Africa is not what we think

The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free

by Alex Perry (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015)

The “Rift” is …

… the Rift Valley that cuts through central and north-east Africa, a vast region which was the cradle of human pre-history. It is where our hominid ancestors lived and died, leaving traces – like Lucy in the Omo valley – which show us that we all came “Out of Africa”.

… a shorthand for Perry’s analysis of the very different patterns of human civilisations that arose in Europe and in nearby Africa. Europe was small and crowded, driving societies towards clear boundaries and identities (by language and ethnicity) leading to the relatively recent invention of the nation state. Africa, by contrast, is vast and for most of its history when significant kingdoms and empires grew and flourished that meant they rarely interacted, so that political boundaries were unnecessary. Influence and control just diminished further from the Centre or was divested to local chiefs and community leaders. The vastness of the continent meant there was ample room and resources for hunter-gatherer societies, in contrast to the rest of the world where large animal species were hunted to extinction soon after humans arrived.

The “Rift” is …

… the chasm in perceptions of Africa between the West and Africans themselves. Our media portrayals of the 50-plus countries of sub-Saharan Africa is often a uniform mush of lazy out-of-date stereotypes. Corrupt dictators, warring “tribes”, diseased and starving children – these are the tropes that appear again and again, like the images of sad, fly-bothered children staring out of the latest emergency appeal. Yet the 21st century is very different. The fastest growing economies in the world (at least half of the top ten) are consistently found in Africa. Half a billion people working their way out of poverty is not “Newsworthy” however. And so, we cling to the old stories, often oblivious to the demeaning and infantilising attitudes they feed, and the blatant racism that is thereby overlooked.

No armchair scribbler

Perry is a journalist and writer who has sought out some of the most perilous and unstable places to do his research. He has been an eye-witness to war and famine and corruption, not as a distant observer, but has met poor and rich, leaders and the mis-led, and he has seen the inside of prison cells and been in fear for his life, for his pains. The book documents the author’s experiences and reflections on several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, from Guinea-Bissau in the West to Somalia in the East; from South Sudan in the North to South Africa, where he has his home.

Undeniable ugly truths

In South Sudan Perry observes the culmination of a relatively new potent political phenomenon: “robust humanitarianism”. This rapidly emerging movement was invented during the Biafra crisis in 1960s Nigeria, with the advent of Western aid agencies. The PR tropes of starving kids unlocked donor resources and launched sincere well-meaning adventurers out of a protest culture and into and aid industry that 50 years later has morphed into an interventionist US foreign policy. Together with UN aid agencies the NGOs became nation builders, as Juba became the capital of a brand-new, if prematurely born independent state. They wage war for peace, or campaign for sanctions to bring about regime change, or withhold food to starve “terrorists”. The result in each case is deaths of innocents, ruination of marginal economies and man-made famine. Disaster by the hands of Do-Gooders.

His experience across several conflict regions shines a light on the impotence of UN “Peace-keepers” (who do anything but intervene on behalf of the people they were sent to protect); and on the disillusionment of those dedicated to new-found freedom and they face the reality of political rivalries and violent vested interests which seek to maintain IN-stability! After the horrors of Kosovo, Srebrenica and Rwanda, inaction and disengagement seem unthinkable, and yet the utter failures in practice of the high ideals of the UN and other NGOs suggest the outcomes are much the same. Or they are possibly worse because these apparently intractable problems are magnified by a complex web of dependency on external “help”.

And the consequence is that the UN and foreign aid policy leaders begin to openly advocate for a New Colonialism: a “trustee state”, a “protectorate” under Western supervision. It is absurd that the rich West seem to be revisiting the high-minded racism of the Berlin Conference of the 1880s, to carve up Africa for European exploitation. I shared Perry’s anger over these plans laid bare. The case study of South Sudan is also a remarkable story of how Western celebrities are perpetuating the myth of African impotence and the need for a “white saviour”: this is also the tale of George Clooney and the “pre-failed state”.

Did we fight for this?

Alex Perry’s home is South Africa, so his reflections on that country’s politics are especially insightful. He interviews key people in the ANC and opposition, as well as being familiar with the social and living conditions for people in all strata of society. He charts how dysfunctional the ANC became because of disagreements about whether Mandela was right in seeking reconciliation over justice for the wrongs committed under Apartheid. Given the current parlous state of affairs in South Africa, it cannot be claimed that things turned out well. From these home thoughts he extrapolates to address one of the great paradoxes of post-colonial history in Africa: how do successful freedom fighters make such bad leaders? Think Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe (although he points out how poorly our western media have portrayed him – this is a useful corrective). But to put it bluntly, in order to fight an unjust regime, they had to put themselves outside of the law, often aligning themselves with gangsters and smugglers in order to fund the struggle. A life of law-breaking is not easily shrugged off when they become the lawmakers.

The “Rift” is …

… above all what Africans are achieving for themselves, forging societies and economies on their own terms. They are not relying on the imposed values and structures of the past and are not accepting the tyranny of post-colonial “bullies” – the Big Men whose leadership was founded on being the dispenser of gifts to their dependent peoples – as vehemently as they fought the tyranny of Western colonialism itself. Entrepreneurs in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya are leapfrogging 20th century infrastructure to meet the needs of people with an information revolution: mobile phone technologies providing banking, enabling new local and regional markets, re-greening deserts and fighting climate change. The Rift is the breaking of moulds, a newly found confidence, a freedom from much of their historical baggage. It is a continent that is still very much a Work in Progress, but with the power to increasingly shrug off the obstacles thrown up by a West that hasn’t yet caught on. Don’t be duped by our negative media peddling lazy stereotypes: this could be Africa’s Century.

Elsewhere

• Telling Africa’s story – Welcome (grandpops-bookshelf.co.uk) – Europeans have created ideas of “Africa” from their own prejudices or exotic imaginations. But underlyingly, it’s economic exploitation that perpetuates these myths.
• Africa’s Long Road Since Independence by Keith Somerville (Penguin, 2017) – another writer to wrestle with the messy history of developments and set-backs.
• Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: Monarchy, Revolution and the Legacy of Meles Zenawi by Gerard Prunier and Eloi Ficquet (editors) (Hurst & Co., 2015) – time marches on and Ethiopia is into an era defined by the mould-breaking yet highly contentious prime minister Abiy Ahmed, but the heavyweight (and often academic) studies in this book open up the complexity of even recent modern history. Of course everything is not as simple as we think!
• BBC iPlayer – Ethiopia: Caught in the Crossfire – BBC iPlayer link to a short documentary about the appalling human cost of the Tigrayan conflict. So much human potential, broken and scattered and starved. Some parts of the world seem to revisit tragedy so often it seems like a stuck record, but Perry’s book shakes us out of that despair: we can look on and weep, but many Africans are already forging a better future.