To identify Africa with misery is a distortion. Nevertheless, a continent with centuries of cultural and scientific achievement has been reduced in the popular imagination to a land of flies and pot-bellied children.
The U.S. press fashions such distortions by concentrating on Africa's "bloody" civil wars, "corrupt" leaders, "tribal" violence, and "failed" socialist experiments. Two recent Los Angeles Times headlines announced that Africa is "on the road to nowhere" and "cursed by man and nature." Rarely does Africa come into focus as a place of creative power and hope. Unfortunately, best-selling books about Africa delve only a little deeper than the daily paper.
Blaine Harden's Africa: Dispatches From a Fragile Continent is no exception. Harden, who was the Africa correspondent for The Washington Post for five years, has written a sweeping, detailed book on Africa's bad news. His certainty that Africa is on a slide into oblivion is outstripped only by the flat-footedness of his assertions: "Nigeria -- horrible, ugly, boastful, coup-crazed, self-destructive, too-goddam-hot Nigeria -- is black Africa's principal prospect for a future that is something other than despotic, desperate, and dependent." For U.S. readers used to equating cynicism with progressive thought, Harden's arch style may not at first come across for what it really is: disdain.
While his book is superior to his reporting in The Post, and far superior to the last general book about Africa (The Africans, by David Lamb), Harden has diminished the astonishing complexity of Africa to a few simple concepts which do Africa no justice. His economic analysis is straight from the World Bank when he states that Africa's poverty is "self-inflicted" and freeing the market is its only solution. His political analysis describes Africa as suffering from a peculiarly African "Big Man" syndrome, an idea which should come as a surprise to John Sununu and Charles Keating. He even manages to discredit the African family (no small feat).
Most striking of all is that nowhere does Harden express interest in Africans who have made it on their own terms in their own cultures. Instead, he concentrates on urban elites and the "fairytale" success of an "illiterate cowherd" who makes it to the big time in the United States (the story of Manute Bol).
If one wished that Harden felt less arrogance in the face of 650 million people, the book does have some strengths. Harden is on his most solid ground when addressing the West's involvement in Africa: namely, the complicity of the United States in Zairian and Liberian regimes. His chapter about the enormous errors of donor agencies and development experts is often quite fine. If you have time to read only the introduction, his thoughts on interviewing an Ethiopian woman in the refugee camps are both moving and telling.
PERHAPS HARDEN'S GREATEST strength is that he is so much better than most foreign writers about Africa. One has only to read Robert Klitgaard's book Tropical Gangsters -- billed without embarrassment as "one man's experiences with development and decadence in deepest Africa" -- to understand my point. Klitgaard is an economist who spent two years in Equatorial Guinea instituting the World Bank's version of Reaganomics: structural adjustment. His book reads like a Western-genre film: development cowboy lassoes runaway economy and hogties corrupt officials as grateful townspeople cheer.
Although it's clear that Klitgaard is a decent guy who only wants to help, he appears to know so little about Africa and to be so deeply steeped in Western attitudes that his book cannot avoid seeming anything but racist. Africans are presented as congenitally corrupt and incapable of governing themselves. Klitgaard derides all those around him, while effortlessly applauding his own achievements, and repeats without reservation an abundance of derogatory comments about Africa made to him. His book is absent of any historical context that would make Equatorial Guinea's predicament understandable.
The only reason I would recommend this book would be to get an insider's view of the World Bank and a damning look at development experts abroad. As a take on Africa, it's worse than useless, and the fact that The New York Times voted it one of the best books of 1990 is a sad comment. Again and again, hateful books about Africa emerge to popular acclaim in the U.S. press. I can only wonder whether a book that claimed the Soviet Union had failed because "nobody cares" would fly so high.
FOR THE READER searching in the popular press to find alternatives to such books about Africa, the choices are slim. Only one of the books written by a non-African attempts to chronicle the "courage and creativity ... integrity and resilience" of the African people. Pierre Pradervand's Listening to Africa: Developing Africa From the Grassroots portrays an Africa most Americans have never heard of.
In this Africa, Africans do not wait in refugee camps to be saved by Western food donations. They do not lie, rotting, in bombed military equipment sent by foreign nations. Their children do not stare mournfully from advertisements. In this Africa, a thousand villagers build a dam by hand. A woman elder invents a new form of development financing. A farmer discovers a natural pesticide. Villages reform traditional youth associations into cooperatives that design and execute self-help projects. And the problems of famine, deforestation, and drought are solved without a Western development expert in sight.
Based on interviews with 1,300 African farmers across West Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, Pradervand's book is a collection of stories about these farmers and the tens of thousands of groups they have formed to transform their lives. It is the only book I know of that concentrates on authentically African development based on who Africans are, what they know, and what they wish to achieve. It stands out for the simple reason that Pradervand actually quotes farmers throughout the book and gives us their names -- a break from rendering Africans voiceless and anonymous.
Furthermore, it is an important and singular history of a phenomenon that has gone largely unrecorded: the massive grassroots movements sweeping Africa. A Senegalese extension worker named Bernard Ledea Ouedraogo sparked the largest of these movements when he left the civil service to organize farmers around an ideal of "development without destruction." No one interested in development in the Third World or inner-city America can afford to ignore the work of these revolutionary organizations. They have no interest in the Westernization that passes for development. They are not interested in promoting the individual at the expense of the community. Instead, their activities read like a primer in small-group dynamics, cooperative techniques, and communal organization.
However, Pradervand's book does have its flaws. His analysis of Africa's environmental problems is often contradictory and outdated (Paul Harrison's book The Greening of Africa is preferable). Pradervand defends women's rights at the expense of African men, a failing he shares with Harden. Genuine feminist scholars on Africa recognize that African men are no worse than men elsewhere and that capitalism radically reshaped the relations between African men and women in destructive ways.
Most important, Pradervand's bootstrap philosophy serves Africans badly. Jesse Jackson makes a fine distinction in his speech to African-American school children when he states that "you may not be responsible for being down, but you are responsible for getting up." Pradervand is nowhere as adept, and frequently descends into a Jack Kemp interpretation of poverty which suggests that Africans are poor because they are lazy and passive, and that those working in self-help groups do so because they have disavowed this cultural inheritance. If this book did not include so much you cannot find elsewhere, I would not recommend it. Instead the reader must simply be aware that just because Pradervand quotes Africans who agree with him does not mean that it is so. What Africans criticize out of modesty, love, or fear, outsiders often repeat out of racism.
FORTUNATELY, THE U.S. reader is not forced to see Africa only through the lenses of outsiders. Africans themselves have written numerous books about their own continent, history, and struggle. Although most of these books are too scholarly for a general audience, I have noted a few of the more popular works below.
For a book written by an African in the same genre as Harden's, see Ali Mazrui's The Africans: A Triple Heritage, companion to his television series of the same name. This controversial commentary on Africa provides a good antidote to Harden's book. Where Harden describes what's wrong with Africa, Mazrui describes what's wrong with Europe. Mazrui expresses sadness, wonder, and hope at the long course of African history.
For a book written by an African in the same genre as Klitgaard's, see Dawit Wolde Giorgis' book Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia. This memoir by the Ethiopian official in charge of relief during the famine of 1983-1985 comes recommended by William Acworth, a Washington, DC expert on Africa books. Why read what an outsider thinks of an African government when you can read an insider's account? Probably the best book on famine in Africa, this readable and fast-paced story depicts the political obstacles to relief efforts, obstacles that eventually caused Giorgis to quit in frustration and leave the country in exile.
For a book that celebrates the power of the ordinary African, see Ngugi wa Thiong'o's most recent novel Matigari. Ali Jimale, a scholar of African fiction, recommends Ngugi as the best novelist from East Africa and one of the four most prominent African writers, along with Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Wole Soyinka. Ngugi is celebrated for both his novels and his refusal to write in any of the colonial languages. (Matigari is translated from the Kikuyu.) His significant book, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, calls for African artists to embrace their own cultures. In Matigari a fighter for independence who survived the war returns home to find his land stolen and his people abused. He joins forces with a prostitute, a street boy, and a worker to bring about justice. As stories spread of their fearlessness, Kenyans realize that power lies in the hands of the people.
For a book with an African perspective on politics, see the collected speeches of the late leader of Burkina Faso, Thom-as Sankara. Thomas Sankara Speaks is a testament to the aspirations of the African people. During the brief time that Sankara ruled, Burkina Faso experienced a renaissance associated with his fiery and eloquent ideas. Many of Pradervand's examples emerge from the Burkinabe experiment in economic independence.
For a book that discusses the African worldview, see the fine collection of essays in African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity. Written by African thinkers from every continent, this book is an introduction to Afrocentricity by some of its leading formulators. As such, it refutes nearly every popular idea about Africa. The authors define Africa's uniqueness by exploring the African personality as well as African dance, traditional education, concepts of time, spirituality, language, and political organization. The Afrocentric view, by no means universally accepted in African circles, remains the most important attempt to date to deconstruct the Eurocentric view of Africa as passive, historyless, and marginal.
I have mentioned only a few books by African authors, but those with further interest can be assured that almost any book published by Africa World Press is worth its time. Started by an African dismayed at the state of classroom material on Africa, Africa World Press turns out consistently good books by Africans and those sympathetic to Africa. The same can be said of Heinemann Educational Books.
While Africa has its share of problems, like any continent, it's time that the view of Africa as broken and crisis-ridden be swept away. Too much about Africa and Africans is inventive, joyful, and powerful to allow such distortions to continue. When next faced with some dire headline about Africa, remember Sankara's declaration. "My country is the quintessence of all misfortunes of the peoples, a painful synthesis of all humanity's suffering, but also, and above all, a synthesis of the promise of its struggles."
Wendy Belcher was a graduate student at the University of California-Los Angeles, working on a degree in African Studies at the time this review appeared. Wendy is the author of Honey From the Lion: An African Journey.
Africa: Dispatches From a Fragile Continent. By Blaine Harden. W.W. Norton, 1990. $22.50 (cloth).
African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity. Edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Kariamu Welch Asante. Africa World Press, 1990. $12.95 (paper).
The Africans: A Triple Heritage. By Ali A. Mazrui. Little, Brown & Co., 1986. $17.95 (paper).
Listening to Africa: Developing Africa From the Grassroots. By Pierre Pradervand. Praeger Publishers, 1989. $14.95 (paper).
Matigari. By Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Translated by Wangui wa Goro. Heinemann Educational Books, 1989. $8.50 (paper).
Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia. By Dawit Wolde Giorgis. Africa World Books, 1989. $29.95 (cloth).
Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-87. By Thomas Sankara. Translated by Samantha Anderson. Pathfinder Press, 1988. $10.95 (paper).
Tropical Gangsters. By Robert Klitgaard. Basic Books, 1990. $22.95 (cloth).
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