The best thing that can be said about today’s Live8 concerts is that – unlike its predescessor Live Aid – because it is free it will not give another African dictatorship easy cash to buy weapons to continue a brutal civil war.
Enthusiasm about “Africa” has become deeply rooted in western culture. But where does this Africa actually exist? In Botswana or in Tanzania? These are two functioning democracies. Or is it in Senegal? or in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
Who knows. I doubt this Africa can be located anywhere else than in the imaginatory landscape of the west, where ethno-enthusiasm blinds out a rational analyis of a continent far more complex than the easy to imagine ever repeated image of the crying hungry child. In our days the crying hungry child is also an HIV- infected orphan.
As Matthew Parris argues brilliantly on today’s Times:
Pity poisons the continent when it stifles criticism. As leaders of the G8 gather to discuss aid, they should be pitiless in their resolve to make pariahs of black Africa’s cruel and rotten governments. A ruling class of greedy men, sheltered by a popular culture of gawping passivity in the face of political swagger, is suffocating the people of Africa and neither tears nor money nor rock music should be our first response. Rage, not rock, is called for.”
Parris’ analysis is fully supported by the experience of the author of this diary who lived for more than a year in Tanzania and travelled to numerous African countries.
More from the article:
But the truth is otherwise. Everywhere on the continent there are people making a go of things. Everywhere there is a struggle between energetic self-improvement and an enervating corruption. There are good people and good ideas in African politics, fighting for survival. Across much of the continent the structures of administration are still in place and leaderships know how to work them — too often to line their own pockets. Chains of command and supply, the collection and exchange of information, the imposition of order and taxation may be shaky but they exist. It is not all like Congo where anarchy rules. Most of Africa is not anarchy; it is tyranny.
But tyranny is not a bad place to start. Tyranny can be mended. Kleptocracy can be disinfected. The nuts and bolts of State are there and fitfully the machine can be made to work. “Governance” does not need to be created, but reformed, and there are men and women there capable of doing it.
We should be unequivocally on their side. Yet the invading army of spanking new, top-of-the-range, white, air-conditioned Toyota Land Cruisers and their palefaced, safari-suited occupants sent in by aid agencies and non-governmental organisations, are not on the reformers’ side. NGOs and relief workers’ instructions are to keep out of politics and engage constructively with the political elite.
Their talents lie far from the world of trade, commerce and industry. They talk more to civil servants than to slaughtermen and metal-beaters. Their thickness on the ground, I notice, is in inverse proportion to their distance from an international airport, European-style supermarket and decent sewage system. Heaven only knows what these well-paid and fashionably sunglassed recruits to “a career in Development” are in Africa for but it is not to bother the political elites. If you work in development in Africa and are not bothering a political elite you have some serious questions to answer about meaning and direction in your life.
We rightly protest at the cavalcades of Mercedes for black governments whose national debts we must now forgive. But perhaps we should remind ourselves that hard men at Toyota, too, have done well out of war and famine in Africa: the development industry grows fat on Africa’s failure, and peasant faces pressed to the windows of smart restaurants in Nairobi may make little distinction between the black politicians and the white aid-executives sipping imported Scotch. […]
Swaggering African tyrants stay in power because the small people in Africa passively tolerate, even in some cases sneakingly admire, their leader’s greed and rascality. The cult of the Big Man is the tap-root of Africa’s suffering. That culture has to change. We can help it to change.
frica’s leaders should be the laughing stock of the world, and ordinary Africans should know it. Where is the satire, where the anger, where the mockery and derision, that these brutal boobies deserve? How many f***s has Bob Geldof directed at their heads rather than ours? Only Alan Coren of this newspaper ever dared to subject an African leader, Idi Amin, to sustained ridicule; and progressive-minded readers in Britain didn’t approve.
But it is patronising to think these criminals and crackpots can’t help it because they are black. They should be exposed to universal hatred, contempt and ridicule. We should sneer, rail and scoff, as we did at the leaders of apartheid South Africa. The populaces before whom these jackasses puff themselves up should know — as every South African used to know — that they are led by outcasts.”
As people will celebrate their solidarity today on the streets of the G8 capitals and have a good time being emapthic, they will again miss the point:
Again the African continent will be portrayed as childish and dependend on “our” good will. Again, Africa will be portrayed as “one”. This is a compley and diverse continent: much more complex than Europe or the Americas.
Live Aid in the 80s suceeded in wiping out the imagage of African diversity and replaced it with the image of African’s as need child, thus reproducing an almost colonial sentiment.
Still, nothing seems to have been learned: If you look at Rwanda before the genocide – then the country with highest density of NGO/development aid proliferation – almost no one grasped the genocide comming. Now, the same density of NGO’s – mostly busy examining and accompanying “Reconciliation” in effect stabilizes one of Africas most immoral and authoritarian dictatorships.
I personally remember all this people in Safari outfits (the Jack Wolfskin pseudo-individualism), running through Arusha and Dar es Salaam, pretending they were better able to define how Tanzania should be run. None one them would even be near the political power of a Northern hemisphere country, but in Tanzania, a development worker in the early 20s has access to the very core of the power structure. Because they bring money and they are white.
The African states – may they be democratic or through authoritarian ways – deserve to be treated individually and seriously. Their dictators shall be named and treated accordingly: On no other continent, the world would embrace so many authoritarian rulers. Africa should be embraced for its modernities. When did you see the last time a decent documentary about a big modern African city and not a tiny village? The best HipHop concerts I have ever seen were in Dar es Salaam. Kampala, Uganda is even better.
Africa is not a dream space where people in the west can project their wish for exotism. It is a real continent with real peoples and it is time to take them seriously.
As long as the African continent remains the doll’s house of international politics, I see no hope.
Cross Posted at dailykos