Africa in the 1970'sAuthor(s): Aaron SegalSource: Africa Today, Vol. 19, No. 4, Lesotho, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau (Autumn, 1972), pp. 71-76Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4185265 .

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Africa in the 1970's

Aaron Segal

Guessing about the future of Africa is as hazardous an enterprise as one can imagine. It was the Romans who first discovered as they advanced across the Mediterranean and southwards that "Out of Africa always comes something new." The decade of the 1960's was one of turbulence, warfare, political instability, and massive social change. It is this last characteristic combined with its extraordinary diversity that makes Africa the most fascinating and the most un- predictable area of the world. No other continent is so heterogeneous, with over 700 ethnic and linguistic groups and 43 independent states. Nowhere else can one be proven so wrong by taking the present as a glimpse of the future, or in attempting to generalize from the partly known to the likely or probable.

Yet the basic forces that are shaping the future of Africa are visible and discernible. These include the rate of growth and demographic structures of the population, the emerging post- independence political and economic institutions and corresponding social structure, and the changing relations between Africa and the rest of the world. The drama of Africa in the 1970s will be the extent and pace of -change at the personal level rather than the ephemeral events that may catch momentary headlines. What is happening to the extended family system, marriage, divorce, styles of life, and personal values are the real stories that provide the keys to unraveling the future.

Africa has, for better of worse, inherited a crazy-quilt of national boundaries which are largely the product of nineteenth-century colonial rivalries. These boundaries divide ethnic and linguistic groups, geographic entities, and natural resource areas. Yet President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania was correct when he warned in 1961 (in a belated plea for an East African Federation) that "once the national flags go up, no one will be willing to see them taken down." As irrational as African political boundaries are, offering the world the spectacle of fourteen landlocked countries, nearly half those on planet Earth, and more than twenty countries with populations of less than five million, these boundaries are not likely to be altered, either by coercion or volition. The secession struggles that tore apart Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa) and Nigeria in the 1960s are not likely to be

Aaron Segal. is a visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University.

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repeated. The tragic struggle in the Sudan between the Arab- dominated government in Khartoum and the Nilotic non-Muslim peoples of the South could flare up again, and irredentist movements in Ethiopia and elsewhere may continue. However it is safe to bet that Africa's boundaries in 1980 will almost be identical with those of 1972.

This means that political and social change must take place within existing boundaries. It means that three distinct types of governments will emerge, each seeking to reconcile basic ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity with a minimum of administrative and political order essential to the maintenance of the nation-state.

One type of regime, exemplified by Tanzania, Algeria, and Guinea, as well as Somalia, Rwanda, and Swaziland, is seeking to forge homogeneity out of heterogeneity. These are governments committed to providing their citizens with a new sense of national identity based on a common African language, widespread inter- ethnic social mixing extending to inter-marriage, and unique national institutions. Although in some instances the economic costs of this route to national unity may be high, these governments are deter- mined to bestow a sense if nationhood.

A second type of regime accepts the legitimacy of ethnic dif- ferences and seeks to ensure that each major ethnic group will share in the benefits and obligations of the new nation. This often means an intricate political balancing of posts and resource allocations so that everyone gets their share. Those familiar with the process by which political parties select candidates on an ethnic basis in New York City or Belgium would feel at home in the politics of the Cameroun, Kenya, or Botswana. Here a sense of national identity emerges alongside a continued pride in, and awareness of, one's own ethnic group. Often such a policy makes sense in a continent where the word "tribe" is a misnomer, since an ethnic group such as the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Baganda of Uganda, or the Barotse of Zambia may number in the millions, and have a thousand-year history and continuous shared institutions.

The third type of regime eschews national unity in favor of sheer repression on behalf of one particular ethnic or racial minority. This is the political style of the white settler regimes of South Africa, South- west Africa, Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Although their internal practices differ, each of these countries is what Professor Leonard Thompson has called a "pigmentocracy" in which the color of a man's skin determines every aspect of his life. Unfortunately most of the evidence points to these repressive states remaining in power indefinitely, as their superior wealth, technology and military power keep the African nationalist groups stalemated, while the major western powers profess their outrage while tacitly supporting the oppressors. The sole exception to this bleak prognostication is the tiny West African Por-

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Aaron Segal

tuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau, with a population of less than one million sandwiched between the independent states of Senegal and Guinea-Conakry. Here the dynamic African nationalist movement, PAIGC, led by Amilcar Cabral, is effectively administering much of the countryside, and given additional external assistance might be able to definitely oust the Portuguese.

However, the continuance of white rule in Southern Africa, based on South African might and extension of its political and economic hegemony over its satellite neighbors, risks a major international crisis. As African states perceive the hypocrisy of the West, which denounces these regimes while continuing to aid them with arms, trade, and private investment, the splits between those Africans who favor coming to terms with the repressive regimes and those who advocate violence will become more acute. Racism in Southern Africa is a cancer which at best can be confined south of the Zambezi River but which threatens to infect much of Africa.

The impossibility of altering political boundaries will also largely determine the shape of economic development. Grandiose Pan- African schemes will fall by the wayside in favor of specific regional arrangements such as the existing East African Community and the common market shared by Cameroun, Gabon, the Central African Republic and Congo, Brazzaville.. Only Nigeria appears to have sufficient population and purchasing power to support sub- stantial industry for a national market. Otherwise African states must continue to rely on widely fluctuating and often deteriorating prices for agricultural commodities such as coffee, cocoa, sisal, cotton, and tea, or pool their markets regionally to permit more rapid in- dustrialization. Africa's chances to export manufactured goods to the rest of the world are slim in the near future except perhaps for Ivory Coast textiles and Algerian petrochemicals.

The impetus toward regional economic cooperation in Africa may increase with the entry of the United Kingdom and other states into the European Economic Community (EEC). This should end the division between the African associated states of the EEC (mostly ex-French and Belgian colonies), and anglophone former British colonies. Monetary unification in Europe may speed up the convertibility of national currencies, especially in West Africa, and encourage intra- African trade.

While political boundaries remain constant, political institutions are likely to vary widely. Although Africa has gained the reputation as the continent of coups and attempted coups, in 1971 only 13 of its 43

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independent states were under military rule. What non-African ob- servers often overlook is the extraordinary stability of one-man presidential rule established since independence in countries such as Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Niger, Zambia, Liberia, Kenya, and elsewhere. The next ten years will bring a series of political succession crises as the generation of nationalist leaders who channeled the drive to independence are replaced by younger men with different ideas and ways. The crisis looms most serious in Ethiopia where 80 year old Emperor Haile Selassie, one of the most remarkable statesmen of the twentieth century, will probably be succeeded by a military regime; in Kenya, where President Jomo Kenyatta, also eighty, has no obvious successor; and in Senegal and the Ivory Coast where Presidents Leopold Senghor and Felix Houphoet-Boigny, the two apostles of close Franco-African cooperation, are both in their sixties. The succession is likely to fall first to close associates, whether military men or civilians, who also gained pre-independence prominence. It is my guess however, that in many countries young men educated after independence will quickly rise to the forefront, as has already happened in Nigeria. While these leaders will lack the traditional respect for the elders of their predecessors, they will have drive and determination to be less dependent on non-African powers.

Certain political and economic developments can be predicted. All the signs point to rates of population growth increasing to average slightly over 3 per cent annually, as high infant mortality recedes in the face of improved medical and hygenic facilities. With the youngest population in the world and an obsession for education that has to be seen to be believed, the major problem for much of Africa will be coping with its young. In spite of expenditures of nearly 30 per cent of total government budgets on education, there will not be nearly enough jobs at any level. The need for educational reforms to provide more vocational and agricultural instruction, to combine adult literacy and agricultural productivity as in the UNESCO pilot projects in Tanzania and Tunisia, and to concentrate on labor-intensive small- holder agricultural schemes, will be intense. The present millions of primary school-leavers, unwilling or unable to stay on the farms, drifting jobless into the cities at a rate of urbanization twice the rate of population increase and among the fastest in the world, will soon become millions of unemployed secondary-school leavers. Jobs and job-creation will be the major political and economic problems, but no one has yet found a solution to them. The only hopes for long-term reductions in population increase lie in improved post-partum maternal health care to convince parents that most of the children they bear will live and be healthy. UNICEF and WHO are working with African governments along these lines and are collaborating with ILO

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Aaron Segal

on model rural employment schemes, such as the village polytechnics in Kenya and rural development schemes in Western Nigeria.

At present more than 80 per cent of Africans live in rural areas in settlements of less than 5,000 persons. Africa has only one megalopolis, Cairo, and the problems of its cities have yet to reach the crisis proportions of other continents. The next decade will determine whether green seeds, agricultural education and extension, adequate and reliable credit facilities, and other measures can permit a rural middle-class to emerge and prosperity to extend beyond the cities and government bureaucracies. This will require that elites restrain their own standards of living and that regressive fiscal policies which siphon off the peasants' cash income to support urban services and amenities be altered. Otherwise the pace of urbanization and unemployment will overwhelm the capacities of governments, and rural farmers will shy away from growing cash crops to benefit urban elites in favor of feeding themselves and their neighbors.

Related to the need to redistribute income and resources away from the cities is the future of Africa's extended family systems, marriage patterns, and social mobility. Most of Africa is free from the caste systems and feudal land tenure practices which are frequently found in Asia and Latin America. Most African elites are still close to their rural less-educated cousins. The extended family system with its elaborate network of reciprocal rights and benefits is one of the most efficient welfare systems ever devised by man. It is breaking down in some places, as on the copperbelt in Zambia where African mineworkers' wages of $3,000 per year are the highest on the continent, to be replaced there by the nuclear family. Elsewhere, especially in West Africa, it is proving to be marvelously resilient, transplanting rural values to urban settings and providing a powerful impetus to sharing the costs of education and the establishment of private businesses. One critical test will be who marries whom, whether the first and second generation of elites, basically those who were able to go furthest in school in the pre-independence period, are willing to share their sons and daughters with lower income groups, or insist on forming a rigid and stratified social order. Africa's saving grace has been its rapid social mobility and relative absence of massive inequities in inherited wealth. The social-climbing trees will need lots of shaking to keep those at the top from clinging to too many of the fruits.

Finally, what Africa will offer to the world can be safely predicted. In addition to its basic commodities Africa will provide an increasing flow of minerals, especially oil and natural gas, with African states

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taking majority control of operations while retaining foreign private firms as technical partners. In addition Africa is destined to become a major tourist attraction. Millions of Europeans and hundreds of thousands of North Americans will flock to share in Africa's human and wildlife spectacles. Steps must be taken to ensure that Africans, who under colonialism were often relegated to the role of bearers of water, do not become merely porters for the bags for wealthy whites. Tourism can combine with ranching, intensive cash-crop farming, and small-scale industrialization, to help provide the badly needed jobs for burgeoning populations, including millions of young women who are insisting on access to education and opportunities.

In addition to its economic resources, Africa will offer a cultural effervescence. Whatever its politics and economics, its artists, writers, film-makers, playwrights, choreographers, and poets have just begun to make themselves felt and heard globally. The pace, tensions and conflicts of perhaps the most rapid social change oc- curring anywhere on the face of the earth are the stuff of vital art. The best of Africa's artists, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, Ivory Coast sculptor Christian Lattier, Senegalese film-maker and writer Ousmane Sembene, and scores of others who embrace both the traditional and the avant-garde will make all our lives richer. Africa's continued ability to integrate art and work, art and leisure, to make art a community rather than an individual or passive spectator en- deavour, gives its efforts a universal relevance. The vitality of its religions and its fascinating syncretic religious experiments are also worthy of export.

The Romans were right and the Africans will prove them to be right: Out of Africa will always come something new.

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