Second Round for Africa: Independence on Trial

THERE’S been too much glib talk in Africa since we all had our independence. Nonsense about oneparty states that Western liberals too often bought, about pseudo-Marxist plans of industrialization that have dissipated our scarce resources — pretty heavy frosting on a Western cake of excessive expectations.”

My friend who spoke was a Ghanaian government economist who had watched his country nearly collapse during the Nkrumah regime. He continued, “Well, what are America’s intentions now: are you still bored with Africa because we’re not ‘strategic’ enough, or will you use this chance to help us build at a time when we’re ready to talk sense?”

A group of us were chatting in my bungalow at the University of Ghana about Africa’s recent round of coups, the hopes stirred by them, and the chances for economic development in the new and calmer atmosphere prevailing everywhere save the southern tip of the continent. The university’s former vice-chancellor, Conor Cruise O’Brien, had recently written two controversial articles — in the Atlantic and in the London New Statesman — and these provided our focus. If the necessary “revolutionary social and economic changes” were to occur in the developing world, then there must be “disciplined, revolutionary, political movements . . . likely to be of communist type” to carry out these changes, Mr. O’Brien argued in the New Statesman. But this ferment would, he feared, bring about increasing Western support for militarized regimes seeking to repress such desire for change. Were his premises correct? we asked; were political movements of a “communist type” what was needed? It seemed a good time to reflect on the changes in America’s attitude, and Russia’s too, before we could consider what had gone wrong in Africa and what could now be done.

I recalled my first encounter with an African eight years ago at a Friends’ meeting hall in Cambridge, England. Kenya’s Tom Mboy a, then twenty-eight years old, was arguing that it wasn’t for Britain to judge whether Kenya was “ready” for independence; Kenya would go on struggling, and America could choose its side. But Mboya said that America had a unique chance in Africa to help in nation-building because it was untainted by a record of colonial occupation on the continent.

In various ways America began to take up the challenge, and in the 1960 presidential campaign, Africa and its problems constituted an important issue. It was “Africa’s year at the UN,” with the admission of sixteen new African states. The continent seemed important, and the attention President Kennedy began to give it in 1961 helped sustain such an image in the new African leaders’ minds.

But if these countries had few birth pains at independence, they were all sooner or later baptized with fire when domestic crises set in. And the most serious one — in the Congo — could not be contained; it split the other nations into factions, and engendered a sense of futility in the minds of many American policy-makers. Kennedy’s effort — well chronicled by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. — to press for democracy in Africa was simply too late. Some states, like Ghana, were already by 1960 one-man shows, and there was a curious Western chorus echoing Ghana’s line that a oneparty state was natural to African conditions and efficient for the “war” on underdevelopment. Others, like Nigeria, a composite of at least three major traditional nations, had democratic institutions far too fragile to withstand the stress of corrupt politicians and spreading unemployment. Still another group, the former French colonies, had in some cases to be virtually forced into independence, an independence that made mockery of the term. “France’s client states,” the Economist was to call them in 1965.

Indeed, independence had come too easily to too many, and Western liberals had unrealistic expectations, perhaps a reaction to conservatives who hid badly their contempt for the principle of African self-rule. But all this made the growing disenchantment with things African the more painful. By 1964, it seemed as if Africa could find its salvation only in further international turns to the left and closer alignment with Moscow and Peking.

Early in 1964 Chou En-lai traveled through the continent and concluded that “an excellent revolutionary situation exists in Africa.” I was following him—on my first trip to Africa — and feared he was right. And when Washington decided to back Tshombe in the Congo that summer, after having virtually financed the effort to defeat him when he had led breakaway Katanga, it looked as if America had come full circle, thus playing into Chinese hands. After the Stanleyville landings at the end of the year provoked so violent an African reaction at the UN and in various capitals, Time wrote that a martyred missionary’s death “did more than prove that Black African civilization —■ with its elaborate trappings of half a hundred sovereignties, governments, and UN delegates — is largely a pretense. . . . Virtually all these nations echoed the cynical Communist line in denouncing the parachute rescue as ‘imperial aggression’; when this happened the sane part of the world could only wonder whether Black Africa can be taken seriously at all, or whether for the forseeable future, it is beyond the pale of reason.”

Le Monde, in Paris, echoed that the world was “fatigué d’Afrique.”

THE various Communist states had for so long preached that Africans were victims of pitiless exploitation that they became, in the words of one observer, “prisoners of their own propaganda.” Moscow and Peking believed that anything they sent—technicians, scholarships, ideas — would be deemed preferable by the Africans to the colonialists’ offerings. For a time things worked out well. In the fall of 1961, Ghana, Guinea, and Mali sent “fraternal observers” to the Twenty-second Party Congress in Moscow, a sign of new status that was a bad omen for America. But within months the Russians seemed to have overplayed their hand, and in December Guinea’s Sckou Touré expelled the Soviet ambassador for alleged involvement in a plot against the state.

Ghana, however, learned little from its wouldbe partner in the never-consummated “GhanaGuinea-Mali Union.” It tightened its links with Russia, and with Soviet help opened secret subversion-training camps, from which it launched sporadic, though generally unsuccessful, forays against neighbors.

On the international diplomatic front, it became Russian policy to seek out areas of African interest and sensitivity and support the African position. The West was certainly vulnerable on such issues as South African apartheid and Portuguese colonialism, and it would be naïve to fault a Communist country for what was a good, if easy, stand. More hypocritical was the semantic attempt of the Communists to assume a mutuality of interests on all issues, playing on the predilection of Africans to term their own social-welfare systems “socialist.” Neo-colonialism, imperialism, the national liberation movement all became sloppy words that almost misled a generation of young Africans. Once a country was committed to “socialism,” however mild the variety, it was simple to argue that there was only one socialism, “scientific socialism.” as the Marxists running the Ghana press began unceasingly to proclaim.

The self-deception can be seen most clearly in Ghana. In the summer of 1964 the Stanfordeducated (and democratic-socialist-minded) Ghanaian director of state planning, author of the Seven-Year Plan the country was following, tried to get away from the self-deception by arguing in an address at the University of Ghana that in fact Soviet Marxist experience had limited relevance for a tropical country like Ghana. He stated that foreign capital judiciously invested was a necessary prerequisite if a country without “surplus labor” was to industrialize, a tenet Ghana had in practice accepted. But the press and politicians reacted violently. One writer countered that if the wartorn Soviet Union could in forty-five years increase its per capita income seven times over, Ghana ought to be prepared to make the concomitant sacrifices to achieve the same result. Questionable statistics aside, there was no reference to the fact that tropical Ghana simply wasn’t Russia. In fact, there was only one area where Marxist experience seemed to be relevant: the corrupt use of power on the part of the elite. One recalls Theodore Draper on Cuba: “They can find in Marxism an ideological sanction for the unrestricted and unlimited use of the state to change the social order, and they can find in Leninism a sanction for their unrestricted and unlimited power over the state.”

One began to fear that this increasing discrepancy between Marxist economics—that weren’t used—and power rationalizations — that were — would spread across Africa. The economy might very well be a mixed one, with even the commanding power positions in private hands, but the controlled press could scare away the needed foreign capital on which development plans counted for their success. Thus in 1964 Ghana attracted a tenth of the capital that its plan provided for: a vicious downward-spiraling circle set in, with the politicians accusing the West of perfidy, increasing their power as economic chaos grew, all in the name of “the immutable laws of Marxism-Leninism.”

One of the men in our discussion had recently returned from two years in Russia. He told us: “We were taken for a very long ride indeed. . . . All they talked about was fighting colonialism and neo-colonialism, assuming we had scars on the back from the British. We might have been fooled had they not bought our cocoa at low prices, sold it secretly to the West for convertible currency, in return For which we got — foreign exchange? Never. We got their third-rate products, their machinery that wasn’t competitive, their food that was nearly inedible — ask any Ghanaian. We were their dumping ground. Last fall at one point they owed us over a million pounds. They had our politicians sewn up — and they had to believe those crooks in Ghana really represented ‘the masses,’ lest they admit their entire ideology was based on ridiculous premises. And meanwhile, Ghana’s party, press, youth movements increasingly resembled Russia’s.”

The indictment seemed severe, but the facts checked out. Certainly Ghana was an extreme example of bad Soviet tactics, but one hears stories and sees statistics all over Africa which confirm that, as one observer in Accra put it, “Africans have been given an inoculation against Communism, not an infection of it.”

CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN went further, though. The West must of course grant the right of a developing nation to be nonaligned, he wrote, but must also “recognize its right to ‘go communist,’ if that is the tendency of the political and social forces inside the country.” But what does this mean in 1966? The “communist” world has changed since 1960, and it is difficult to imagine any African country “going communist” in the sense that Cuba did in 1960-1961. However many trade agreements an African country may have with the centrally planned economies of the East, it is far more involved, through historical and geographical accident, in what O’Brien calls “the international capitalist economy,” which includes about two thirds of the world. Nehru in 1947 noted that “ultimately, foreign policy is the outcome of economic policy,” a realization that seems to be on the minds of every African leader these days. Russia has neither the resources nor, it would seem, the will to buoy up any African country that cuts its economic lines with the West: Cuba has been too expensive, and the Ghana failure too embarrassing. For the fact is, the West did “allow” a nonaligned country to move about as far toward “going communist” as is possible in a polycentric age. What more could Ghana have done when its trade agreements with the East were not even fully used, and when unfulfilled aid agreements with the bloc had become a standing joke? Moreover, Ghana desperately needed the West to fulfill its Seven-Year Development Plan. Trade statistics since 1960 make clear that Russia, for one, was not prepared to exploit its favorable political position to the limit.

Had Nkrumah gone ahead with the plans we now know about—to break the university (a move O’Brien had courageously balked during his three years there), to nationalize various privately held businesses, to finish the job of absorbing the army into the Russian-influenced President’s Own Guard — would this have made Ghana so much more a member of the “socialist” bloc than he had already declared it to be? Even the airfield the Russians were building in the north would hardly have released him from his economic dependence on the West. Ghana had for some time been subverting its neighbors with Russian arms (and serving as a channel for Chinese money to Kenya’s former vice president, Oginga Odinga), but the discrepancy between economic reality and political fancy had reached a point at which something had to give. The country, in short, was broke, and when the Russians rejected Nkrumah’s request for aid in 1965, he turned quite expectedly to the West.

“What has happened is this,” said a Nigerian lawyer with us. “We quite naturally went through a period of hostility to the West just after our independence — and at the same time ‘discovered’ the East, from which we had been so stupidly isolated by the colonial powers. If the Nigerian government didn’t feel this way, intellectuals in the country did. It was the same in Indonesia, Algeria, and in a different way, in Egypt — and no doubt in Latin America. But as Eastern solidarity collapsed, the Russians seemed to have pinned their hopes on a loose time-marking association of what they will now call ‘revolutionary democracies,’ such as those which met in Havana in January [the TriContinental Conference].

“But the naïveté of the so-called radical leaders of the third world flew more and more in the face of a reality that the civil servants — and army — appreciated. And thus the coups of Indonesia and Ghana; earlier of Algeria. What has happened is a recognition of reality, not what O’Brien thinks is a harnessing of the military by an unprogressive West. Nkrumah couldn’t have gone any further to make Ghana a Russian base for its African operations.”

My Ghanaian economist friend added, “If nonalignment is to have any meaning, it must involve an honesty and integrity of purpose. We can’t expect the West to help us become ‘spearheads of Communism.’ We can expect them to appreciate our efforts to benefit from association with both sides, if we’re not trying to fool anybody. We accept gladly our ties with the West, and such does not necessitate our becoming American puppets. But the Nkrumahs of this world will continue to push themselves off the cliff not because the CIA wills it, but because the people — the ‘masses’ — will not put up with them. And if the Russians come back, we’ll tell them we welcome their aid and trade, this time on an honest basis; but we prefer them to refrain from their silly talk about ideology, which has no relevance for Africa.”

ALL this sounds good, but in no sense means that the West is off the hook. For the moment, the strategy of the radicals has been proved to be without hope of success — as most of the 200,000 Guineans who have gone to the prosperous Ivory Coast would probably testify — but the next ten years will be the most difficult, and who knows what alternatives a doubly disillusioned generation would look to? The problem is economic; a recent report from Nigeria stated that in a decade the Nigerian economy would be self-supporting, and jobs would be available to match the increasingly sizable reservoir of manpower, assuming continued aid and capital investment. But how to get through those ten years? The rate of unemployment in Lagos is at least 25 percent, and one wonders whether agricultural development will work fast enough to create sufficient jobs on the farm to keep young men from further crowding into the slumridden cities. Twenty percent of American aid to Africa is going to Nigeria, and the United States committed $250 million to their Five-Year Plan; yet a look at the mounting dissatisfaction with the price of food, the growing unemployment, and the recent political turmoil suggests it isn’t enough. And Nigeria was in many ways the most hopeful African country.

And what will happen in France’s “client states” when De Gaulle is gone? There are indications already that France, whose total aid is five times as generous, proportionately, as ours, is unwilling to continue to subsidize its former African colonies on the same scale, and there is growing realization that too much of the French aid simply subsidizes inflated budgets and postpones effective solutions to basic problems. Yet the lines between Paris and Niger, Dahomey, Upper Volta, and eight other nations are still tightly drawn. But were De Gaulle to give up his special attention to the former French empire, where would these countries go? They have followed the Western lead almost embarrassingly, and if the Ivory Coast is becoming a dazzling model of economic development since independence, one can hardly be so sanguine about the others.

“The West has a golden opportunity and had better not miss it,” a Ghanaian scholar said. “You people should by now have realized that no one part of the world can any longer be considered ‘strategic’ or ‘nonstrategic’. . . . The difference between Africa and the rest of the developing world is that there haven’t been so many unlearned lessons here. We’re ready for a second round with the West, but there will be a quid pro quo, of necessity.

“You can see a community of states develop where democratic values are important — nobody has proved that these values are more relevant to the United States than to Ghana, nor why they should be. This would be in itself an object lesson and an accelerator to the Russians in their own internal reorganization. You might even see us questioning Soviet colonialism in central Asia, or on the Baltic.

“But the price is high: we expect something done about our terms of trade, we expect you to stimulate cooperation amongst ourselves, rather than to play us off against each other. We expect you to set minimum standards for your businessmen, who too often have encouraged the corruption that has been ruining us, and we expect you to work to bring about majority rule in South Africa, the Portuguese territories, and, of course, Rhodesia.”

America has heard these demands before, though not usually from men who through bitter experience have learned to value democracy for its own sake. It is perilous to underestimate the political sophistication of the urban African, for the one area in which development has been explosive is education. Russians never experienced “democracy,”

but most Africans were taught to expect it with independence and are now demanding it.

The quid pro quo is really only a suggestion of what must come to sustain the present hopeful developments. First of all, it is widely realized now that the “terms of trade” of the developing world are getting worse rather than better. A UN study shows that while the adjusted net balance-of-payments deficit in the developing world was approximately $5 billion in 1959, at present growth rates it would be $20 billion by 1970, and $57 billion by 1980. This deficit must be made up by outside support. Yet world aid is decreasing, both in amounts and in buying power. In the two years since the United Nations conference on Trade and Development at Geneva, at which numerous remedies were proposed, essentially nothing has been done to try to give the poor world a fair deal for its primary products — 86 percent of its exports. Indeed, one of the first attempts to implement the Geneva proposals was the Cocoa conference held in New York this past summer, attempting to stabilize the prices of a commodity which in ten years had dropped from about $1300 to $300 a ton. But the first stage of discussions between suppliers and manufacturers ended in failure, and Africans reluctantly, but rightly, blamed American intransigence.

Second, the most painful lesson of the past few years in Africa is that states do not come together, economically or politically, without an outside stimulus, or without a single state powerful enough to call the shots within the system. While Nkrumah’s insistent appeals for a “continental union government” were ludicrous in their lack of realism, there is definitely a need for far greater political cooperation within Africa if the continent’s economic development is to be realized. Could not America stimulate this movement by supporting regional development projects, thus giving an incentive to leaders to think in terms of transcending their own national borders? There is at least a beginning in this direction. In Washington last May, President Johnson, in his most positive address to African diplomats, offered to help establish regional communications links and to support the development of regional universities. The State Department has long favored, in principle, such an approach, but greater imagination and push are needed. In Africa itself, there are hopeful developments, like that of the new common market among the five states of Equatorial Africa, and the discussions for development of the Senegal River by Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and Mauritania. These projects can become models, or they can go the way of the now disintegrating East African common market.

Third, the involvement of Western businessmen in so much of the recently exposed corruption in Ghana and Nigeria is shocking, however much it can be explained away as the necessary price of obtaining a contract there. African governments are likely to be more careful after the exposures in Ghana, but in the meantime it is worth asking if there are steps Western governments could take, such as refusing to guarantee credits extended by businessmen, when it is known that the project will be used only for prestige purposes, or when it is a project from which too much West African “dash” (maybe 10 percent) is derived by the local politician. As an example of the former, the British extended a credit guarantee for a $14 million frigate for the Ghana Navy, and one fears their concern was less for Nkrumah’s military prowess than for unemployment in the British shipyards. And as for “dash,” we are now told that some tens of millions of dollars were poured into ministerial pockets in Nkrumah’s Ghana. How many schools could have been built with the millions that Nigeria’s ministers allegedly pocketed before the January coup ousted them, or that Nkrumah demanded as the price for contracts? Africans have, to date, blamed only their own leaders for these excesses; but when Ghanaians, for instance, fully realize that 25 percent of their export earnings will go to service the debts piled up with the connivance of Western businessmen, their charitable attitude may well disappear.

Finally, Africans are quite aware now that the West has a sizable financial stake in southern Africa, and will not act rashly to jeopardize its investments. But no one action of America would earn more friendship than to design a policy to force South Africa to alter its course. This could be done as a by-product of the Rhodesian crisis, or it might come about as the result of a hardened attitude at the UN among Afro-Asian states regarding the World Court, following its surprising decision not to pass judgment on South Africa’s use of its mandate in Southwest Africa. A billion dollars of American investment in South Africa, when our gross national product has reached $700 billion, does seem a paltry reason for dragging our heels.

President Bourguiba suggested last fall that “Africa would be better off when its leaders stopped denouncing imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism, and began working for the welfare of their population.” As my African friends pointed out, and as is confirmed in newspapers and political developments throughout the continent, they have begun to do just that. We in turn should not miss this chance to help nations who want to assist in establishing a democratic world.