AFRICA THE TERRIBLE, AFRICA THE MAGNIFICENT.
I am reading (again) Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “The Shadow Of The Sun” where he recounts his travels and travails in various African regions. Ye Gods!
Africa the terrible. Africa the beautiful. Africa the ugly. Africa the rich. Africa the poor. Africa the endless. Africa the claustrophobic. Africa the immense. Africa the small of mind. Africa the fecund. Africa the barren. Africa in terrible poverty. Africa in the magnificence of plenty. Terrible African blood-lust and satanic brutality. Magnificent African generosity and kindness. Africa’s fabulous riches. Africa’s gut-wrenching poverty. Africa the irresistible. Africa the sometimes best avoided, at all costs.
And no such thing as Africa at all, not really. Start to describe a massive continent in terms of anything like an African culture and you are in the worst of generalisation’s traps. Diversity, thy name is written from Cape to Cairo. This cannot be a surprise: Africa is a continent, over 7,000 kilometres top to bottom, 8,000km at its widest and almost 3,000km its narrowest. 30.7 MILLION square kilometres. How can any kind of uniformity be divined from anything that immense?
And yet, Kapuscinski manages, without diluting that diversity, to prise out of his life-and-near-death experiences, some inescapable commonalities which anyone who has travelled Africa and stayed put long enough in enough places, cannot but observe. And here, perhaps, it might be useful to draw a rough line between Africa north of the Sahara, and the rest, with my focus on the area south of the mighty desert. And a further distinction, because I think of myself of being African, having been born and raised in South Africa, with my European white skin, European white culture, European white norms, but my African soul.
Kapuscinski and I, in this context, mean the originals, Africa’s first people, those whose ancestry is Bantu and whose skins are shades of black. There is one exception to this general Bantu rule; the San, Khoi-San and Khoi-Khoi people of southern and southwestern Africa (the Bushmen and Hottentot for example) whose skins are beige, whose facial and other physical features and small stature set them apart, and whose origins remain mysterious. All others, who think of themselves, as I do, as Africans, including Arabs, Europeans or Asians are incomers who do not share that commonality born of aboriginality.
The ability of those Africans to wait, and wait, and wait, sometimes for hours, days, unmoving. Uncomplaining, sitting or lying in a state of near-torpor, conserving energy, eyes open but seeming to see nothing.
The unmistakable Black-African accent they share when they speak English in particular, no matter which of any of their myriad native languages they speak.
Their inborn sense of rhythm and dance, to which there seem to be no exceptions. Unlike Europeans, no African has two left feet.
The fact that not one African culture developed the wheel at least partly because they never saw any reason to get from A to B any faster than they could walk, or their cattle or camels could. No wheels, no need for pairs of wheels, so no carts no matter how simple. No carts, no roads where single tracks were more than good enough and where, even to this day, Africans in rural areas will automatically walk in single file. But in war, that single file becomes a phalanx, a Zulu impi, an army on an imposingly wide front. And on the way back home after defeat or victory — single file.
Africans, everywhere, until they are really old and lose them, have the most beautifully sparkling, white teeth. Simply explained by the sheer contrast between their black faces and their teeth? Not so. Despite, in some cases, very poor diet, their teeth just are whiter than any European useless tooth-whitening potion claims it can achieve. And 99.9% of Africans never came within a mile of fluoride, while poverty of diet comes with levels of overall poverty in too many parts of Africa.
And here is the dark heart of what Africa has in common with itself:
Africans, everywhere, have come to see that the path to real riches lies where politics comes within reach. With a handful of notable exceptions in modern times, Africans have not equated the achievement of riches with entrepreneurship or anything that involves the gradualism through promotion or achievement which characterises the Western rich. There is hardly an exception to the rule that those who have seized political power in Africa, through whatever means, have turned the tables on the norm, where money so often leads to power.
In Africa, power leads to money, which consolidates power and leads on to even more money — and the faster it can be accumulated, the better — because there is no telling when a younger, even more ruthless and more ambitious soldier-suddenly-turned-politician will arrive at the palace gates and throw you the hell back into the masses you so recently controlled. Or throw your body into the nearest ditch unless you can escape, to join the money you have so cleverly salted away in Switzerland or elsewhere. Africa is the continent of now and previous absurdly rich despots and dictators, whose several palaces were and are surrounded by shanty-towns and worse. Mobuto. Abacha. Amin. Obote. Banda. Mugabe. Bokassa. Mengistu. Kagame. Kabila. Al Bashir. Taylor. I leave you to match dictator with country. And Zuma. Yes, Zuma in South Africa. Elected by a party in a de-facto one-party state. Corruption personified.
Let me enter, at this point, an extract from Kapuscinski’s book, because no-one has ever put their finger on the problem so perfectly as the character to whom Kapuschinski refers:
“(African corruption)….. was the subject of a conversation I have one day with A., an elderly Englishman and longtime local resident. His view: That the strength of Europe and of its culture, in contrast to other cultures, lies in its bent for criticism, above all, for self-criticism — in its art of analysis and inquiry, in its endless seeking, in its restlessness. The European mind recognizes that it has limitations, accepts its imperfections, is skeptical, doubtful, questioning. Other cultures do not have this critical spirit. More — they are inclined to pride, to thinking that all that belongs to them is perfect; they are, in short, uncritical in relation to themselves. They the blame for all that is evil on others, on other forces (conspiracies, agents, foreign domination of one sort or another). They consider all criticism to be a malevolent attack, a sign of discrimination, of racism, etc. Representatives of these cultures treat criticism as a personal insult, as a deliberate attempt to humiliate them, as a form of sadism even. If you tell them that the city is dirty, they treat this as if you said that they were dirty themselves, had dirty ears, or dirty nails. Instead of being self-critical, they are full of countless grudges, complexes, envies, peeves, manias. The effect of all this is that they are culturally, permanently, structurally incapable of progress, incapable of engendering within themselves the will to transform and evolve.
Do all African cultures (for there are many of them, just as there are many African religions) belong to this touchy, uncritical mess? Africans like Sadig Rasheed (Development Management In Africa: Toward Dynamism, Empowerment, And Entrepreneurship, 1994) have begun to consider this; they want to find the answer to why, in the race of continents, Africa is being left behind.
Europe’s image of Africa? Hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; AIDS; throngs of refugees without a roof over their heads, without clothing, without medicines, water, or bread.
(And now, in writing this, I must add, with fear, the almost certainty of Covid-19)
The world, therefore, rushes in with aid. Today, as in the past, Africa is regarded as an object, as the reflection of some alien star, as the stomping ground of colonizers, merchants, missionaries, ethnographers, large charitable organizations (more than eighty are active in Ethiopia alone).”
You may now conclude that I have rambled a long way from my theme: Commonality in diversity in Africa. I haven’t. Remember that Kapuscinski’s book was written in 1998 and the English translation published in 2001. And very little, if anything, has changed in the 22 intervening years. The diversity remains diverse. The commonalities are still common and in this context, in particular, the common diseases of tyranny and corruption are still rife.
The African in me, which is all of me except the colour of my skin, feels a dreadful sense of loss. I want to scream from Kilimanjaro, Table Mountain, the top of Cheops Pyramid, and from the highest peak in the Atlas … “You are letting me down. You are letting us all, down. We want to be proud of every inch of our terrible and magnificent continent, each in our own way and in our own corners.”
