The Africans (63 page)

When white rule ends in South Africa—it will; the only question is how violent the ending will be—there seems to be no earthly reason why black Africa cannnot come to grips with its problems. Tribalism will become less important as Africa becomes more urbanized. The leadership will become more competent as an increasing number of young, educated Africans demand a share of authority in setting national destinies. The thin elite class that has established itself largely through corruption and nepotism will give way to a growing middle class that is legitimately founded on individual merit, education and honestly earned money. A new nationalism may even evolve, one that is based not on the flush of victory over colonialism but on the pride of national achievement.

As our Kenya Airways Boeing 707 lifted off from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (recently built for $60 million by West Germany), heading through the darkened skies past Mount Kenya and over the Kenyan Highlands, where whites and blacks who had fought one another in the Mau Mau war now farmed side by side, I thought about how many times in so many countries I had heard Africans say to me, “Give us time. We are young.”

It seemed a reasonable request.

L
ATE
IN
1984 my editors in Los Angeles asked me to return to Ethiopia to cover the famine that was carving a swath of death across Africa.
The Africans
had been banned in Ethiopia—and denounced as a “Communist book” in the parliament of neighboring Kenya—and I doubted whether government authorities in Addis Ababa would grant me a visa. They dawdled over my request for a month, finally granting me entry only after my friend Mohammed Amin, a noted African filmmaker, told the man in charge of issuing visas, “Come on. Let him in. You know what he wrote is true. The disaster is all around you.”

I flew from Cairo to Addis Ababa. Nothing seemed to have changed in the five years I had been gone, except that the Ethiopian capital looked shabbier. I checked into the Hilton Hotel, which had been virtually empty on my last visit. Now it teemed
with relief workers from around the globe. Among them was a sprinkling of American movie stars, politicians, coiffured television notables and college-age disaster junkies. The famine that threatened the lives of 7 million Ethiopians had become a celebrity event, and Ethiopia had caught the fancy and stirred the guilt of the outside world, as African emergencies always do briefly before compassion burnout sets in. On the elevator going up to my room, I met a gaunt gentleman some journalists still identified as a comedian. He was the social activist Dick Gregory, and he said he was going on another fast to call attention to the famine. He had fasted so often during the last twenty years that I couldn’t figure out how he had managed to stay alive.

The head of the Ethiopian relief effort, Dawit Wolde Giogis, was an articulate soldier-spokesman for the Marxist government, who railed against the West in his speeches—and who would flee Ethiopia the next year and take up residency in the United States. He wasn’t in his office when I called, so I made an appointment to see his assistant. He and I chatted amiably for a while, then he reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, took out a copy of
The Africans
and asked me to sign it. “I shouldn’t have this, you know,” he said, “but I think it’s pretty good. We need to be reminded just how bad things have gotten and why … even though it hurts when a non-African says it.”

Indeed, I am not sure I initially fathomed just how ominous and imminent was the specter of disaster that hovered over the continent. By any yardstick, the forces of man and nature buffeting Africa have extracted a toll in suffering more severe than I had dared imagine. Millions of people have been relegated to surviving at the mercy of pop charity events and international donors. Sub-Sahara Africa’s indebtedness has grown to $130 billion, representing more than 200 percent of its total exports. AIDS, an unknown disease when I left Kenya in 1980, has struck 50,000 Africans, and the World Health Organization estimates that as many as 2 million other Africans may be symptomless carriers of the virus. Malnutrition and hunger is killing 5 million children a year and permanently crippling another 5 million. Sixty percent of all Africans, according to the World Bank, are consuming fewer calories each day than thought to be necessary for a fairly normal life. The continent’s population continues its unimpeded rise toward the frightening figure of 1.6 billion by the year 2025. Of the
forty-six countries south of the Sahara, only giant Nigeria has a gross domestic product larger than that of the city of Hong Kong. As Tanzania’s former President, Julius Nyerere, put it after touring his country’s state-controlled sisal industry, “If I called back the British today to look at their former estates, I am sure they would laugh at us because we have ruined their estates.”

Many of the changes in Africa since
The Africans
was first published have been cosmetic. Upper Volta changed its name to Burkina Faso. Nyerere retired as president but maintained ultimate control by retaining his leadership position in the sole political party, and thus still presided over a country that had become one of Africa’s most unfortunate shambles. President Samuel Doe of Liberia learned to appreciate the perks of office and started driving around dirt-poor Monrovia in a $134,000 silver Mercedes-Benz limousine while espousing fiscal responsibility for all others. And exiled Idi Amin, whom I reached on the phone one day at his home in Saudi Arabia, told me, “What Uganda needs is democracy. Of course, I can see that democracy would not work immediately in Uganda. Security is very bad there now, and there are many problems. Democracy takes discipline. But a tough person with military knowledge like me could teach the people discipline and prepare them for democracy.”

Other more substantive changes caught me by surprise. Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiri, whom I had respected as a statesman of real stature, surrounded himself with mystics, became a fundamentalist Moslem, seemed to go daffy, let the country slip back into civil war and was overthrown. President Sekou Toure of Guinea died, and within days his people destroyed every statue and every memory of that tough socialist who had been at the forefront of Africa’s independence movement. The experiment with democracy and civilian government in Nigeria ended abruptly with two military coups d’état. Mozambique signed a treaty of nonaggression and good neighborliness with South Africa. Libyan troops invaded Chad and were driven back by the French.

It was the famine, though, more than any single event, that symbolized Africa’s “Decade of Decline.” It spoke of an unbearable future and of the need to alter course dramatically. And it left me with an indelible portrait of suffering when I awoke in a tent one December morning in Alamata, 375 miles north of Addis Ababa,
and knew I was part of a nightmare. I listened and I shuddered. In the last moments of that chilly, windy night, when all the valley was as still as death and the foreboding darkness seemed eternal, the wailing began, softly at first, like the distant chant of ghosts. It was a high-pitched, eerie howl that sliced through the night, gathering strength until it lingered and echoed over the mile-high valley—thousands of voices united in prayerful pleas for mercy and forgiveness, voices that mourned the dead and begged the privilege of living another wretched day.

When the half-light of dawn reached over the stone-faced mountains that surrounded the valley, the wailing passed, giving way to the husky coughs of children. As far as I could see stretched a scene resembling a medieval battlefield—legions of peasants, barefooted and rag-wrapped, a vast civilian army conquered by famine awaiting its daily ration of porridge.

The word had spread quickly. There was food in this feeding center run by World Vision International, a Christian humanitarian organization. There were doctors. Sometimes there were blankets. The people had come, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, from their mud homes deep in the mountains, crossing parched earth that once bore bountiful harvests of grain, trudging past corpses and carcasses, and finally, after many days, settling on this hillside where the morning dew was heavy with the smell of sickness. “Their suffering brings out a certain grace in them,” said Sister Bertilla, of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, as she stirred a huge cauldron of porridge. “They do not complain. They do not ask why. They do not try to take more food than they are entitled to. These are beautiful people.”

About 200,000 Ethiopians had died of hunger by the time I reached Alamata. I walked over to a wooden medical shack where 800 or so people squatted and sprawled in an orderly, patient line, knowing that a Western doctor would soon appear. A frail old man, carrying his wife on his back, moved unsteadily toward the group. His legs wobbled and gave out twenty yards short and they both tumbled to the ground, remaining there for several seconds until he, summoning all his strength, began crawling. He pulled his wife behind him.

The political irony of Ethiopia’s disaster was that Haile Selassie had been deposed in 1974, at the age of eighty-one, after trying to
cover up a famine that had swept through his ancient land. Now the uncompromising Marxist soldiers who had overthrown him were faced with a similar dilemma, and they, too, were culpable. They had tried for months to hide the famine from the world while the death toll mounted. They devoted 45 percent of their national budget to defense and security, and they had spent millions of birrs staging an extravaganza to celebrate the “accomplishments” of their ten years in power. What’s more, they had long since severed their links to the industrialized West that had the resources to help and had tied their fortunes to the Soviet Union, which had little to offer except guns and ideology. They had abrogated the first obligation of any government—the responsibility of feeding its people.

Despite Addis Ababa’s infatuation with Marxism, the West mounted a $3 billion rescue package for Ethiopia and Africa’s other drought-ravaged countries. Moscow managed to send not much more than a couple of planeloads of rice. The relief effort averted what could have been the worst peacetime disaster of modern times, but no sooner had the rains returned and renewed crops begun to grow than a plague of billions of locusts—described as potentially the most serious infestation in half a century—cut through Africa from Ethiopia to Senegal, devastating the harvest. Relief specialists estimated that it would take three years to eradicate the ravenous locust swarms, which were so thick they turned the daytime skies black. Each of these swarms could eat enough crops in a day to feed 50,000 people for a year.

“Sometimes I think we are cursed,” an African doctor told me, and there were moments when I thought the same thing. But I think that Africa’s “Great Famine” of the 1980s may be a watershed, the event that future African generations will look back to as the turning point. It jolted Africa into a new realism, and the world into an awareness that we cannot pay attention to Africa only in times of catastrophe. For the first time, really, African leaders met to examine—and admit—the failure of Africa and the bankruptcy of some of their policies. What they addressed were the fundamental problems underlying poverty and stagnation. And that may be the most significant step toward eventual self-sufficiency that Africa has taken collectively since independence.

In Addis Ababa, Africa’s heads of state summed up their shared dismay during an Organization of African Unity summit in 1985.
“We are most gravely concerned.” they said, “by the continued deterioration of our economies, which have been severely affected by the deep world economic recession and penalized by an unjust and inequitable international economic system. This situation has been aggravated by unprecedented severe, persistent drought and famine and other natural calamities, such as cyclones and floods. These developments, added to some domestic political shortcomings, have brought most of our countries near to economic collapse.”

In Zimbabwe, representatives from twenty-nine countries gathered to discuss ways of curtailing Africa’s uncontrolled population growth. It is hard to imagine that happening a decade ago. In Tanzania, Madagascar and Somalia, government leaders accepted the failure of nationalization policies that had stifled individual incentive with artificially low price controls. Nigeria announced an austerity budget, and Ghana, still under the stern leadership of Jerry Rawlings, adopted Western-inspired economic reforms that cut inflation from 123 percent to 10 percent and helped the gross domestic product grow by 5 to 7 percent a year. The Ivory Coast and Cameroon continued to enjoy political stability and economic expansion. A soldier by the name of Yoweri Museveni took over in Uganda, and Ugandans were amazed that his disciplined young troops did not rape, loot and go on drunken rampages. For the first time in a decade, a measure of stability returned to that ravaged nation.