ONE fascinating and encouraging aspect of human affairs is that nothing and no one is ever entirely good or evil. Case in point: my discussion last week of the past half-century of Africa's political history undoubtedly left a totally bleak impression.
A senior academic at the University of the West Indies took issue with the case I tried to make. Professor Rupert Lewis of the Department of Government noted that I failed to talk about the evolution of democracy in several African nations. I take his point, and while I still believe there is very little to celebrate, the picture in the mother continent is by no means one of total gloom and despair. There are, indeed, several encouraging examples.
Tanzania, which has suffered significant economic setbacks because of misguided, failed experiments, has never strayed from the path of political stability, unlike several of its eight neighbouring countries. The spearhead of its independence, Julius Nyerere, left office voluntarily and his successors have all been chosen democratically. The country was known as Tanganyika until 1964, three years after it severed colonial ties with Britain. That's when it merged with the neighbouring island of Zanzibar.
While it is a functioning democracy with regular elections, Tanzania is effectively a one-party country, with the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi holding well over 90 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly. That is not, though, the result of political repression. Interestingly, the constitution requires political parties to have women comprising at least 20 per cent of their representatives. And Zanzibar has its own assembly responsible for matters peculiar to the island.
On the other side of the continent, Ghana started out with considerable promise but quickly descended into economic chaos and political morass. Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister and then president of the new republic, had been influenced by agitators like Marcus Garvey, CLR James and WEB Du Bois. He never achieved his dream of uniting Africa but played a significant role in founding the Organisation of African Unity, which became the African Union eight years ago.
Nkrumah fell into the common trap of the personality cult, calling himself Osagyefo (The Redeemer) and engaged in a number of ambitious projects which, unfortunately, came to naught. The Americans, feeling that he had become a liability, engineered a military coup in 1966, the first of several ending with the seizure of power by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings in 1981. Rawlings later ran for office and won the presidency, re-winning it until he was prohibited by the constitution. Since then the country has had peaceful changes of government and appears to have settled into a state of stability.
Then there's South Africa, where a handful of descendants of Dutch and British settlers ruled the roost for a considerable part of the 20th century in a quasi-democracy only for their benefit. The black people, along with the "coloureds" and a relatively small number of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, made up the overwhelming majority of the population but had essentially no voice. The Boers, as the Dutch settlers were known, played the Cold War game to the full, accusing anyone who opposed their diabolical schemes as "communist" and throwing them in jail.
At one point almost the entire senior leadership of the African National Congress was in prison, but through a steadfast belief in the rightness of their cause and stern discipline, they held their heads high until the system ultimately collapsed under its own weight and from tremendous domestic and international pressure. Nelson Mandela, a man of supreme sagacity, moral courage and tremendous grace, emerged unbowed after more than a quarter-century of hard prison time to lead his country into the fold of truly democratic entities. South Africa still has many problems - widespread unemployment, lack of prospects for hordes of young people, high urban crime and sub-standard housing in many places. But after observing, since 1994, the way South Africans have embraced the vote and all that goes with it, there's hardly any doubt that democracy has taken root. Mandela's example and leadership have inspired and encouraged people all over the continent.
Rwanda is another case where we can see more than glimmers of hope. Sixteen years ago, tribal hostilities boiled over at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Members of the Hutu tribe, who had long harboured resentment against the smaller Tutsi ethnic group, lashed out and slaughtered Tutsis and Hutus who objected. There had been previous cases of internecine brutality, albeit on a much smaller scale, in neighbouring Burundi, which shared the same ethnic makeup as well as German and Belgian colonial rule. The slaughter went on for 100 days until the exhausted nation collapsed from sheer fatigue. The outside world looked on and did nothing.
Rwanda has slowly and painfully clawed its way back to some semblance of normality and last week held its second presidential election since the massacre. The man who led the rebuilding, Paul Kagame, was elected to a second seven-year term. His years have been marked by high growth and a significant increase in foreign investment, the building of infrastructure and tourism. But all is not roses; he ran almost unopposed and has come under criticism from opposition figures and human-rights groups for suppressing dissent. We will have to wait to see how this one will turn out; critics say Kagame is a mixture of nation builder and autocrat.
There are other cases of stability and reasonably good governance, but the overall picture remains dire.
Perhaps the most egregious example is this one: on June 30, 1960, the Republic of the Congo came into being as an independent country, ending 52 years of subservience to King Léopold of Belgium. (I said last week that the new Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was leader of the French, rather than the Belgian Congo; several re-reads failed to catch the error). It was a stormy passage and the beginning of decades of even more stormy times. Two mineral-rich provinces, Katanga and South Kasai, decided to secede.
The place was overrun by armed men in uniform - Congolese army and resistance groups, Belgians as well as blue helmets from a UN emergency force mustered to try to maintain some order. The fabled UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold made four trips to the Congo to try to procure peace and it was that quest that led to his death. In September 1961, his plane crashed in neighbouring Northern Rhodesia, which became Zambia upon gaining independence from Britain. Three inquiries failed to determine whether the crash was the result of an accident or hostile action.
Belgium, the United States and other Western countries connived to get rid of Prime Minister Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu. The eventual victor was Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, head of the secessionist movement in Katanga. The first two had set their country on a socialist path while Mobutu was deemed friendly to the west. He turned out to be a monster of enormous proportions - establishing one-party rule, a personality cult, widespread infringements of human rights and a kleptocracy of unprecedented proportions. He was eventually overthrown in 1997, but the wars continued, with forces from neighbouring countries coming across its borders to settle scores with their own refugees.
All these wars have cost the lives of almost five and a half million people, a toll dwarfed only by the Second World War. Truces and peace treaties have not stopped the brutality.
Clearly, while there are positive developments to applaud, the tasks facing Africa's leaders are truly monumental.
keeble.mack@smpatico.ca
August 14, 2010
jamaicaobserver
