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As always the article is available for download as a Word-document on the final page (p. 11)
FOURTH QUARTER 2003: |
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6:11
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Africa's Still Sliding Backwards
Your book – Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa – from 1997 painted a bleak picture of Africa. Has it gotten better?
KR: It has gotten worse. If I wrote the same book now it would be even more negative. Sure, everybody can choose success stories, but: as I mentioned in the book, at the time South Africa was one; Zimbabwe was probably a success story, but that has gone backwards; Ivory Coast was a nice place, that’s gone backwards; they had a peace agreement in Liberia which fell a part and then another civil war, so that’s still a mess. Congo is even worse than it was under Mobuto. It’s not even a real country any more: it’s divided into about five different zones controlled by different people. Everything seems to take two steps forward and then one step back in Africa. So I am not really optimistic about the place. Another problem is the growing gap between Africa and the rest of the world. The rest of the world is on this high-tech, IT-related boom and Africa’s just sliding further and further back. Africa’s becoming irrelevant.
Because of the lack of contribution to the world economy?
KR: Yes, their portion of the world economy is shrinking. That’s what’s sad about it: the continent is becoming irrelevant.
A big problem in Africa would be corruption in the central administrations, which hampers internal as well as external initiatives?
KR: The big problem I think, created by the West, the Europeans, in the last 30 years was pouring money in with no accountability. As I write in my book: it was a double standard. In no other place in the world would they pump money in without any accountability – and whenever anyone was demanding accountability, the Africans would play the race-card and say: “that’s racist: it’s colonialist to make us account for this money”.
There was an element of bad conscience?
KR: Everybody felt bad about colonialism, real bad about slavery, so there was and is a tendency to let Africans off the hook. To not hold them to the same accounting standards you would hold other people to. That’s the real racism to me. If you look at Africa now, it didn’t do Africa any good, did it?
Another element in your book was the feeling of hope for Africa after the Fall of the Wall, an optimism about democracy coming. But the opposite happened, maybe because with the geopolitical change…
KR: …the continent lost its relevance, yes. When you had the Soviets, Americans and the Chinese competing for Africa, they had reason to stay there and stay engaged. But now you might actually see an upturn because of the war on terror. At least in places like Kenya, Tanzania, northern and Moslem Africa you see the US engaged because they don’t want these to become Al-Qaida bases. If that’s what the war on terror can do: make Africa relevant again, then that is a good thing.
One thing that doesn’t attract much attention neither in Denmark nor in the States is French influence in Africa. And the high-level French corruption scandals very often have an African connection?
KR: It’s not an issue I know much about, but I don’t think it’s something that is to the benefit of the Africans – more to the benefit of French national interest. To make France stay involved: they feel some cultural link to French speaking Africa. On the whole I think it’s just about preserving Africa as a bastion for French business, and the fact that Africa makes France important on the world stage. There aren’t many places in the world where France is considered a superpower, except in Africa. In the Middle-East they have connections and contracts, but I wouldn’t say the French have any real influence. In Asia, they lost their influence with the colonies forty years ago. But Africa is the one place where France rules.
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Photo (illustration): BrunoInBaghdad.com
Photo (portrait):
Francesca
Luk
