Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Note: not ‘what’s wrong with Africans?’ 30 years ago I gave a similar
talk to a promotion class of army, RAF and naval officers. One opened the
questioning afterwards with the observation, ‘Of course what you were trying
not to say is that in fact they have smaller brains than ours.’
I deny that. Absolutely. Let me tell you why. In these post-modern
days all historians are in any case supposed to declare their personal feelings
and prejudices, ‘where they are coming from’. So here’s where I come from,
what I’ve learned about Africans.
I first met Africans in 1953, as a schoolboy, spending my first of three
summer holidays in Kenya, where my father had just taken a job. I was
petrified by the Mau Mau guerrillas and their bloodthirsty, bestial ways; and
thought my father’s house-servants to be over-grown children. Like most
other Europeans at the time I thought Africans half-savage and half-child. It
was the colonial view.
My views changed utterly in 1956, when I started my national service
as a subaltern in the King’s African Rifles. A regiment that had ‘white
officers with black privates’. ‘Oh, how exotic!’ as the lady at the officers’
mess cocktail party is supposed to have exclaimed.
What did I learn of Africans from the KAR? That they were twice the
soldier I was, my platoon sergeant, Odera, especially, and still more my
Company Sergeant Major, Maingi, who had helped to drive the Japanese from
Burma in ’44-45. Samuel, my wireless operator, found the BBC overseas
programme on my platoon wireless set, with a designed range of only 50
miles, so that I could listen to Beethoven and Max Beerbohm after sunset,
running down my batteries so that my company commander, many miles
away, could no longer give me orders. I became ever more dependent on my
platoon. Always cheerful, brave of course but also wise, utterly dependable,
and fantastically good company around the camp-fire, ‘my askari’ treated me
as their promising child—just as I had treated my father’s house-servants.
Sergeant-Major Maingi just about saved my life.
My education in the qualities of Africans continued after I had come
up to Trinity in ’58 and then started on my first teaching job in Dar es Salaam
in 1964. I have always counted myself lucky to have had Africans as my first
students. My English had to be simple and direct—it was likely to be their
third language at least—but the concepts one dealt with could be every bit as
complex as one would try to share with undergraduates later, here, in
Cambridge. They were eager to learn, quick to have an informed opinion. I
have never been prouder than when, towards the end of a course I was
teaching on the Russian Revolution, they could scarcely contain their laughter
at the historical interpretation served up to them by a couple of CPSU party
hacks who had called in at Dar on a cultural cruise.
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Why does Africa present this sorry picture? Are there root causes?
There are over 50 states in Africa, each with their own history, and all
of them different. Historians are professionally nervous of generalisation: we
leave that to philosophers, economist and political scientists.
But I have no option: I have to generalise—about Africa’s history. As
an historian I naturally think it matters. Different histories produce different
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peoples—which is not to say that people cannot act to make the future
different from their past.
To make 4 points:-
• That a critical awareness of the justice or injustice of personal
relationships is perhaps unusually strong in Africa, a trait ingrained in
people who have historically lived in households very directly
responsible for organising their own subsistence on their own land,
with their own labour, conducting their own litigation, doing their own
marketing—whose households in many respects remain family firms.
• That, largely in consequence, African states, throughout history, pre-
colonial, colonial, and post-colonial have been relatively weak.
• That the politics of identity in Africa have been unusually complicated
because, contrary to popular belief, Africa’s tribes are modern
creations, full of new patriotic energy—not resentful, fading, residues
of a primitive past.
• And, finally, that the timing of Africa’s economic transformations has
been particularly unfortunate. Economic late-comers need strong
connections and protections, the very things Africa has not got and
which the rest of the world is not keen to give.
Africa’s past then, has not been kind to its people’s future. Yet
Africans are the most cheerfully optimistic people on earth. How far they
have good cause to be is a question to which I will return.
Let me then turn to the first of my four points, the very sharp African
sense of personal equity and inequity, and its ambiguous implications.
1) At bottom, Africans are both too independent-minded and yet too
inclined to depend on personal patronage for their own good. A paradox! Not
so much an ingenious paradox such as tied poor dutiful Frederick to the
service of the Pirates of Penzance but a perhaps more crippling one. Let me
unravel:
a) independent-minded. Historically, Africa was underpopulated, with
a population of only 200 million in 1900; and was for the most part, stateless
in consequence. African kingdoms were pretty weak: if they tried to impose
on their citizens, the latter could too easily vote with their feet and move
away. Ronald Robinson, who taught me African history half a century ago,
used to say that the glory of African history was its free peasantry. But that
could also be the continent’s curse. In the past it meant that when African
rulers wanted dependent labour they had to capture and enslave it. And it
means today that the ambition of most Africans is to live as independent
producers, subject to no boss. It is still the case, in West Africa, that 75 per
cent of the economically active population is self-employed within their
family firms, in agriculture, trade, or artisan manufacture.
Africans are too bolshie to be easily ruled, unused to the disciplines of
obedience, more obedient to the self-disciplines, male and female, and proud
honour, of independence, expressed best at the level of the family, ruled by
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European missionaries. And of what does one read in the Bible? Of a chosen
tribe, the children of Israel, subject to colonial enslavement not once but twice
and yet capable of redemption. To read of this in one’s own language was
altogether more immediate than reading of it in the language of one’s colonial
ruler, English or French. Ethnic nationalisms could be much more deeply
rooted than territorial nationalisms (Ghanaian, Nigerian, Kenyan and so on)
and every bit as modern.
So, where have we got to thus far, before I turn to my final point, the
timing of economic change?
We have a tradition of bolshy independence among people difficult to
rule, of clients dependent upon but deeply critical of patrons, demanding of
them the generosity that permits dependent followers to become independent
allies. We have historically weak states, gatekeepers of export economies
rather than entrepreneurs of a national market. These states each incorporate
dozens of newly self-conscious ethnicities, tribes. Patron-client relations are
most trusted, and most demanding, within tribes, conducted in a local
vernacular.
These are not promising materials for the construction of nation-states,
able to agree and then enact rational policy for the common good, responsive
to a common public sphere.
Add to this the fact that for the past half-century Africa has
experienced the fastest population growth in world history, so that half of
Africans are under the age of 16. If they are not adequately educated, as
fewer of them now are, and gainfully employed, then never has firepower
been so readily and cheaply available to arm their discontent, carried by
superannuated Ukrainian pilots in superannuated Antonov transport planes,
nor so profitably employed as by their ethnic political patrons, keen to tip the
balance of electoral advantage with a spot of instructive violence.
But 4) and finally, to turn to economic history, productive job creation,
the only alternative to boy soldiery or ethnic ‘warriorhood’, is far from easy in
the Africa of today. For half a century, in the middle and later 20th century,
Africa began to prosper, as the supplier of primary agricultural commodities
and raw materials to a Europe that spent extravagantly on war and recovery
from war. But in the 1970s Europe discovered substitutes for Africa, whether
through technological change or by protecting its own expensive farmers.
Only recently has Africa found a new economic importance, with the world’s
increasing thirst for oil, and China’s inexhaustible appetite for raw materials.
But are these new export roles also good foundations for national
economic development? It seems doubtful. Continued ‘gate-keeping’ seems
the more likely.
To take the first new role, economists commonly talk of the oil curse.
Oil is produced by skilled outsiders using imported materials, it employs few
locals and has almost no local multiplier effects. Politically destructive too, it
gives a cheaply provided rental income to local rulers, a fabulous supply of
patronage that both puts clients uncomplainingly in one’s pocket and devalues
most local form of enterprise. And as for China, secondly, Africa may supply
its raw materials, but how could Africa ever compete with China—or India—
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in any more sophisticated productive task? And more generally, too, the
current rules of world trade impose liberal, non-protectionist, disciplines on
African producers while permitting America to subsidise the cotton that
Africa could otherwise produce, and Europe to protect its farmers against
cheaper competitors. New producers have historically needed protection
against those who innovated earlier. That historical lesson has been reversed
in Africa’s case, to Africa’s grave disadvantage.
What are all those underemployed and, by now, under-educated,
young Africans to do, to achieve that adult independence and honour that,
culturally, they crave? Should one be at all surprised at what seems to be a
rising tide of violence, in which politics and criminality appear to be
increasingly close allies?
The only things on which Africa has stolen a march on the rest of the
world have been, in the distant past, the evolution of humanity as a whole—
we are all Africans by origin—and, it seems about 50 years ago, the
emergence of HIV-AIDS. AIDS is worst in Africa because it started there,
among a poor population subject to many other fatal diseases. And so it grew,
‘a silent epidemic’ in the heterosexual population at large, ‘unnoticed until
established too firmly to be stopped.’1 Outside Africa, it grew later and
among vocal minorities who demanded action. In Africa action is now much
more difficult to take, among the generality of a poor population.
All these elements of their history help to explain why Africans seems
to have the cards stacked against them. And we are told that global warming
will be particularly damaging for Africa in the future, a continent in which
tropical sun and rains have always made agriculture still more of a gamble
than in other parts of the world.
So, is there nothing to hope for?
Richard Dowden, for many years the Independent’s Africa
correspondent before he was the Economist’s Africa editor and, now, the
Director of the Royal African Society, has just published a wonderful book
called Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles.2 He gives three causes of
hope:
i) the mobile phone, that allows Africans to transcend
their inadequate infrastructures of communication, to
permit new democratic solidarities to form, and to offer
producers better market intelligence and bargaining
power;
ii) the emergence of a new, assertive, middle class,
impatient of corrupt and inefficient government, with
the potentially productive anger of similar European
middle classes in the nineteenth century; and
iii) a new cultural confidence that allows Africans, perhaps
more than before, to live comfortably with the new
1
John Iliffe, The African Aids Epidemic, a History (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), 10.
2
London: Portobello Press, September 2008.
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