to stress the big factor in Africa--the rogue factor and the 
     charisma factor--which is leadership. ``President Yoweri 
     Museveni is a very good, clean, popular president,'' he says, 
     ``and that makes a huge difference.''
       It is true that Museveni's reputation is justly very high, 
     and also true that he played a useful role in supporting and 
     protecting the many Rwandan refugees who were driven into 
     Uganda. But the key fact about his recovery plan is that it 
     was not forced upon him from outside. Recently, alluding to 
     the time when the first Portuguese slavers arrived in Africa, 
     Museveni said, ``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.''
       The Swahili word for this concept, now coming back into 
     vogue after a long series of experiments with foreign models, 
     is Majimbo. It stands for the idea of local initiative and 
     trust in traditional wisdoms. SUNY Binghamton's Professor Ali 
     Mazrui is one of its leading advocates, and Basil Davidson, 
     perhaps the greatest living historian of Africa, has been 
     very sympathetic to much the same scheme.
       ``Of course I'm a great admirer of Basil's. We all are. But 
     I heard he'd gone a bit native.'' My conversation partner, 
     who is speaking so affectionately of a man who is as English 
     as the day is long, is Professor Bereket Habte Sellassie. He 
     is one of Africa's most distinguished lawyers and academics, 
     and he has come home, after a long exile, to chair the 
     commission that is writing Eritrea's constitution. To him, 
     the problem with Majimbo and majimboism is that it is a bit 
     too much like the way it sounds--a bit fuzzy, a bit archaic, 
     a bit improvised, and a bit too respectful of rather dubious 
     ``traditional'' leaderships. One reason that I like Asmara, 
     the capital of Africa's newest country, is that it is a place 
     where you can have conversations in this tone of voice.
       Having survived Mussolini's depredations, the attempt by 
     British colonialism to partition them along tribal lines, and 
     three decades of bloody Ethiopian occupation and repression, 
     the Eritreans have done a remarkable thing. They have gotten 
     rid of outside tutelage, while retaining the best of Italy 
     (the food and the espresso, though even an ardent fan cannot 
     praise the wine, which tastes like sheep-dip), the best of 
     England (pedestrian traffic in Asmara is directed by modest 
     but efficient Girl Scouts wearing white ankle socks), and 
     most of the useful contacts with Ethiopia.
       Though the war of liberation went on for generations, and 
     though every adult Eritrean has seen violence and suffered 
     from it, there is no cult of the gun. No testosterone-
     infested jerks and yahoos with machine guns mounted on their 
     jeeps, like the cowardly road-warrior ``technicals'' in 
     neighboring Somalia. It is rare to see a policeman, and very 
     rare indeed to see an armed soldier, even though burned-out 
     tanks and the rubble of warfare litter the country.
       Driving down to the coastal city of Massawa, I watched with 
     mingled admiration and annoyance as a smart motorcycle cop 
     drew abreast of our car, signaled us to pull over, parked 
     his machine, and removing one white glove for the purpose, 
     gave a disciplined salute to his well-polished helmet. He 
     then issued us a ticket for passing another car too fast 
     on a bombed-out causeway. Our driver was ticked off, all 
     right, but the thought of offering money did not even 
     occur to him. As he grumbled I thought of telling him how 
     lucky he was.
       The aid agencies like Eritrea because it is honest and open 
     and because the money doesn't get sucked up into stray 
     pockets along the way. They also like Eritrea because, in a 
     very rough neighborhood, it is going against the tide of 
     religious and tribal sectarianism. Next door, in Sudan, a 
     jihad of revolting proportions is being waged by the Muslim 
     fanatics in Khartoum against the Christians and animists of 
     the South, and against secular ideas. You know the story in 
     Somalia--no longer a state and barely a nation. In Yemen, 
     across the straits, a political and social bloodbath.
       The two big tests for Eritrean society will be, and already 
     are, the overcoming of tribal and religious fissures, and the 
     emancipation of women. Both tasks are made easier by the 
     nature of the war Eritrea fought, a people's war which 
     involved different tribes and faiths, and both sexes, 
     fighting together. Although the country is divided into nine 
     ethnic groups and their main religions, the solidarity that 
     has emerged from this is more than rhetorical.
       For example, both the Muslim mufti and the Coptic Christian 
     patriarch agreed recently to go on the airwaves and say 
     clearly that the practice of female circumcision and 
     infibulation was not sanctioned by Koranic or biblical 
     teaching. What a tonic it was to sit with Sheikh Alamin Usman 
     Alamin, the grave and courteous mufti, and to hear him speak 
     about the need for schools to be free and nondenominational, 
     about the importance of elevating the status of women, and 
     about the necessity of cooperating with Christians. ``We were 
     brothers in the movement for independence,'' he says, ``and 
     brothers we will remain.'' In any case, as he adds, the rule 
     of one religion is no guarantee of harmony: ``Look at 
     Yemen''--as he speaks, most of the Yemeni national airline is 
     parked on the tarmac at the Asmara airport, hiding from the 
     civil war in Aden--``they are all Muslims there.''
       This broad-minded, open style found its counterpart in 
     Abune Philipos, the Coptic Orthodox prelate, who pointed out 
     something I had already noticed--namely the way in which any 
     village of size could boast a Christian church and a mosque 
     side by side. Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodoxy has the 
     advantage, also, of dating back to the fourth century A.D. 
     and thus of being entirely African.
       In Eritrea, one does not encounter the fateful combination, 
     consisting of resentment of Europeans and envy of Europeans, 
     which disfigures so many other countries. The president, 
     Issaias Afwerki, drives around in a jeep and, in his first 
     address to the Organization of African Unity, accused that 
     body of being a waste of time. The constitution is being 
     written slowly and carefully, to avoid either offending the 
     traditionalists or giving in to them too much. The press is 
     fairly free. The refugees and exiles are in one case 
     clamoring and in the latter case often hurrying to come home. 
     There are no photographs of leaders or politicians in public 
     places.
       It can be done, even in a country with almost no natural 
     resources, and this multiplies the reproach that is involved 
     in contemplating the rot and crash and failure elsewhere. We 
     need to seek out the Eritreas, and the Professor Sellassies 
     in all countries, and clasp them to us. It's no good dealing 
     with Africa through the medium of intermittent horror 
     stories, half-cocked panicky interventions, high-handed 
     economic relations, debt schedules, cultural blinkers, and 
     the shipment of expensive weapons. The resilience of Africans 
     (and what resilience) and the resources of Africa (and such 
     resources) can yet be combined in astounding ways. The 
     alternative is warned against by a UNICEF statement, which 
     concluded, ``The abandonment of hopes for the continent would 
     mean the writing off of the talents, aspirations and 
     potential of one eighth of mankind, both now and far into the 
     next century.'' We have no right to amputate the human family 
     in that way.

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