Africa’s Predicament, who is to Blame For?

By Dr. Khidir Haroun Ahmed

The conventional wisdom answer to the above question of who is to blame for many missteps, several conflicts and long periods of wars in Africa especially these days which are witnessing a sweeping phenomenon of military takeovers, is the failure of the elites or intelligentsia to govern.
Many books and articles were authored to confirm that accusation without a convincing logic. Military coup d’état has occurred recently in Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea Bissau, Gabon, Gambia, the island Sao Tome and Principe, and in Sudan. In Sudan, it became an ugly war killing so far more than five thousand and displacing around four million civilians by the notorious Janjaweed militia or Rapid Support Forces (RSF). A study by two American researchers Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne, “Coups and Political Stability in West Africa” has counted 200 military attempts to take power in Africa since 1960s, when most African countries became independent. About half of these have been successful.
This article is an attempt to investigate the real causes of instability in Africa beyond resting the blame on the African intelligentsia. One of the ways to scrutinize the claim is to compare what took place in each African country when the colonial rule departed. You will notice that all of them faces similar problems sowed by that rule: fragmentation, ethnic strife and military takeover. The heroes fought for independence and tried hard to make a cohesive nation transcending the colonization’s legacy of animosities manmade by foreign rule based on benign diversity of languages, creeds and ethnicity. The Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, addressed his nation in1960 in that spirit:
“Our dearest wish perhaps, some may find it utopian is to found in the Congo a nation in which differences of race and religion will melt away, a homogeneous society composed of Belgians and Congolese who with a single impulse will link their hearts to the destinations of the country”
Nelson Mandela of South Africa tried also “I have fought against White domination and I have fought against black domination. I churched the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.”
A deep look would confirm the fact I mentioned above that the majority of African countries experienced the same kind of difficulties immediately after gaining their independence. Sudan has obtained independence, January 1st 1956, followed by Ghana in March 15th 1957 and almost all other African countries did in 1960s except Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and South Africa. So, if what Sudan has been suffering from occurred in other countries that had been colonized, the blame should be sought elsewhere. This is what this article is trying to shed lights on.
In 1884-85, the European powers gathered for a conference in Berlin for what has been known as the Scramble for Africa. The idea came in response to the Industrial Revolution which made industrial Europe in badly need for raw materials and markets for their production. The conference was held in order to avoid war among Europeans by dividing spheres of interests in Africa among themselves. As a result, the colonial powers lump summed people of different ethnic, religious and traditions together in entities populated by people of different tribes, religions and traditions. Not only that but the colonizers were keen to keep them apart that way and capitalize even more on their differences based on the infamous principle of divide and rule. Those countries emerged after the independence with the feeling of little in common among their population, a situation that led quickly to disintegration and civil wars in 19 African countries.
Sudan was not unique. Five months before the declaration of independence, an attempt of secession took place in a shape of a mutiny in South Sudan as a result of which, around three hundred civilians from Northern Sudan in addition to seventy-five Southerners were massacred in August 1955 by the Equatoria Corps, a military unit composed completely from South Sudan which was meant in the end to be (an integral part of the would-be national army of the independent united Sudan). That tragic event kicked off the rebellion movement for the secession of South Sudan that claimed thousands of lives which stopped only after decades in 2005. Similar events took place immediately after the independence of the Congo when the elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumamba was assassinated, Katanga region seceded and a coup followed. In Nigeria Ibo people declared their region as the Republic of Biafra. Earlier, the first and second Angolo-Boer wars took place. Italy also put together three distinct regions together in one single country, Libya which is fragmented in recent years. Angola witnessed a civil war like the other new independent African countries. The story of both Rwanda and Burundi were heart-wrenching. In Asia the semi-Indian continent witnessed similar events at the dawn of Independence in 1947: split into two independent countries: India and Pakistan. Pakistan begot later Bangladesh.
All these suggest that colonial powers were focused on their needs for raw materials and for strategic positions to safeguard routes that protected those passages. They were not in the business of creating viable countries in the future. The divide and rule mentioned earlier strategy was a testimony to that.
After decades of colonization, Europeans departed and left behind very little for Africans to build upon. Martin Luther King junior talked about hollow freedom given to the African Americans who found themselves with nothing to base their new life upon in economic arena after been freed by Emancipation Declaration in 1863. “They gave the slaves no land and nothing as a matter of fact to get started on at the same time America gave away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest which meant that there was a willingness to give peasants from Europe an economic base and yet refused to give the Black peasants from Africa who came here involuntarily and in chains and had worked for 244 years for free, any economic base. So, emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the rains and winds of heavens. It was freedom without land to cultivate to eat it was a freedom of hunger. And when White Americans tell the Negro to lift himself by his bootstraps, they don’t look over the legacy of slavery….” As for what took place in Africa, the colonizers left little or nothing to independent Africa to get started on as an economic base, yet they blame the intelligentsia for the situation there then and now. Recently in Burkina Faso, some youth shouted at the visiting French President blaming France, a former colonizer, of the lack of enough energy – and as a result of that, the country has been suffering from frequent outages that stall any efforts for development. He replied sarcastically that they should place their blame on their President and not on him. He probably understood that they were blaming colonization for that shortcoming.
Jomo Kenyatta’s statement on the colonial rule to Africa is telling a similar mission on the real objective of colonialism: the resources. He put it this way,” When missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land we had the bible.”
Activist Lumamba said that interference in Africa started with slavery, when slavery lost its value, it graduated into colonization and that is the context in which the Berlin Conference must be seen. European powers sat in Berlin and divided the African continent into spheres of interest. After decades of colonization, they reaped the harvest there and they moved to the next stage of hegemony. He said, “When colonization lost its lust through a combination of southern reality and agitation from the continent, we regained our independence as the great African American John Henry Clark said, “we regained our independence by mimicking the European system of governance” and he anticipated that no African country will succeed based on that system. “After that, the new colonialism project was instituted. Kwame Nichrome wrote his book, “New Colonialism the Last Stage of Imperialism” in which he said that that would be the most dangerous level of imperialism. Lumamba believed that NGO’s, UN Agencies, The World Bank, IMF, The Commonwealth of Independent Nations and French Speaking Countries are nothing but tools of the new phase of hegemony. He called those institutions and organizations, “Trojan Horses” designed to infiltrate African societies for ulterior purposes. He believed that this is the phase in which Africa is in right now.
It is not a must to turn colonial relations as a cause for animosity between the colonizers and the colonized. It could be a catalyst for mutual benefits. Reviving ties that link them by languages and some cultural aspects during the periods of colonial rule – although that bears unpleasant memories of exploitation. Animosities and hatred could be turn to become a base for mutual benefits and respect but to achieve that noble goal, the ball here is in the former colonizers’ court. Measures such as: Unconditional debt relief and a project similar to the American Marshall project that had rebuilt Europe after WW2 could do the job. It indeed will be a Big Bang which would benefit not only Africa but the world. It will also improve the historical unjust image of colonial legacy and the current unfair World Order divided by the rich North and poor South. I think if European colonial powers along with the US, Japan, and Canada would allocate a good amount of funding (perhaps about a few trillions of dollars) and administer it directly by a mechanism of their choice to spend on energy, education, health, fresh water and transportation, that would drastically improve the quality of life in the content. That would help eradicate extremism and chaotic migration to Europe by creating jobs for thousands of them at home and enable the continent to prosper. That would ease tension among the nations and races and create a better world.

*Ret.Sudanese Ambassador and Politics Associate Professor