The Africans (54 page)

The herd, frightened and enraged, thundered across the highlands’ plateau like a fleet of tanks, crashing through trees, fences, even villages. They gathered in a great milling mass, trunks raised in trumpet, then spun and rushed again. The earth trembled and entire villages fled the advance. Dust clouds swirled into the early-morning mist and the herd turned up the wooded valley, the calves struggling to keep up, the bulls and cows scrambling just ahead of the helicopter that hovered at treetop level with police siren screaming.

Darting to and fro overhead, the British-born warden Tedd Goss used the helicopter as a trail boss used his horse in an Old West cattle drive. He nudged the herd along, heading strays back into the group, picked out suitable terrain ahead and gave commands to the African elephant drovers who slogged along on foot.

“There’s a mob trying to break off to the south, chaps,” he radioed. “I don’t want that. Get some men over there … Okay, Bongo One, that’s far enough with the vehicles. Leave them there to block … Phil, what have you got up there?”

In his command post two thousand feet above, Phil Snyder, a warden from Berkeley, California, peered from the window of his single-engine plane, a floppy brown hat on his head, his long brown hair tied in a bun, a roll of toilet paper on the control panel to cope with a nagging cold.

“What you see down there,” Snyder shouted to me over the roar of his engine, “is the cutting edge of a conservation conflict that’s just beginning. You’ve got Kenya saying it wants to preserve its wildlife and, at the same time, committing itself to becoming self-sufficient in food production.

“They’re ambitious goals. But are they compatible? As the marginal land gets settled and farmers and wildlife compete for what little land is left, Kenya is going to have to make a national choice. The question is, Can Kenya accommodate both?”

History would seem to make the answer evident. The epitaph for Africa’s wildlife may, in fact, already have been written; from the frontier of America to the plains of Africa, there has always been only one winner when the needs of man and animal collide. As I write this, Phil Snyder is preparing to leave for a new job in the
Sudan, his position in Kenya having been “Africanized.”
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The European wardens in Kenya are being eased out of their jobs too, and soon the Kenyan Tourism and Wildlife Ministry will be entirely in the hands of the men who control the country’s poaching operations. Another chapter of white influence in Africa is ending and the result will be that the continent’s wildlife cannot hope to survive outside the national parks. It is sad, but that is the future.

Thus far I have spoken only of Africa’s economic problems. But what of the solutions?
Are
there even solutions? The answer, I believe, is an unqualified yes—if the West is willing to help and Africa is able to capitalize on its tremendous assets by mounting a serious campaign to promote national instead of individual advancement. Just think how much has been written about Saudi Arabia’s flashy future. Yet that country has just one limited resource. Africa has oil too, but it also has great quantities of other minerals and the endless farmland a continent needs to be self-sufficient. Saudi Arabia is only now establishing the infrastructure—ports, highways, communications, government services—that a country must have to develop. Africa has an infrasructure, however shaky, established nearly a hundred years ago by Europe. Saudi Arabia was isolated from the outside world for centuries. Africa has been exposed to it for generations. And while Saudi Arabia is painfully hot and full of sand, most of sub-Sahara Africa is blessed with a favorable climate and great beauty and could become a multibillion-dollar vacationland for tourists from around the world.

If you look at the handful of African countries that have combined economic progress with political stability since independence—the Ivory coast, Kenya, Malawi and Cameroon—four common denominators are apparent. First, all four countries were ruled for at least the first fifteen years of nationhood by their founding presidents, each of whom was authoritarian bt not wildly repressive. (Malwai’s Hastings Banda fell just short of being a tyrant, though.) Their governments had a continuity that enabled national
politics to be formed and pursued, and obviated the need for major expenditures on defense and internal security. Second, all four continue to use a large number of Europeans in the private and public sectors. By moving cautiously in the “Africanization” of their economies, the countries maintained a level of expertise in key positions and were less apt to be run on a trial-and-error basis by untrained Africans. Third, all placed a higher priority on economic pragmatism than on political ideology, and none had an alliance with the Soviet Union or even a dalliance with Marxism. There were economic incentives for people who produced, and individual achievement was encouraged, not stifled. Fourth, all made agriculture the backbone of their economies, and only when their farmlands were productive did they turn their attention to developing a light-industrial base.

The United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa has set a goal of Africa having one fiftieth of the world’s industrial output by the year 2000. That modest accomplishment would represent four times more productivity than Africa had in 1980 and would require an investment of $250 billion to build the necessary highways, ports, factories and vocational training facilities. That is an unlikely sum for Africa to muster, but the continent can still take important steps toward fulfulling its economic potential if three objectives are established and met; (1) increase farm production and decrease baby production; (2) allow a new generation of national leaders with the integrity, wisdom and courage to act on behalf of the majority; (3) form regional economic communities that would absorb the weak states and give strength to the unit as a whole.

The idea of regional groupings is not new. Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda were linked at independence in the East African Community, which many economists viewed as one of the world’s best models of regional cooperation. The three countries shared a common airline as well as postal, transportation and customs facilities. Their currencies were convertible within the community, and residents of one country could move freely throughout—and work in—the member states. In West Africa, fifteen states of varying linguistic and political backgrounds have been loosely joined since 1975 in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have formed what is known as the Mano River Union. And in 1981 Senegal and The Gambia established a union called Senegambia.

What sounds good in theory, however, is difficult to promote in practice. The communities have not worked out, for the same reason that a Cairo-Cape Town transcontinental highway has never been built: cross-border rivalries are stronger than the desire for neighborly cooperation. The East Africa Community was dissolved in 1977 due to political differences between capitalistic Kenya and socialistic Tanzania and militaristic Uganda. President Julius Nyerere closed his border with Kenya—it was still sealed in 1982—in a futile attempt to get European tourists to fly directly to Tanzania instead of transiting through Kenya. But all he managed to accomplish was the loss of valuable trade routes into Central Africa for both countries and the reduction of tourism in all East Africa. For just that reason, the oft-discussed idea of a transcontinental highway—similar to, say, the Pan American highway in South America—is an idea whose time has not yet come. Presidents would close it down out of petty jealousies, soldiers would blockade it to collect duties, governments could not afford to maintain it. Until Africa can develop continental transportation and communication networks, and can achieve regional harmony, most states will continue to find that it is cheaper to trade with Europe than with one another.

As for Africa’s failing currencies, the solution seems fairly straightforward. Individual national currencies should be discarded in favor of four or five regional ones that are closely linked with a European monetary system. This, in fact, has already proved effective. Thirteen French-speaking countries in Africa use the Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) franc, a currency backed by France which is as convertible at a Paris bank as an American dollar or a British pound. There is an interesting historical aside here that shows that the system benefited both Africa and Europe. In the fifties and sixties, when France needed hard currency for its own development, all foreign exchange flowing through the thirteen countries or colonies eventually ended up in the central bank in Paris. Theoretically, the African governments could draw foreign exchange freely to meet their own needs, but the system and the issuance of import licenses was controlled by Frenchmen and little hard currency found its way back to Africa. Thus, the Ivory Coast sold its coffee to the United States for American dollars, which went to Paris and were used for France’s development. CFA francs, in turn, went to the Ivory Coast and were used to buy French goods.
Neither party lost: Africa had a convertible currency to buy the goods it required, and France had $300 million a year that it otherwise would not have had access to.

Today much of the foreign currency goes directly to Africa. But because the CFA franc is convertible in France—and not in the United States or most other European countries—the thirteen African nations are obligated to buy mostly French goods. If the transaction sounds one-sided, just remember that countries like Guinea and Ghana can’t buy anything at all abroad with their sylis and cedis.

Undeniably, though, the West’s post-independence contributions to Africa have been paltry and often misdirected. The billions of dollars in aid money thrown haphazardly into Africa have accomplished no more than President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty did in America. They have created a welfare-state mentality, and governments have come to realize that there is no need to do anything for themselves because someone in Stockholm or Paris or Washington will do it for them at no cost. Poverty has become the engine that drives the African economy.

Why should Africa worry about producing more food when a Western government will ship in all the grain it needs as soon as some president hollers “Emergency!”? What the West should do is formulate a Marshall Plan for the Third World that places the emphasis on producing more and wasting less. It should help every country, regardless of its ideological persuasion, because to isolate the radical states only drains the cohesiveness and potential growth of the region as a whole. To use aid—as the United States does—primarily to reward those who share Washington’s political views serves to heighten cross-border rivalries and retards Africa’s development as a unit.

The West holds the key to Africa’s development. But for Africa to seek a closer economic alliance with Europe, for presidents to throw away the paper notes bearing their portraits in favor of a regional currency, would require a few people to swallow some national and personal pride. It would, though, be a significant move toward economic stability and regional collaboration. It would strengthen the weaker states and enrich the already buoyant ones, such as Nigeria. Some critics undoubtedly would say the suggestion is a neocolonial one. But if it helped the continent realize its awesome economic potential, wouldn’t Africa really be stepping into the future instead of slipping into the past, as it is doing today?