The Challenge for Africa (24 page)

Today, genuine medicine men and women could play an important role in helping contemporary Africans understand the problems they face as they straddle modernity and tradition, the West and their native cultures, and as they try to meet the challenges of determining their identity in relation to other communities. But, because Africa has few psychologists in the Western sense, the choices for Africans are stark: they are either mentally sound or in a mental hospital. Of course, people can seek counsel from their priests or imams, but because it is generally still believed in Africa that one cannot be either
a good Christian or a good Muslim while being open to traditional healing, the individual's turmoil may not be fully acknowledged or addressed. It will take many years for African authorities to accept the presence of traditional healers again, just as it has taken many years for them to concede that traditional mid-wives can fill certain gaps in the nursing profession, so that all women are provided with basic hygiene and assistance when they give birth.

It is within this context that reports, for instance, of older women in Kenya being burned alive because they have been accused of practicing witchcraft, or of children in Angola and Congo who have been cast onto the streets because their families believed them to be possessed by the devil, should be interpreted. This persecution expresses a dichotomy common to many Africans caught between tradition and modernity.

Behind these phenomena lies a trauma sadly familiar to many of the world's poor. As in other regions, many African societies are in tumult, only just emerging from years of civil war and with economies, communities, and families fractured or decimated. When calamities follow one upon the other—disease, war, poverty, or famine—it is not surprising that the reactions can become outsized and extreme. In such circumstances, a desperate people may turn on their own, hoping they will have one fewer mouth to feed by demonizing a family member, or ridding themselves of what they perceive to be a “cursed” existence.

As I have suggested, the transition Africans underwent from indigenous practices and worldviews to imposed spiritual and cultural systems from elsewhere was rapid, and in many cases incomplete. Consequently, while many Africans want to say they don't believe in the traditional way of life, their understanding of, say, the Christian doctrine of suffering and redemption is often nonexistent or only skin deep. For many Africans, Christianity is as full of devils and good and bad angels as their
“old” religions were. They believe they can hear and communicate with God, speak in tongues, and prophesy. These facets of religious expression remind them of the supernatural elements in their own traditions. As I see it, in both cases people are torn between belief systems they don't fully understand.

As Pope John Paul II also recognized, cultures are dynamic, changing with time and place, interacting with other cultures and evolving and adapting: people should not have to become walking museums. Progressive cultures help their peoples survive and pass their wisdom and a sense of destiny to the next generation. African cultures, of course, cannot return to where they were. Too much has been lost, and reverting to a pre-colonial mind-set—even if it were possible—would not serve contemporary African peoples well as they struggle to move forward. What Africans need to do, as much as they can, is recapture a feeling for their pasts that is not solely filtered through the prism of the colonialists. This will not be easy, because five hundred years is a long time to struggle against all forms of oppression. Nonetheless, just as Africans can honor sacredness beyond that contained in the Bible or the Koran, so they should not be embarrassed that, for instance, their languages were not written down or that their weapons against the colonial forces were spears. Even the British, who perfected stainless steel and the Gatling gun, once discovered themselves faced with an enemy—in this case, the Romans—who possessed greater technological skills and superior weaponry, and whose cultural achievements dominated their own.

Traditional technology and artifacts reflect the creativity inherent in those societies. When that sense of creative potential is lost, the innovative part of the brain is left dormant, making it more difficult to think in new or pioneering ways. The latent creativity lacks a medium for expression. This is why Africans should honor and record, in written form for current and future generations, the fact that their communities
once knew how to make spears, and take the ingenuity and skill employed in forging these weapons and apply them to developing products that are more relevant to today's needs.

Culture could be the missing link to creativity, productivity, and confidence. Ultimately, it is critical that Africans dispense with what might be called the culture of forgetting that has enveloped Africa since colonialism and re-collect their history and culture, and the
kwimenya
that comes from both. Without them, Africans lack a foundation on which to build for the future.

THE MODERN
African state is a superficial creation: a loose collection of ethnic communities or micro-nations, brought together in a single entity, or macro-nation, by the colonial powers. Some countries include hundreds of micro-nations within their borders; others, only a few. Kenya has forty-two; Nigeria, two hundred and fifty; Cameroon, at least two hundred; Mozambique, more than ten; Gabon, more than forty; Zimbabwe, fewer than ten; and Burundi and Rwanda, three. The largest of the micro-nations can have populations in the millions; the smallest usually number only in the thousands. With a few exceptions, it is these numbers that determine political power.

Most Africans didn't understand or relate to the nation-states created for them by the colonial powers; they understood, related to, and remained attached to the physical and psychological boundaries of their micro-nations. Consequently, even today, for many African peoples, a threat to their micro-nation or those they consider their leaders within their micro-nation carries more weight than a threat to the nation-state. At the same time, each community hopes to have access to the resources of the nation-state should someone from their micro-nation assume political power (particularly the post of president or prime minister). In this way, the community will have, as is said in Kenya, its “time to eat.”

In turn, the elites know that to acquire and maintain power they need the support of their micro-nation and therefore must
demonstrate loyalty to it. The result has been a kind of political schizophrenia. While expressing allegiance to the nation-state, African leaders have repeatedly used their identification with a micro-nation to divide their citizens from each other and control them, to the detriment of the larger macro-nation. They have downplayed the role of micro-nations' traditional cultures in a modern society, even as they have used ethnicity to maintain their hold on power. In doing so, they have mirrored the colonial era's tactics of divide and rule with disastrous effects. Consequently, what the leaders and some politicians in the rest of the world call “tribal conflicts” have almost nothing at their root to do with “tribes.”

(It is general practice in discussing micro-nations in developing countries to refer to them as “tribes,” although this is not the case in developed regions of the world when ethnic communities are being described. In my view, the word “tribe” is not really a pejorative, but it has taken on negative connotations. “Tribes” are generally seen as primitive or backward, comprised of people who have not completely realized the concept of the nation. The use of the word “tribe” becomes a way of looking down on some communities, pushing them to the margins rather than seeing them as part of a larger whole. In the Yugoslav wars, by contrast, the term “tribe” was never used to describe the ethnic factions. Micro-nations may be very small, but they have all the characteristics that define nationhood, notably shared common customs, physical boundaries, origins, history, and language. Calling micro-nations “tribes” suggests, falsely, that they have not yet arrived at nationhood.)

When conflicts arise in Africa, they are almost exclusively over governance, corruption, poverty, and a perception that national resources are not distributed equitably. It is true, of course, that when a micro-nation is aggrieved, it naturally calls upon its own for support. This is probably no different from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, when Serb leaders rallied
Serbs, and Albanian, Croat, and Bosnian leaders did the same with their ethnic groups. For those who share the same ethnic heritage but need to differentiate themselves even further, there are smaller groupings, like clans, as in the case of Somalia.

Some scholars of modern Africa have suggested that keeping the ordinary people focused on the interests of their micro-nation, and fomenting suspicion and competition between them, prevents them from perceiving the stark class and wealth divides that characterize African societies, with a small elite at the top and large numbers of poor at the bottom. This reality is obscured from the people to the advantage of political leaders who incite hatred and violence between micro-nations and facilitate the violence through armaments and logistical support. Even if the conflicts temporarily give the members of the micro-nations some sense of power, in the long run they are marginalized, experiencing neither progress in development nor self-knowledge, as their leaders and their cronies bleed their nation dry.

What tends to happen is that one micro-nation judges itself worthier and therefore more entitled to power and the wealth that goes with it, and claims that the other micro-nations are less entitled to both. The colonial authorities are responsible for some of these self-perceptions by favoring one group over the other and, when they left, putting power in the preferred group's hands. In much of independent Africa, the leaders of micro-nations, who often form a ruling clique, are constantly competing for power and privileges. If they are not included in the sharing of these, conflicts can easily develop when they mobilize their often poorly informed communities in the name of their micro-nation and become, in effect, warlords. The mass media, both nationally and internationally, however, usually report such conflicts in Africa as arising from ancient
tribal animosities. Such misconceptions and misrepresentations obscure the real source of the violence.

Two examples that perhaps encapsulate the challenge of the micro-nation within the nation-state, the complex relationship between micro-nations and their leaders, and the possibility of African solutions to African problems, are the ongoing conflicts in Chad and Sudan and what occurred in Kenya in the run-up to, and immediately after, the 2007 general elections.

In August 2008, I traveled to Ethiopia, Sudan, and Chad as part of a delegation organized under the auspices of the Nobel Women's Initiative, which I and five other women Nobel peace laureates founded in 2006. Our mission was fivefold: to highlight and bring further awareness to the massive violations of women's human rights, especially with respect to displacement, rape, and destruction of homes; to reinforce efforts to bring about participatory governance in Sudan; to give encouragement to women's groups working for peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction in southern Sudan; to stand in solidarity with all those working at the front lines to bring about peace with justice in Sudan and the region; and to call upon citizens throughout the world to take individual and collective action to build a sustainable peace and to insist that the international community implement existing commitments to peace and justice in Sudan.

The delegation included 1997 U.S. Nobel peace laureate Jody Williams and the American actress and activist Mia Farrow, both of whom have been diligent in trying to bring the situation in Darfur and Chad to the world's attention; Gloria White-Hammond, an American pastor and cofounder of an NGO, My Sister's Keeper, which is supporting girls' education
initiatives in southern Sudan; Qing Zhang, a Chinese labor advocate; and a small group of other colleagues.

During the mission we met with government officials; the staffs of international relief and development organizations working on the ground in Sudan and Chad, including the office of the UN high commissioner for refugees and the World Food Programme, the staff of which are doing a heroic job in refugee camps under extremely harsh conditions with limited resources (including food) and at considerable risk to their own safety; local women's groups in Juba, southern Sudan; and refugees from Darfur, living in camps in Chad—some of them for years.

In Ethiopia, it was clear that senior leadership in the African Union was troubled by the political and humanitarian situation in Darfur, as well as the International Criminal Court's 2008 indictment for war crimes of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir. AU officials were concerned that the ICC was applying indictments only in Africa, because of the perceived weakness and vulnerability of its leadership. At the same time, an impasse had been reached over the composition of a larger, better-equipped, and more effective peacekeeping force for Darfur.