World Policy Journal
Volume XV, No 4, Winter 1998/99

In Defense of Afro-Pessimism

By David Rieff

 

It has been almost 40 years since the decolonization of sub Saharan Africa began in earnest, and more than 30 since the independence of the continent was largely achieved. But what began in such hope—independent Africa will be “a paradise” was the way Kwame Nkrumah, one of the architects of Pan Africanism and Ghana’s first president, put it in 1957, and he was anything but alone in his optimism—had already, by the late 1970s, given way to an ingrained pessimism about Africa’s future. This gloom soon became pervasive not only among Africans themselves but among the continent’s well wishers and advocates abroad. By the end of the 1980s, what had come to be called Afro pessimism dominated the debate. In this view, while Africa’s promise remained undeniable—given the energies of its peoples and the vast resources that lay beneath its rich soil, from oil and minerals to 40 percent of the world’s potential supply of hydroelectric power, it could hardly have been otherwise—the continent was seen as the one part of the world for which the future was likely to be far worse than the past.

Afro pessimism was all too amply grounded in Africa’s postcolonial realities. The continent’s living standards had risen during the first decade after independence but had begun declining in the 1970s, the same period when much of the rest of the poor world—the “South,” to use the term of art of development experts and United Nations conférenciers—began to make real progress toward sustainable development. In particular, the contrast with East Asia, which, by all the normal indicators of social and economic progress, had been at roughly the same level of development as Africa in the early 1960s, could not have been more pronounced and more ghastly. Between 1960 and 1980, much of East Asia was literally transformed, and some countries, notably Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, either shrugged off underdevelopment entirely or became, both from an economic and a social of point of view, complicated mixtures of development and underdevelopment.

During the same period, most African countries grew poorer, and most Africans find themselves worse off today than they were at independence. Some indicators, like educational enrollments and life expectancy, have stagnated. Again, the contrast with East Asia, where, for example, average life expectancy rose ten years between 1980 and 1994, could not be more striking. Even food security became an issue in Africa, since the continent’s ability to feed itself became more and more of an endemic crisis in many areas by the 1980s. In terms of real incomes, even factoring in the improvements in the economic situation of some parts of the continent in the mid 1990s, the decline is equally acute. And whatever gains in agricultural production have been achieved, they have been more than offset by the vast increase in population, so that less food is available per capita in 1998 than in 1968.

If the agricultural sector is weak and growing weaker, industrial development outside of South Africa, which is a partly developed economy and thus by the standards of the continent anomalous, is all but nonexistent. In macroeconomic terms, Africa’s only important role in the world economy remains that of a producer of commodities—principally oil, minerals, and strategic metals. And the fall in the prices of oil, gold, and such commodities as palm oil that began in the 1980s has only further exacerbated the African situation. In fairness, there are statistics that show that in the 1990s foreign investment in Africa is once again increasing. However, when disaggregated in such a way as to show the distribution of real capital flows rather than percentage increases in foreign investment, this seems to represent mostly further investment in the energy and mining sectors and in business ventures in postapartheid South Africa than a massive expansion of international corporate investment in the continent.

Another “Lost Decade”

In an era when the volume of world trade has been growing steadily, and in which capital is mobile in a way that arguably it has never been before, it is hardly surprising that some investment flows have been directed toward the continent. However, Africa’s overall share of the volume of world trade has been declining, despite what seemed like a sharp uptick in 1995 and 1996. African growth rates have mirrored this trend. The steady growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) in 1995, 1996, and 1997 was impressive, particularly since Africa had virtually negative growth in 1993. But as a result of the Russian and Asian economic crises, the effects of which have churned through the world economy, Africa’s real GDP in 1998 will grow no more than 1 percent. The prospect looms of a return to the catastrophic economic conditions of the 1980s—the period known among economists as Africa’s “lost decade.”

That Africa would have been severely wounded by a global economic contraction is hardly surprising, since, as even its staunchest supporters have long conceded, what little recovery there has been on the continent remains extremely precarious. There are many reasons for this, but certainly the gravest is that little of substance has been done to ease the crushing burden of the continent’s debt. Sub Saharan Africa owes over $227 billion, $379 for every man, woman, and child on the continent. By itself, the full servicing of this debt amounts to 25 percent of sub Saharan Africa’s total annual export earnings.

All of this has rendered Africa enormously dependent on official development aid and humanitarian assistance, which rose steadily from the 1970s to the early 1990s. By the 1980s, this aid accounted for between 10 and 20 percent of the gross national product (GNP) of many African states. In the 1990s, however, as donors have lost confidence in the efficacy of a development model that has been tried in one form or another since the 1960s in Africa and yet cannot be shown to have substantially improved the situation of ordinary Africans, these aid budgets have steadily been scaled back, both in percentage terms of national budgets of donor countries as well as in percentage terms of GNP of these countries. In the United States, they have fallen to historic lows. And even in donor countries where there is a greater consensus on the need for aid, governments have been increasingly unwilling to disburse funds. There are signs that multilateral aid from such institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) may soon start being cut as well. By most criteria, Africa has received more aid than any other region of the world. And yet, for all the very tangible good it has done, aid has clearly had a far more minimal effect on Africa’s development than either donor countries or recipients ever imagined.

What Went Wrong

There are probably as many explanations for why things went so wrong in postcolonial Africa as there are commentators. Some have located the root of the problem mainly in the despoliations of the colonial era. Others have blamed the “personalized” state, as it is sometimes known, of the Nkrumahs, Kenyattas, Mobutus, and Senghors, and the kleptocratic habits of the politicians who succeeded them. The artificiality of Africa’s borders doubtless played a role in impeding political development. Alongside all these explanations, there is the colder fact that Africa entered the world economy at a moment when neither cheap labor nor mineral riches that were really all it could bring to the economic table sufficed—given the corruption of most African regimes—to lead it to sustainable economic development. Some development officials and African intellectuals, while acknowledging this, claim that the problem all along has been that the Western model of modernization that Western donors and bankers and African elites embraced was wholly inappropriate for Africa.

What is clear is that all the work of the development experts who have crisscrossed the continent over the past three decades, and all the initiatives—from donor governments, from the United Nations, from various foundations and think tanks—that have been put forward in their wake have not produced a model capable of lifting the majority of Africans out of the terrible poverty in which they find themselves. If the failure of the World Bank’s controversial Structural Adjustment Initiative in the 1980s probably spelled the end of the old development model, the realization that humanitarian aid could both destabilize fragile societies, as arguably it did in Somalia in 1992, or contribute to the prolongation of war, as seems to have happened over the last decade in Sudan, left those eager to help in a quandary. Development had been a false dawn; so had humanitarianism. But the question of what to put in their place remained. The needs have not gone away. They are as pressing today as they were when the basic structures of development assistance were erected in the 1960s.

Ironically, some, including James Gustave Spaeth, the former head of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), have suggested that aid flows are being cut back at precisely the moment when what Spaeth called “an effective new architecture of development cooperation” has been put in place. The United Nations, of course, along with the Netherlands and the Nordic countries, has long been Africa’s most reliable and impassioned advocate. Not for nothing did the late Anthony Parsons, the former British ambassador to the United Nations, dub the world organization a great “decolonization machine.”

But however much U.N. officials have tried to persuade major donor governments that, as Spaeth put it, development aid is surely “the price we should willingly pay to live in a civilized or civilizing world,” such views carry even less weight today than they did in the past, in part because the memory of colonialism has largely faded, and with it the residual appeal of the West’s guilty conscience. The mere fact that an increasingly impotent and financially derelict United Nations has been Africa’s court of last resort offers eloquent proof of the continent’s marginalization. Over the last two decades, where Africa has been concerned the United Nations has gone from being a decolonization machine to an alleviation machine, unable to do much, as the term itself implies, to address the underlying causes of the African calamity.

The Lost Continent

Secretary generals could warn about events in Africa—Boutros Boutros Ghali said it risked becoming “the lost continent”—but little has been achievable in practical terms. The New Agenda for the Development of Africa and the Tokyo Conference for the Development of Africa are only the latest in a long line of initiatives with little or no prospect of making an appreciable difference in many African lives. All the talk about the world’s shared responsibility for Africa falls on deaf ears these days, or, worse, in an era of lachrymose politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, eager to demonstrate to all and sundry how deeply they feel everyone’s pain, what we see and hear are sympathetic statements and almost no concrete help. Moreover, the enduring expectations of many African leaders that one of these days Western governments will come to view the colonial period as imposing some special obligations not only have been counterproductive but have served as a smoke screen for many dictators to mask their own crimes and ineptitude.

The Dutch and the Scandinavian governments have bucked this trend to a considerable degree, agreeing to increase their official development assistance budgets to 1 percent of annual national GNP. But for the most part, donor governments have tended more and more to write off development aid as being at best an unsatisfactory stopgap and to insist that first the Africans must look to themselves.

Interestingly, by the mid 1980s, many African political leaders and commentators themselves had begun to draw similar conclusions. Blaming the West had become the dodge of military dictators and local demagogues, and as such it steadily lost credibility as a catchall explanation for Africa’s woes. Already in 1978, Edem Kodjo, the former secretary general of the Organization of African Unity, declared that “Africa is dying.” What was taking place before everyone’s eyes could no longer be denied. In 1986, in his book, The Africans, Ali Mazrui wrote that “things are not working out in Africa. From Dakar to Dar Es Salaam, from Marrakesh to Maputo, institutions are decaying, structures are rusting away.” The political reaction, particularly once apartheid South Africa, the last bastion of white supremacy on the continent, had fallen was not long in coming. In 1992, Nelson Mandela remarked that many Africans “are irate at their leaders for having betrayed them.” Not long after, the Ugandan leader, Yoweri Museveni, looking back on the legacy of dictatorship, corruption, economic stagnation, war, and poverty, said that Africa had “lost 30 years to the sergeants.”

Marketing Africa

And if this was true, then the question was whether, now that in at least some African societies people were facing their problems squarely, there was a way out for the continent. In all societies, there is a lag time between diagnosis and the first efforts at cure. But in a surprisingly short period of time, a very different approach to African problems was adopted in countries from Mali to Burkina Faso, and from Uganda to Botswana. And almost overnight, it became possible for a reasonable person to believe that the Afro pessimism of most of the last two decades, seemingly so firmly grounded in African reality, might be giving way to something more hopeful. Despite the atrocities of the Rwandan genocide and the ongoing war in Sudan, the meltdown of Zaire and the deliquescence of the Kenyan political order, the first good news from Africa in a very long time has begun to make itself known. Slightly grandiloquently perhaps, Thabo Mbeki, the South African deputy president, could argue that Africa stood poised on the verge of a “renaissance.”

In Mbeki’s view, after so many false dawns, the turning point had finally come in Africa. Neither he nor the many African politicians and scholars, U.N. officials, and other foreign well wishers denied the scope of the continent’s problems. But they argued that the future was filled with opportunity. African leaders, they insisted, had finally recognized that they had to be the agents of change in their own society, and the soldiers who had ruled for so long were seeing the handwriting on the wall. Democratic elections were being held; military regimes were being dismantled; and a new and energetic civil sector of business groups, nongovernmental organizations, and independent media were coming into their own. A reconfiguration of the relations between the state and society, one in which the former would no longer simply prey on the latter, seemed underway, not just in a few countries along the South African border, but in many countries across the continent.

The undeniable fact that these social transformations were soon accompanied by demonstrable improvements in at least some economic indicators, above all the rise in growth rates, made it possible for the first time in a generation to entertain the entrancing vision of an Africa that was being remade both in the sense of business opportunities for foreign investors—the hard fact of our post Thatcherite times being that without that prospect the rich world rarely pays attention to the poor world for long—but also in the important and constructive sense of a rosier destiny for the peoples of Africa. All of Africa might still be poor, the argument went, and parts of the continent might still be in crisis, but with the end of the neocolonial, patrimonial state the last years of the twentieth century were also a time of tremendous promise.

An emblematic expression of this view can be found in the spring 1998 issue of this journal. In an article titled “The Other Africa: An End to Afro pessimism,” David Gordon, a senior fellow at the Overseas Development Council, and former congressman Howard Wolpe, President Clinton’s special representative to the Great Lakes region of Africa, wrote of an African renewal, fueled by both political and economic reform and led by a new generation of leaders committed to the democratization of their own societies, that had already yielded “a new sense of hope and possibility.” The ingrained Afro pessimism in Western Europe and North America, they insisted, was based more on ignorance and racial stereotyping, as well as on media coverage influenced both by these same biases and a tropism toward negative stories, and had little to do with contemporary African realities. “While Africa remains the poorest continent in the world,” Gordon and Wolpe wrote, “a number of African countries are already reaping the fruits of new market oriented institutions and policies.”

Beyond the factors of improving economic indicators and political democratization, their optimism, and that of the many outside observers who have expressed similar views in conferences and journal articles, is also grounded in the belief that the end of the Cold War may finally have put an end to Africa as battlefield—a condition that, in and of itself might have sufficed to stymie development in the subcontinent. They have insisted, rightly in my view, that one of the reasons the fledgling states of postcolonial Africa never fulfilled the promise of the immediate period after the departure of the British and the French was that they had been enlisted, whether by the United States and its allies or by the Soviets, as proxies in the Cold War.

Today, however, the great powers—even, in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the French, for whom maintaining a francophone African sphere of influence was vital to the claim that France remained a world power—are no longer so wedded to their local clients. This has left the political field open to local leaders who have either vied for power peacefully, as in Mozambique, or violently, as in Uganda, where Museveni started an insurrection in the bush without fearing that his effort to overthrow the Obote dictatorship would engender opposition in Washington or Moscow. In other words, the days when the road to democracy in Africa was routinely blocked by the CIA and the KGB seem to be ending.

Another False Dawn

Unfortunately, for all the promising signs that could lead an African or a sympathetic foreign observer to believe in the reality of an “African renaissance,” it is far more likely that the new “Afro optimism” is, tragically, yet another false dawn, based on little more than some promising but unrepresentative social developments, a move toward formal democracy that has not and shows no real promise of being translated into grass roots democracy, a brief and transient spike in Africa’s economic fortunes, and a vast overestimation of the qualities and commitment to democracy of a new generation of African rulers who, however different stylistically they are from their predecessors, are cut from very much the same basic mold—the African “Big Man.”

Here, African continuities are at least as striking as African discontinuities. It should be remembered, at a time when journalists and area specialists are trumpeting Africa’s new generation of leaders, that an earlier generation—Léopold Senghor in Senegal, William V. S. Tubman in Liberia, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and Sékou Touré in Guinea—received many of the same plaudits from outside observers. That alone should engender a certain caution. The fact that the leaders most often praised by Afro optimists—Museveni in Uganda, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Jerry Rawlings in Ghana—came to power either in coups or after a military campaign should be further cause for skepticism. Their talk of free markets and democratic openings should certainly not be taken at face value. Some may be sincere, but it cannot be overstressed that in this age of global capitalism’s high water mark, this is the talk donors now demand.

In any case, the outlook for an African revival does not depend all that much on whether or not men like Rawlings or Museveni are sincere. Afro optimists would concede that even the most positive cases of economic and political turnaround, which, in any case, look considerably less promising at the end of 1998 than they did in the middle of 1997, have occurred (with the exception of the admittedly anomalous case of South Africa) in small countries in subregions where the larger countries are in desperate trouble.

Uganda may be doing well by some criteria, but its much larger neighbor, Kenya, on which it remains economically dependent, is in free fall. Ghana has made considerable progress, but the situation of Senegal has deteriorated gravely in the past ten years. Surely the most fervent Afro optimist would be hard pressed to make the case that most of the largest African countries are making progress. When Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Kenya, and Angola are either in economic or political turmoil or actually at war, it is difficult to see how small neighboring states will somehow manage to shrug off the ripple effect. In terms of refugee flows alone, a crisis in one of the large states would almost certainly undo the progress of half a dozen smaller ones.

Moreover, the successes of those states that have shown progress are only relative, as the Afro optimists know perfectly well. After pointing to Ghana and Uganda as two of the most promising stories on the continent, Gordon and Wolpe note in passing that “neither country is back to where it was 25 years ago.” Again, it is possible that the transformation of at least some African states has been real. But without sustained economic growth, and some insulation from war, refugee flows, and humanitarian emergencies, it is open to question how long lived these transformations will be.

Most important, what the optimistic view of Africa’s prospects often glosses over is the degree to which all the transformations of the past decade were based on the assumption that it was feasible and desirable for Africa to be integrated into the world economy, and that the political and economic interest among rich countries in assisting in this process could be mobilized.

To a certain extent, the claims of Afro optimists can be viewed as a kind of marketing effort for Africa—part of the campaign to secure commitments from the rich world and overcome the negative images of Africa that are, as Gordon and Wolpe rightly point out, often the only ones Western audiences are exposed to. Not by accident did Thabo Mbeki first formally employ the term “African renaissance” at a speech to the Corporate Council on Africa’s “Attracting Capital to Africa” conference held in Chantilly, Virginia, in April 1997. To be sure, the boosterism, which viewed in a certain light is no different from that of any American elected official pitching his or her region to a business group, comes freighted with other appeals and admonitions. More often than not, talk of the reality of the African renaissance segues rapidly into accusations that to deny its reality is racist, and into assertions that whatever the economic prospects, there are moral obligations involved—a view with which, incidentally, I concur fully. But it is one thing to insist that we ignore Africa at our moral and their physical peril, and quite another to claim that things have taken such a radical turn for the better there.

Humanly, of course, this claim is not simply understandable; it does credit to the moral sensitivities of those who advance it. No decent person enjoys being pessimistic, nor should pessimism be wielded like a club, as it so often has been in the past by outsiders eager to write off Africa and to preclude engagement with the continent’s problems. And yet the proponents of Africa’s renewal have based their optimism on a set of assumptions not just about Africa but about the world in general that do not hold up well on closer examination. In particular, the American version of this Afro optimism seems to stem as much from important domestic policy considerations and from still deeper American preconceptions about how to address difficult political questions as it does from any profound understanding of the problems that will bedevil all efforts to mitigate the African crisis.

The domestic policy issues are obvious enough. President Clinton’s dependence on African American voters made both his visit to Africa in 1997 and the support he has repeatedly given to the idea that Africa is becoming again a region of great promise and opportunity a sound political move. In this sense—and, if anything, it is surprising how long it took for this to become a reality—Africa is simply taking its place as the latest international arena in which a U.S. president must be seen to be engaged for domestic political reasons, and Clinton’s assertion that what he saw happening on the continent was—what else?—“the beginning of a new African renaissance” hardly needs to be taken at face value. The tour made political sense for the president, and political sense for the many African American politicians who accompanied him and clearly found it to their advantage to be photographed with the president in the company of Uganda’s Museveni.

None of this is either surprising or especially objectionable. But to confuse it with substantive changes in U.S. policy toward Africa, or to imagine that any real engagement is likely to be forthcoming is pure wishful thinking. Unlike the British government under Tony Blair, the Clinton administration has not made debt forgiveness a public issue. The administration has supported one trade bill, the “African Growth and Opportunity Act.” The bill is couched in the lofty language of a new U.S. Africa partnership. In practical terms, however, though it makes some funds available to support private U.S. investment in the subcontinent and to underwrite the privatization of state owned industries, the bill is unlikely to make much of a difference to any part of the region outside South Africa. Because of its “trade, not aid” emphasis, it may have the unintended consequence of lowering the total amounts of humanitarian and development aid African countries receive from the United States at a time when U.S. foreign aid is at an all time low in percentage terms.

Optimism as a Governing Generality

In terms of direct U.S. political involvement on the continent, the Clinton administration’s preference in the last year seems to have been to give the young assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Susan Rice, who is a protégée of Madeleine Albright, something of a free hand to formulate U.S. policy on the subcontinent. But the fact that an assistant secretary is making policy is eloquent proof of how marginal Africa is in U.S. calculations. And Rice’s record is mixed at best. She failed to foresee the renewal of fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and badly bungled U.S. policy in the Great Lakes through her uncritical support of the Kagame regime in Rwanda in its efforts first to install Laurent Kabila in Congo and then to overthrow him. In fairness, even had Rice done a better job, she would still have been operating—as Secretary Albright herself operates—in the context of an administration whose focus has always been principally centered on domestic issues.

In a sense, the real U.S. commitment is less to Afro optimism than to optimism as a governing generality. For, as in so many other matters of public policy, where Africa is concerned that deep seated American attitude that assumes that every problem can be solved, and that, all things being equal, tomorrow will be better than today, plays a not inconsiderable role. President Clinton’s emblematic phrase, “I still believe in a place called Hope,” is relevant here. Indeed, if optimism is seen as a moral good—and most Americans do see it that way—and, more important, as part and parcel of any effort to combat a wrong or develop a new policy, then pessimism is itself a force, and a malign one at that. Obviously, the position of the Afro optimists can hardly be reduced to such crude millenarian nominalism, or to the more conventional polemical interest of making their case one that is politically difficult to rebut. But the issue of belief is central in society where the commonplace assumption is that reality is there for the remaking.

The dangers of this view can be identified in many areas of American politics, from immigration policy to the way political candidates now run their campaigns. Where Africa is concerned, the truth can be occluded, but in the long run denying it in the name of some politically correct wish to be hopeful will do no good. For there is simply very little reason to be hopeful. Neither the political situation as it actually exists, nor the prospects for the kinds of transformations that will have to take place in Africa, give one any particular grounds for such hope.

It is possible, of course, simply to insist that one must hope for hope’s sake, but in that case the debate acquires a metaphysical cast in which all questions of evidence and all reliance on probabilities have little relevance. Similarly, it is possible to make the case that it is important to pretend that things are going better, because otherwise the public in the rich world would lose whatever marginal interest it entertains in Africa. These may be correct judgments politically. They are, however, unsustainable intellectually. And surely if the situation in Africa is dire, and growing more dire by the day, then that needs to be said, not swept under the rug in the name of racial justice, or business opportunity, or simply the wish not to feel badly about a part of the world for which there are ample reasons to mourn and feel afraid.

Afro optimism is hardly an American phenomenon alone. Indeed, its particular configuration, I think, has as much if not more to do with the triumphalism that succeeded the collapse of the Soviet empire as it does with the deep structures of America’s feel good politics. In Africa itself, it was not simply the shame and misery of the past but the triumph of free market economic arrangements all over the world, made manifest by the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, that finally impelled a new generation of African leaders to reconsider their previous commitments. These beliefs, stemming as they did from the “state socialist” credos of so many of the founding generation of leaders that had led Africa to independence and of their Western allies, above all in Britain and Scandinavia, and at the United Nations, were revealed not so much as wrong than as irrelevant. In a world in which protected economies were not an option, and in which donor governments in the West were making continued aid dependent on democratic political openings and the establishment of free markets, responsible African leaders had little choice but to radically alter the way their societies were organized, even though the economic effects of protectionism and import substitution that predominated in much of Africa in the immediate postcolonial period were more mixed than is now commonly supposed.

Conventional Wisdom

In any case, Africa’s increasing dependence, in large measure because of the crushing burden of the continent’s international debt, on the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, made acquiescence to largely unfettered market arrangements pretty much of a foregone conclusion. Those countries that did not liberalize their trade and move toward democracy, however haltingly—states like Nigeria and Mobutu’s Zaire, which had natural resources that were so valuable that they expected to be left alone—were vulnerable to having lines of credit halted. And the donors could do this with a clear conscience because, by the mid 1990s, it had become an article of faith in the rich world, and, later, with the ascension of Kofi Annan, the first U.N. secretary general to appear to share the presuppositions of the globalizers, that open markets and democracy are the only possible avenues to prosperity. “No country can afford to opt out from the process of globalization under way,” Annan has remarked. His view unquestionably represents the conventional wisdom of the end of the twentieth century.

It was a view that was refined during the early and mid 1990s; in other words, during the high water mark of the East Asian miracle. And it had little patience for Afro pessimism. Asia, Afro optimists have often reminded their detractors, started from a similarly impoverished situation. Africa was best seen not as a zone of unextirpable misery, want, and war, but as an emerging market. And emerging markets were going to be the engines of growth in the twenty first century. “Africa,” in the emblematic observation of one South African entrepreneur, “is a huge market; it may be turbulent at times, but it eats and uses toiletries every day.”

Viewed in this light, the implicit argument of the Afro optimists was that it was impossible to be pessimistic about Africa because it was impossible, over the long term anyway, to be pessimistic about globalization. As Kofi Annan said, the globalized world is one in which opportunities “abound.” Even in the short term, Africa’s future was, if not assured, then certainly far from bleak—at least so long as Africans took steps to end the corruption and lack of democracy that was seen by Afro optimists as having stifled Africa’s development. To be sure, some of these arguments, notably on the part of U.N. officials, perhaps including Annan himself, can be seen as an effort to make the best of existing reality. After all, official development aid was being cut, and there was and remains little prospect that the trend will be reversed. Under those circumstances, what other hope was there for Africa except free trade?

And for a time, Africa’s macroeconomic development seemed to bear out the Afro optimists’ scenario. The problem, though, is that during the last year that same process of globalization that the Afro optimists had confidently predicted would lift the continent up has been the instrument of the undoing of much of the economic progress some countries in Africa saw during the middle of the decade. After the East Asian crash, Africa, with its ruined infrastructure (there are more telephones in Greater New York than there are between the Atlas mountains and Capetown), its lack of an industrial base, its inefficient airports and harbors, its political instability, the high crime rates of its cities, and the threat of AIDS, which has imperiled many of the countries—Uganda, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa—where economic and political developments have been most promising, could hardly compete with East Asian countries that were now aggressively lowering the already low cost of locating industries there. Nor, in a world economy from which a great deal of capital liquidity had suddenly been removed and much of which was on the edge of recession, was the kind of speculative investment that, even at its best, Africa was always going to represent in at least the short and medium terms nearly as attractive as it had been previously.

In short, despite the reforms many African countries have put in place—what some African leaders call “the emerging environment of good government and free markets”—the economic bad news from Russia and East Asia may lead to a situation where there are few businesses interested in taking advantage of them. Globalization had always been a mixed blessing for Africa. Despite some moves on the part of the World Bank that were undertaken once James Wolfensohn took over and imparted to it some of his own moral scruples to begin to address the problem of debt relief, the debt burden of even favored African nations has not been reduced or has been reduced very little. There has been one initiative to reduce (though not forgive) the debt of a few so called highly indebted poorer countries, and some moves to reward through debt forgiveness and IMF loans and credits a few states favored by one or another great power, notably Uganda and Ivory Coast. But in the main, the effort to find solutions has neither been consistent nor imaginative.

Globalization as Catastrophe

Afro optimists routinely argue that if Africa can only secure substantial investments, the continent will develop as Asia did. Presumably, they mean by this that African states will export their way out of their difficulties. Inside the continent, the dereliction of the infrastructure of most African nations makes trade difficult and expensive. Outside the continent, the picture is, if anything, even bleaker. On the macroeconomic level, the continent had already emerged a loser from the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. The common economic policies of the European Union, destructive as they were of privileged markets in former colonial powers for African goods, have been a further blow. Without increased capital flows that go beyond traditional investments in the mining and energy sectors, as well as some liberalization of access of African goods to world markets—none of which now seems likely to occur in the near term, again because of the changed conditions of the global economy—the mixed blessing of globalization may well prove to be a disaster for the continent.

Though it does little good for the people of the continent, the debate about Africa actually offers a way of looking at globalization from a very different perspective—one in which its virtues are not simply stipulated. Increasingly, it appears that the major power shift in world affairs, from the public to the private, and from national governments to private corporations and international financial institutions, that we know as globalization, will prove to be catastrophic for Africa. Afro optimists and pessimists agree that the continent missed out on the benefits of the first wave of globalization, while avoiding none of its costs. The question now is whether it is realistic to hope for a second wave. If not, Africa will have been put at the mercy of the markets. As Robert Hormats, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, has put it, “The great beauty of globalization is that nobody controls it.” But while that may be all very well for the winners, it is likely to be disastrous for the losers. And it seems increasingly likely that in this market driven world Africa will indeed be the great loser.

Who Will Pay the Price?

Development needs to be undertaken if we want to live in a world of human rights, a decent world. But do we? Or, more exactly, are we in the rich world willing to pay the price for this? On form, the likelihood of this is slim. That is bad enough news for countries that have some meager hope of developing on their own. For Africa, which depends on bilateral development aid and whose elites really cannot envisage the kind of untrammeled, chaotic free market system that lies at the core of the current international economic system, the global economy offers no way out for ordinary people and marginalizes the continent as a whole.

It has been argued that Africa entered the world economy at the wrong time, too late to profit from a world economic system in which cheap labor offered a competitive advantage. Even in East Asia, however, the economic miracle turned out to be as much myth as reality. At least the Asian Tigers benefited from vast capital inflows from the West and from Japan. Those inflows were unable to cushion East Asia from a crisis in 1997 and 1998. But imagine the situation of Asia today without those capital flows: that, in a nutshell, is the situation in which Africa now finds itself.

Without capital inflows, there is certainly no way for Africa to compete. But even if the capital flows were forthcoming, in a world in which there is a surfeit of labor it is hard to see why any business would choose to set up in Africa when it could simply expand in Asia. The middle class in Africa is too small, the infrastructure too antiquated, and literacy rates among workers too low. This is what makes the claims of Afro optimists both so fallacious and, however good their intentions, counterproductive. You do not alleviate vast human suffering with fine words. To the contrary, the fine words may well get in the way of the search for viable answers to Africa’s problems. When the market proves to have failed, what solution will be left?

Emotionally, it may be a great relief to imagine that, at the eleventh hour, Africa’s fortunes have taken such a radical turn for the better because of democratization and the embrace of market capitalism by a new generation of African leaders. Rationally, this makes no sense. The bitter truth is that Africa is not prepared for the world market; it cannot compete, and if it is forced to do so it will not do so successfully. And yet, in the name of a purblind optimism, that is what its friends are urging it to do.

No Corner Turned

Again, given how much bad news there had been from Africa over the preceding decades, it is hardly surprising that many people would want to believe that the corner had finally been turned. After all, the alternative was to imagine an Africa perpetually suffering, and for people of conscience that prospect was all but unbearable. The possibility that the market might be taking care of things that decades of development assistance had done little to alleviate, was bound to bedazzle. Of course, even those who advanced such views most enthusiastically understood perfectly well that things would have to break extremely well for this African renaissance to actually take place. The countervailing forces at work on the continent, above all the AIDS epidemic, the poverty that almost four decades of development assistance had done little to assuage, and a pattern of state decomposition and misgovernment that had made Africa the site of the majority of the wars taking place in the world during the 1990s, might be mitigated in time but for the foreseeable future would remain constants.

However nuanced, the portrait of the continent the new Afro optimism draws is simply not borne out by reality. To insist on this point is not to denigrate the efforts of the Afro optimists to garner support for initiatives on behalf of the continent, or to belittle the efforts some African leaders have made to transform their own societies. It is the fundamental false premise of Afrooptimism—a premise that often seems more akin to an article of religious faith than to an empirical conclusion based on a sober assessment of the available evidence—that Africa can compete on equal footing in the current global economy that makes its good intentions perilous.

For Africa is weak. There is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by pretending otherwise, or even that it has the potential to become stronger soon. Indeed, in a world in which information technology is creating an even greater gulf between haves and have nots, Africa’s technological underdevelopment—a gap that grows more and more difficult and expensive to bridge every year—may be the greatest obstacle of all.

To help Africa, then, will be enormously difficult. Unfortunately, those institutions and nations interested in improving the situation of the continent are themselves weak. It is only in the African context that a derelict institution like the United Nations, viewed by those who know it as a supine organization, could be viewed as a power center. And the fine talk of powerful states on behalf of Africa should not be taken at face value. Africa is marginal to the geostrategic concerns of most important rich countries, and marginal to the economic concerns of most multinational corporations except those engaged in oil extraction or mining. In short, while levels of development assistance continue to fall and the levels of African indebtedness continue to rise, foreign private investment is not taking up the slack and foreign political engagement is intermittent and inconsistent.

Anyone wanting to contrast the rhetoric of concern for Africa with the reality need only look at the contrast between the African situation and that of Bosnia Herzegovina. After the Dayton peace agreements, development funds flooded in to Bosnia. No one is saying that the development model is bankrupt in the Balkans. Moreover, on October 28, 1998, $1 billion of the $1.5 billion Bosnian debt was forgiven. This was described, quite correctly, as a necessary step if the great powers were to ensure Bosnia’s recovery and prevent a new round of fighting. And yet somehow it is expected that sub Saharan Africa, which spends 25 percent of its export earnings on debt service, will recover without similar relief. No one seriously doubts that what is a sine qua non of peace in the Balkans is also a sine qua non of peace and stability in Africa. What is preventing similar engagement in Africa are the vast sums involved and, perhaps more crucially, the fact that the political commitment to Africa does not exist, for all the easy talk of a continent wide renewal and stern admonitions against Afro pessimism.

The figures tell the story, as they almost always do. The initiative to aid highly indebted poorer countries unquestionably represents a step in the right direction in terms of African debt relief. But not only is the process cumbersome, the actual debt service ratios are far in excess of what any creditor would impose were it concerned with speeding economic recovery. The ratio of debt service to export revenue varies between 20 and 25 percent. This is a great improvement over the 708 percent ratio some nations labor under. Yet, by way of comparison, the 1953 London Agreement imposed a maximum debt service ratio on post–Marshall Plan Germany of 5 percent.

What Is to Be Done

To make the claim that there is more reason to be an Afro pessimist than to believe in the promise of an African renaissance is not, however, the same thing as saying that there is nothing to be done. Quite the contrary, it is evident that there is much that could be done. But this would require both money—vastly more money than even the most optimistic advocates of African development are hoping will be made available—and making Africa a priority. To be sure, given the record of corruption among the elites in most sub Saharan African countries, the idea of simply offering more money to Africa is one that may seem counterintuitive. And yet money is surely part of the solution. Even more important than money is commitment, but commitment made with a clear eyed understanding of how grave the African situation really is. Africa’s problems, particularly in light of the apocalyptic implications of the AIDS pandemic, are far likelier to grow worse in the next decade than to be ameliorated.

The answers to those problems will never be provided by the market. Rather, it is the notion of human need and moral obligation, the sense that not to help Africa is a moral scandal, not the notion of economic promise, that could just possibly provide the underpinnings for an African renaissance. This would involve not only a vast increase in aid flows but a systematic effort to protect Africa from the effects of a global economic system in which the deck is stacked against it. In other words, the only solutions that will work involve a return to development assistance, not a flight from it, although of course liberalizing the terms of trade for African exporters, and, above all, addressing the problem of debt relief—preferably through turning the debt into grants, as some African leaders have proposed—would also be important. Then and only then would a properly grounded Afro optimism be sustainable and worth championing.

How likely is any of this? Unless one assumes that values like solidarity and compassion will take hold in the rich world, not likely at all. And yet the paradox is that these are the only motivations that could make Afro pessimism as unwarranted as its critics pretend it already is.