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Time to end the stereotyping of Africa (Jonathan Power)
March 26, 2007 10:53 PM
March 16, 2007
LONDON - Another Africa film - this time the riveting “Blood Diamond”, last month the superbly acted “Last King of Scotland”, and “Out of Africa” still vibrates in my mind ten years later. But am I alone in being rather cross when my 16 year old daughter asks me yet again, “Is Africa really like that?”
I tell her part of Africa WAS like that. Some of it, a diminishing portion of this vast continent, is still like that. But most of it never was and today it certainly is not.
I have covered war and revolution in Africa. I have seen political opponents hung from the bridges of the main thoroughfare in Conakry. I have been falsely imprisoned in Sierra Leone. I have lived for months the village life in Lesotho and Tanzania. I walk the streets of Nigerian towns at night (parts, but not all, of Lagos excepted). But I have very rarely been afraid - perhaps only when travelling on some dilapidated Nigerian airline like the one that crashed shortly after I disembarked in Port Harcourt last year.
Africans are usually the most courteous, hospitable, forgiving and cheerful of all the peoples I have met on God’s earth. And now I rejoice mightily when I see the old continent, so beset by inhospitable terrain, demanding climate, poor soils, the legacy of the slave trade, self-interested colonialism and imperialism and, in the south, apartheid, really beginning to move forward economically and politically. Indeed, I have to confess that aspects of colonialism and the missionary activity that accompanied it put down some rather good foundations and Africa has only learnt to progress when it stopped fighting the shadows of the white man and started to work with him rather than against him.
It is all going very fast yet most people still seem blissfully unaware of what is apace. But turn to the December issue of “Finance and Development”, the periodical of the International Monetary Fund, and read Michael Klein, chief economist of the International Finance Corporation: “When the history of the 21st century will be written, it may become clear that Africa today is where East Asia was in the late 1950s - just about to surprise the world”.
He argues that economists now believe that the majority of African countries have a good chance of achieving annual growth rates of 10%, like India and China. “Thus it is conceivable that Africa could, on average, reach the income level of recent entrants to the European Union by 2050. Were this to happen, today’s children in Africa would leapfrog all history’s stages of development in a lifetime.”
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, dead in the water for so long, weighed down by the rocks of malign dictatorship and corruption, now hums with economic activity and democratic exuberance. On the other side of the continent Tanzania, for so long a failed Christian socialist experiment - kind but dirt poor was the best way to describe it - has now embraced capitalism, albeit a version with a human face, and is experiencing such rapid growth it has the tax revenue to spend on the things that the socialists only dreamed of - a school and clinic in every village.
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Cocoa and coffee? Yes, it continues. But in recent years the much more profitable cut-flower and fresh fish business in Kenya and Uganda with overnight flights to Europe has blossomed. “Nollywood”, the Nigerian film industry, has overtaken both Hollywood and Bollywood in the number of films produced each year. It provides jobs for a million people.
Productivity, that key to economic progress, is improving fast. According to the IMF, African textile and garment firms are almost as productive as Chinese ones on the factory floor. Economic reform involving privatisation, bank shakeouts, business registration and trade liberalisation is common almost everywhere. Tanzania and Ghana were in the world’s top ten reformers last year. This is why foreign direct investment has increased from $12 billion in 1980 to well over $100 billion today. Investors seem particularly confident in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. In Nigeria, Mittal is resuscitating the old giant Soviet-built steel works. Virgin has essentially taken over the role of the old, moribund Nigerian Airways. Chinese motorbike manufacturers are churning out thousands of machines and still can’t meet demand. Two storey houses now dominate the towns- you have to go out into the remoter villages to find a traditional mud hut.
There is still much to do - why not stop grumbling about Europe and the U.S. blocking the Doha ground and simply reduce trade barriers on a non-discriminatory basis by opening domestic markets to all African trading partners?
This year I am taking my daughter to Africa to see for herself.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Power
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