The World Today: Tumultuous Transition

The World Today
March 1999

Tumultuous Transition
By Randolf C. Kent

Africa is on the threshold of a renaissance, proclaimed President Bill Clinton in March 1998. Yes, but Africa’s renaissance, suggested US Assistant Secretary of State, Susan Rice, could be like Europe’s that lasted two centuries and was marked throughout by plagues and bloody conflict. What are the images of Africa, and which of these is reflected in the policies and prescriptions proffered by major actors in the international community today? Is it the one of a rebel leader in the Democratic Republic of the Congo sporting “brand new Converse trainers, a hooded black tracksuit, Nike USA emblazoned on the front, matching baseball cap, chunky gold watch”. ₁ Or is it of Archbishop Desmond Tutu presenting the findings of South Africa’s almost unique experiment in national reconciliation, the Truth Commission?

Will the disaster theme park image of Africa now include more starving peoples, this time those unwittingly caught up in another sequel to the Ethiopian-Eritrean wars? Or is it of Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, returning to his Nigerian homeland to support the country’s restoration of democracy.

Is it the Angola of seemingly unquenchable conflict, or the Mozambique on its road towards stability and economic recovery. Is it the average four percent economic growth rate that economists forecast for 1999, or is it the region that attracts the lowest external investment in the global economy and that has the highest levels of debt?

Africa is a vast and varied continent. Yet, all too often the policy prescriptions proposed by an influential portion of the international community reflect over homogenised views of Africa. These views frequently mirror the dynamics and wishful thinking of non-African states, and at the same time fail to take into account the ways that certain global trends will impinge upon that distinct and very diverse continent.

For many observers, the policy assumptions that underlie the prescriptions of many major governments spell one grim message: international disengagement. There is growing concern that the image being promoted of an Africa increasingly enamoured of liberal-democracy and free-market economies is essentially a ruse by many non-African governments and international organisations to abandon any commitment to the seemingly perpetual turmoil and uncertainties that are Africa. To that extent, some suggest, Africa will be abandoned to its forlorn fate, and with the decline of international interest, millions will have only emergency relief assistance to define their futures.

The evidence that Africa is being abandoned is less clear than the possibility that the international community’s approach to it mirrors misguided Western hopes and assumptions. The rhetoric about the continent’s prospects from many capitals in Europe and the Americas — and to a lesser extent Asia — is not necessarily disingenuous, just presumptuous.

The challenge for the international community will be to divest itself of the presumptions that infuse so many policy prescriptions that comprise African policy. It needs to recognise that the spectrum of images which are the basis for the international community’s engagement from the growth of liberal democracy, market forces or of perpetual chaos and economic catastrophes — all too often reflects an unwarranted certainty and simplicity.

Few Certainties

Much of Africa is undergoing very profound social, political and economic transitions. There are few consistent patterns that can define the continent’s future over the next generation, but four are increasingly discernible and these are not reflected in the policy pronouncements or the assistance strategies of those states traditionally engaged with the continent.

On the one hand it is all too evident why such analysis does not appear in official statements or formal policy prescriptions. On the other, neither the policies the international community is pursuing, nor the assumptions upon which they are based, appear even indirectly to take into account these very profound trends. Of course, such scenarios should not be regarded as immutable or as irreversible. However, they might serve as a means for putting the present images of Africa into a longer-range and eventually more policy specific context.

The first trend of major importance is the diffusion of authority that will in one way or another affect most states on the continent. Africa, like many parts of the international system, is undergoing fundamental changes in conventional authority structures. Such changes will impact less upon state boundaries, per se — although state boundaries will become far more permeable and far less distinct — and more upon governance systems and networks that will affect social and economic decisions and relations.

Many of the states have for almost four decades survived on a combination of Cold War and post-colonial clientism, economic centralisation that supported extensive patronage systems and disproportionately strong military forces. The first is virtually no longer relevant — with some exceptions that will be discussed later; the second is no longer functioning; and the military — mostly because of the first and second — will find themselves in competition with equally well armed non-state forces. In Africa, as well as elsewhere, state control will dissipate and new centres of authority will emerge.

Governments will increasingly vie for authority with other groupings, and while a body of Western analysts continues to be fixated upon Africa’s so-called warlords and Kaplanesque visions of “coming anarchy”, the prospect is in some instances less negative.

Much of Africa will evolve towards more diffuse centres of authority, but not all will reflect groups in armed struggle against established governments. Some emerging centres of authority will be based upon, for example, functional interests arising out of intense though informal cross-border trading systems. Others will reflect soclo-economic networks that stem from a melange of ethnic, religious and economic groupings that have developed localised mutual support systems.

Nevertheless, the increase of poverty and criminality in growing urban areas will present established governments with more violent alternative centres of authority.

Governments will be faced with no-go areas where security is won through informal deals between official bodies and local leaders. Africa, too, will have to contend with the increasing consequence of the privatisation of its resource base, leading trans-national networks to parlay resources for wealth and arms.

African Dependencia

The growing dominance of privatised trans-national economic networks links into the second major trend that will pervade much of the continent. A form of South American dependencia will see the emergence of an African elite whose interests will become both dependent and inter-dependent with those of their global counterparts. This elite, and an emerging middle class, may grow to at least one-third of the overall population within a generation. They will profit from traditional trade in primary resources and also from an emerging industrial base.

However, it is unlikely that the relative wealth of elites and emerging middle classes will filter down to the poor. Impenetrable poverty in Africa will be similar to that in many parts of Europe, Asia and the Americas. It will stem from a very basic lack of access to the education, the technological tools and the societal environment that will determine who will and will not be the beneficiaries of technology driven economic globalisation.

Impenetrable poverty will affect an estimated two hundred and thirty million people in Africa by the second decade of the millennium. It will be most marked in decaying urban areas and in stateless zones where the collapse of infrastructure and environmentally degraded land will be the last recourse for the displaced and dispossessed.

In one way or another most states will have to contend with the fact that a significant portion of their elite and middle class populations are sustained by and depend upon networks and economic interests that are principally determined outside their borders. The resources required to address the needs of the poor and even basic security interests will be less and less available.

Mix of Violence

Africa watchers have over the past three years begun to identify a dominant new reality: the violence engulfing so many parts of the continent will stem more and more from intra as opposed to inter-state conflict. Yet, this relative distinction misses the true dynamics presently affecting Africa which will continue over a prolonged period of transition.

Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and other recent conflicts have in too many instances blinded observers from another grim reality: trans-border violence has spilled over large swathes of Africa. This is true for the axis that sweeps from Eritrea through to Angola and from the DRC to Zimbabwe.

Yet, as opposed to most conventional inter-state conflict, the wars that Africa faces today and will increasingly face in future will be fought by a perverse mix of conventional and unconventional forces, quasi religio-ethnic groupings, private armies, warlords and bands of gangsters.

At different levels and in different ways they will find easy access to arms. Some will be able to get weaponry as sophisticated as that available in many parts of the developed world. Others will rely upon the enormous stores of outmoded but nevertheless lethal weapons that can be found almost everywhere, and certainly in many parts of Africa.

However, it is neither the trans-border nature, or the types of fighting forces, or weapons, that make these future conflicts particularly disturbing. Perhaps the most alarming feature of the continent’s future violence will be its contagion. Over the next decade, domestic conflict and inter-state violence will feed off each other, indeed frequently merging into one, a tide moving back and forth across borders and then receding before another wave.

Imposed Identities

A new generation of leadership and a new politics are also part of the set-piece images of Africa. Yet, in a perverse way, the mere suggestion by non-African governments that a particular country or leader symbolises the new Africa all too often seems sufficient to presage a fall from grace. The new Africa has more often than not been an identity imposed upon Africa by non-Africans.

Of course, the imposition of identities has been a fundamental part of the continent’s modern history. However, if there is any single theme which runs through the pronouncements of the new generation of leaders, it is that there is distinctly less willingness to accommodate external efforts to define what Africa needs, let alone to determine what Africa is.

That said, the diffusion of authority throughout much of the continent, as well as the rapid emergence of a dependencia, will make it more probable that various so-called leaders will find it convenient to pose as new Africans. However, such posturing will be adopted principally to secure non-African alignments and interests. It will he as inconsequential and as resented as it had been since early post-colonial times.

Tolerating Ambiguity

Like the continent of Africa, it is difficult to generalise about the individual intentions of those non-African, industrialised states that maintain an active interest in its affairs. Nevertheless, there may be three types of activities which might be tempting for such states, but which in the long run may not be in Africa’s interests nor their own.

In the first place there is the growing prospect of an even greater gap between Western assumptions about what is happening in Africa and the reality. In part, this will be the result of the simplistic perceptions and prescriptions ironically borne out of the developed world’s frustration with the continent’s uncertain, if not turbulent, future. In part, it will be because of the assumption that the values and interests of trans-national elites do represent to a significant extent the interests and values of Africa.

Secondly, the same dynamics that result in such perceptions and prescriptions may also lead to calls for more targeted economic and development assistance, and less aid through conventional government structures. What the rhetoric will not include are ways to sustain such assistance, ways to increase access to new technologies deep in Africa and ways to use institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the Bretton Woods System to meet the challenges of the diffusion of authority and increasingly diffuse economic and trading patterns.

The third hazard will stem from what might be described as a new form of clientism. Some of Africa’s friends from the developed world may be tempted to see and use the continent to counter perceived global threats. They may support certain states and non-state actors as bulwarks against religious and ethnic radical movements. They, too, may reward those that can serve as barriers to migration to the developed world.

In the final analysis, greater realism will have to underline policy prescriptions. This in turn requires greater tolerance for the ambiguous future that will mark Africa over the next generation. As major faults develop within societies and between social structures, more effort will have to be made to understand the consequences of such transformations.

As centres of authority become more diffuse, new mechanisms will be needed to communicate officially with those authorities that may not be in a traditional sense formally recognised. Similarly as the welfare and livelihoods of a large portion of the population may become reliant on diffuse economic and trading systems, the bilateral and multilateral institutions that can sustain such trends will need the license to do so.

In a very fundamental sense, positive tolerance of Africa’s tumultuous transition may also be a key to mitigating some of the violence that will pervade so much of the continent. Adapting to changes in authority and supporting alternative economic systems may open the way for more and more pockets of reconciliation and stability. That said, Africa’s future and the policy prescriptions that will work must inevitably reflect Africa’s image of itself.

Endnotes

Note 1: Martin Turner, “Africa’s First World War” Financial Times, 14–15 November 1998. Back.