Africa Works

The idea is spreading that sub-Saharan Africans can take positive steps to reduce the adverse effects of climate change. They are not, in short, doomed, and through their own labors can improve their livelihoods while at the same time making prudent steps to adapt to global warming.

That’s the sub-text of a valuable article by Mark Hertsgaard on the political economy of reforestation along the Sahel-Sahara border lands. Building on the undeniable evidence of small-bore environmental success stories in Africa — of the sort I and Alex Perry of Time magazine have trumpeted over the past year to counteract the new Afro-enviro-pessimism, Hertsgaard tracks a growing movement to support strategic tree-planting on a grand scale — across the entire belly of the continent. The effort has the backing of influential African political leaders and the conditonal support of Western donors. Hertsgaard concludes, “The Great Green Wall is too good an idea to be allowed to fail.”

After years of demeaning and degrading the prospects for Africa’s future on the basis of gloomy environmental forecasts, the refreshing conversion of Hertsgaard, an influential writer on climate change, marks another milestone on Africa’s transformation into a “normal” region. No longer, at least in the hyperbolic arena of environmental calamity, can Africa be written off as a hopeless case. Rather, there’s a growing appreciation that the same kind of everyday tactics of adaptation that, say, Americans must adopt in the years ahead, Africans can and will adopt — and to everyone’s advantage.

I had my own tailor for some years in Accra, Ghana. His bright-colored shop is located behind the main drag in the trendy Osu neighgborhood, on Kuku Hill, his front door facing onto the Independence Square and the ocean. Many a later afternoon, I talked fashion with him and enjoyed the sea breeze.

My tailor, like many tailors in Africa, fancied himself foremost as a designer, and a rather fine one. He did have a flair for integrating retro-hippe styles with the enduring colors and fabrics appreciated in the coastal belt running from Dakar to Lome. Often, he made outfits for me from scratch: top-and-down, drawstrings, from intricately-pattern waxed cotton or sometimes “political suits” made of plainer fabric and useful to wear to meetings with government officials or local businessmen. He also made unusual shirts and sleeveless tunics that could be worn to Labadi beach and came with matching drawstrings.

I can’t say that everything my tailor created worked, but I always appreciated his self-confidence. He knew his vision and he presented his clothing without fear or apology. That he made every single outfit in his shop with his own sewing machine and hands lent a certain gravitas to him.

He often talked about becoming a fashion designer, but he had no sense of scale. He didn’t have a single employee, and he often went to the market himself to buy fabrics. At my request, he’d usually accompany me on such trips, and I might treat him to lunch as compensation. But the notion of manufacturing clothes was beuond him. He made clothes from his mind’s eye – and for humans he knew, touched, heard.

Fashion in West Africa is a poor man’s glamour in which I eagerly participated because, even by the standards of local elites, I was poor. The cost of looking good, while not trivial, could well be afforded by anyone with the some sort of regular employment.

That’s still true, but with machine-made clothes flooding Africa now – mainly new garments from China and India but also used clothes from charities in America and Europe – the fidelity to local tailors is declining. Mine soldiers on, living off the legacy of a long reputation for quality and service. But many tailors have surrendered to market forces they neither understand nor approve of. Most of them, bereft of great design ideas, face a race with anonymous and distant machines – a race they’re losing.

There are exceptions, designers who because of education or priviledge or sheer determination, have risen to achieve international recognition – and this despite the existence of an African factory system that could produce small batches of high-quality clothing. In her original and much-needed new book, Helen Jennings, a fashion journalist, has documented and profiled leaders in “New African Fashion,” as she titles her book. The results are captivating — and amply demonstrate that African design, while not spawning yet a fashion industry of any scale or scope, is at least gaining a global audience of sophisticates.

African clothing designers remain vulnerable to the predations of European, American and even Asian designers who seize on exotic motifs in African fashion and present them, drained of meaning and often in fragmented ways, to their own distant tribes. But increasingly, the fruits of uniquely-talented African designers cannot be stolen wholesale. At least not without the risk of global approbation.

And that’s an improvement, a sign that in fashion, as in some much else, the normal and functional in African life is taking center stage.

The Economist this week has a rousing article on the robust economic growth in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Impressive. And the attention is long overdue. I’ve harped for years on the neglected story of the expansion in Africa’s middle-class and the relative prosperity of cities in the region and even ordinary farmers.

The new African prosperity is welcome, but political dysfunction persists. The announcement that Joseph Kabila is again the presidential victor in a Congolese election is a grim reminder that no manner of economic growth can soften the blows of pathological politics.

International observers are calling Kabila’s election “disputed,” in part because Kinshasa, the heart of the Congo and one of Africa’s most vibrant and largest cities, is home to legions of Kabila’s opponents. As to how Kabila could win the election without Kinshasa there is only one explanation. He stole it.

In the weeks ahead, the Congolese will decide whether Kabila can persist in his misrule in peace. If strife does break out, the Congo’s many international supporters will regret that they did not insist that Kabila retire from politics as a price for continued aid to the country. Having come to power after his father, a coup leaders, was assasinated, Kabila has few ties to his own country, and his performance as president — as measured by his success in improving government services and reducing violence in the troubled Eastern region — has been abysmal.

There is no reason to believe that Kabila will do any better this time around. He should and let new leaders, with strong support, take their chance at leading this vast country with so troubled a past.

Of course, Kabila’s voluntary departure is a fantasy. Even as Africa’s economy grows at an Asian-like pace, the region’s politics too-0ften defies logic and practicality. The Congo isn’t the only country where dictatorial rulers rely on elections to provide “cover” for their Hobbsian rule.

Perhaps now that the international community is starting to grasp that Africa’s problem isn’t poverty — but rather how to fairly distribute the wealth being generated by its endowments and its people — there will be a new focus on promoting a genuine revolution in African democracy.

For another overlooked positive trend in the sub-Saharan, see my article today in the New York Times, “Vast and Fertile Ground in Africa for Science to take root.” The article presents smart Africans doing important things in a dignified manner: always an important message when the facts on the ground amply justify.

The rapid expansion of mobile telephony is having unexpected effect: rising cost of burning diesel to power cellular base stations.

Because of the unreliability of electricity grids throughout the region, mobile phone operators depend on diesel-powered base stations to insure smooth operation. According to a new study on power sources for cell stations from the Balancing Act newsletter, few operators are making anything more than cursory searches for alternative sources, such as solar, despite the rising cost of diesel.

Since mobile operators in sub-Saharan Africa are likely to be the most profitable in the world, the incentives for reducing operating costs for essential equipment is rather low. Balancing Act reports that operators aren’t likely to raise prices either in response to higher diesel costs, but simply absorb the costs.

The resignation by operators is understandable. Base stations are the crucial link in the telephony network. They are also expensive. Unreliable electricity doesn’t only disrupt the network service (costing operators money in lost calls made) but also can harm equipment.

So the reliance on an “off-grid” power solution is pragmatic. And while solar-powered base stations are coming on line, they require higher up-front costs for operators, and more unpredictable maintenance issues. Adoption has been slow. In short, solar is sexy but the expedient choice is diesel, which has the added benefit of being readily available becuase the fuel supports a wide range of power generators throughout the region.

But expedience may benefit mobile telephony providers in the short-run, but not African people in the long run. Mobile providers would do a service to society if they worked harder to support widerangng efforts to improve electricity grids in the countries in which they operate. Electricity remains the essential technology that African societies have yet to master on an operational level.

For mobile operators, opting out of the grid is too easy. To be sure, nobile telephone service is also essential and should not be held hostage to the vagaries of African grid-electricity supplies. Yet if mobile operators simply opt out of the grid for convenience, then inevitably the grid loses one of its biggest potential supporters. After all, mobile-telephony providers are now among the largest organizations in every African country – and often the highest tax-payers. A thriving national electricity grid is ultimately in their own interest too.

Chinua Achebe’s refusal to accept an award from Nigeria’s president is the latest example of the great writer’s ambivalence towards his homeland. The author of Things Fall Apart, the most acclaimed novel ever written in English by an African, Achebe has long disapproved over government, governance and public affairs in his beloved Nigeria.

The 80-year-old Achebe, who was paralysed from the waist down after a car accident in 1990, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 for his literary career. Two years later he visited Nigeria for the first time in a decade as part of celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart.

In analyzing he failures of an independent Nigeria, Achebe has stopped short of blaming the victim. Along with criticizing contemporary leaders of Nigeria, he also blames colonialism — and its legacy — for some of Nigeria’s ills. As I wrote last year, in a review of Achebe’s newest volume of collected essays, Achebe is at heart a storyteller, not a policy analyst. While he helps to identify the sources of various pathologies in Nigeria today and in Africa generally, he refrains from presenting cures, which makes his refusal to accept an award from President Goodluck Jonathan harder to swallow for some proud Nigerians.

“I am not an apologist for Africa’s many failings,” Achebe has wrote in The Education of a British-Protected Child (Knopf, 2010) but he believes these African solutions will be created by and for fellow Africans. In the final essay of this collection, “Africa is People,” Achebe invokes the powerful Bantu declaration, “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.” (“A human is a human because of other humans.”) Africa’s future, Achebe insists, depends on a new appreciation for the value of “an African communal aspiration.”

Apparently, Nigeria’s current government has yet to show sufficient appreciation for the communal.

The writing of African history underwent a revolution in the 1960s, culminating an outpouring of fresh interpretations of the African past which continue to exert a powerful influence today. The summation of the new scholarship on Africa, which was nourished by the wave of decolonization that reshaped the region, came in a 1971 coffee table book, published by the venerable American Heritage house, on the African past. The two volume, lavishly illustrated, hardback repudiated a century of popular racist and imperalistic notions. Writing in a lucid introduction to volume, Philip D. Curtin, one of the grand masters of the new African history, wrote in language that still rouses and inspires me:

“History has all too often been an ethnocentric subject written (often intentionally) to foster patriotism by emphasizing the deeds of ancestors. In Europe and North America this tendency has led historians to concentrate on national history, looking only secondly at the broader developments of Western civilization. Cultures beyond the West were either left out altogether or relegated to a minor place. The crucial and organizing question was “How do we come to be as we are?” – not “How did the modern world come to be as it is?” or “How do human societies change through time? African history fell under this blight, as did the histories of pre-Colombian America and of Asia.”

Curtin, who died in 2009, provides a reminder that the past is prologue and that no analyst of Africa’s present can ignore the past. Yesterday is closer than we usually imagine.

My old friend Eric Osiakwan, from Accra, Ghana, reminds me that Qaddafi may have cynically used and abused the dream of “one Africa,”  but that the deposed dictator’s exploitation of the idea of unity across the African continent should not lead to the abandonment of the Pan-African ideal. He writes about a recent Atlantic article of mine, : “I don’t agree with the premise of your article that due to Africa’s “diverse diversity” she should not try to unite, for me that’s all the more reason why she should unite and the unity in this case is not to water down our diversity but to establish a common framework for political and socio-economic development. When you look at the history of pre-colonial Africa, we had pretty much a united front (or something close to it). Salaga was a big marketplace in Mali and people from all parts of Africa go there to trade. Timbuktu was a city of higher learning and many Africans from different part of the continent went there to study.” Osiakwan adds, “I agree with you that the approach of our post colonial leaders as well as recent bandits like Gadafi needs much to be desired and so lets not throw away the baby with the bath water.”

I agree with Osiakwan that Pan-Africanism has more than historical value and that many pragmatic Africans continue to dream of African unity as the foundation for more rapid development within the continent and more geo-political power for Africa across the globe. Indeed, a persuasive rebuttal to my argument against a rigid, ideological Pan-Africanism is to insist, as Osiakwan does, that pan-Africanism has been badly implemented over the past 50 years but that the concept is still worth trying. Now would a well implemented, unified approach to governing the African continent be desirable? I’d say yes loudly but the difficulties remain to realizing this aim remain enormous — and the pursuit of the aim, if it sucks energy from other worthy sub-continental initiatives, could mean that Pan-Africanism still does more harm than good. To be sure, governance along continental lines is no panacea for poor governance by smaller units. Look, for instance, at how badly the U.S. is being run, and quite possibly because the U.S. government is simply too big. Look at the political, financial and economic problems Europe is having because of flaws in the structure of the European Union, which is often presented by Africans as a model for their own political and economic unity.

So can we expect better from Pan-Africanism when Europeans and Americans struggle with the disease of giantism? In contrast to Pan-Africanism, I’ve always favored the construction within Africa of strong sub-regional groupings — like east African Eco community or ECOWAS. Make these sub-regional groupings much much stronger and in the meantime forget pan-Africanism.

The benefits of subregional groups with clout could be enormous: a powerful Ecowas for instance could ban Biya from office or put Togo into a regional trusteeship until a functioning legitimate government was formed.

Once there are  five or six successful sub-regional political groups in Africa, the task of constructing significant continental-wide institutions will undeniably be easier.

Lost in the scramble to understand how Qaddafi died — and to assess his death on Libya — is a review of his influence on sub-Saharan Africa, especially his role in the African Union, the most important contintental body in the region. For insights, see Howard French’s essay from this past March in the Atlantic. And this morning, the Atlantic published my assessment of Qaddafi’s perversion of Pan-Africanism, and a brief critique of the entire movement, which has long influenced the shape of African politics — and often for the worse.

Cameroon’s Supreme Court declared Paul Biya as the winner of the Oct 9 presidential poll. Biya, who is 78, will serve a sixth seven-year term as president of this West African country.

Effectively a dictator, Biya has run Cameroon as a personal fiefdom since the early 1980s. He pushed through a change in the constution a few years ago that permited him to seek another term.

The official poll gave Biya 78 percent of the vote, a tally that defies belief if not the imagination of the shadowy cartel that surrounds Biya the man. The election pitted 22 candidates against Biya, who for decades has adroitly exploited tensions within his country to divide his critics. Biya is believed, for instance, to pay people to run against him for president — the more, the merrier, it seems — in order to make legitimate opposition candidates less able to muster diverse support.

Cameroon is among the most beautiful countries in the sub-Saharan. The country has a powerful agriculture sector as well as diverse natural resources. Biya runs the government in a highly casual manner, earning the nickname, “the ghost,” in part because he is believed to spend relatively little time in the country.

International donors have scant leverage over Cameroon’s government. France continues to limit pressure from reformers who would seek to end Biya’s tenure. French-owned companies control wide swathes of Cameroon’s economy, dominating cotton production (in the north) and cement production in the south. The country also hosts the longest oil pipeline in the region, bringing crude from Chad to the Cameroonian port of Kribi.

A potential bright star of Africa, Cameroon instead languishes. the victim of Biya’s persistence and a perverse set of economic factors that reward both domestic and multinational capitalists for policies that insure the stagnation of social conditions in the country. While ill health has often led to speculation that Biya’s days as the country’s president are numbered, he continues to defy expectations of a deserved exit. That he officially received another term in office in the same week of Ghaddafi’s death is a reminder that, at least in lovely Cameroon, home to West Africa’s highest mountain and most haunting plateaus, there is only winter.