Africa Through Crimson Glasses

...I recently revisited a dozen black countries after several years' absence, and except for rural Niger and Upper Volta (and of course what used to be Biafra), living conditions for the average man had improved noticeably...

...Although the corrosion of African governments through their leaders' self-interest is the subject of her book, Miss First persists in attributing Africa's difficulties to colonialism: poverty, factionalism, inequality, bloodshed—all, she suggests, were introduced and are being perpetuated by the white man...

...Obviously a disciple of Frantz Fanon, whom she quotes repeatedly, Miss First introduces her book by telling us that "in the course of this investigation I changed most of my—and many of the accepted— notions about independent Africa...

...She thinks "all but a tiny fringe own hardly more than a hoe, a plastic bucket, an ironware cooking pot or two, and perhaps a bicycle...

...Nevertheless, the author finds the whites who helped quell the Simba rebellion so repugnant that she feels constrained to praise the Simbas...

...For the author, Socialism invariably proceeds from good intentions and capitalism from evil ones— hence her difficulty in explaining why five years ago Ghanians were bowed by a police state and a bankrupt economy, whereas today most have no fear of official persecution and are beginning to enjoy a return of prosperity...

...The author reveals no understanding of the average Nigerian's deep involvement in the political struggle and ensuing war, of the tribal and religious resentments that had spanned centuries, or of the profound division between Ibos and Hausas over whether the traditional social organization should be sacrificed to economic efficiency...

...By decreeing all Africans equally capable of organizing themselves into a modern polity, Miss First can blame the breakdown in Congo (Kinshasa) on the new government's administrative and political decisions, rather than on the moral anarchy that followed independence...

...Moreover, the military government committed the unpardonable sin of selling Nkrumah's state enterprises to private investors...

...Had she studied the countryside as intensely as she did the governments, a clearer picture might have emerged of Africa's peculiar mixture of pork barrel and payroll padding with violence and witchcraft...

...And if independence politicians became bourgeois, a united peasantry would rise up and restore purity to Africa's politics...

...One of the notions she did manage to change was that black Africans are endowed with a unique sense of idealism and brotherhood...

...And by relegating the differences between colonial regimes to "academic obscurity," she is not obliged to note, say, Belgium's failure to educate, employ or otherwise prepare the Congolese for their "liberation...

...Nigeria fell apart, she asserts, because of "the quarrel over spoils . . . the security of a relatively small group of . . . top Northern civil servants, as well as those who hoped to graduate into these posts...

...A laborer could easily feed himself and have enough left over to buy his hoe, bucket and pot the first week...

...Yet by clinging to Leftist cliches about the traditions and beliefs of the African people, her analysis advances little beyond Fanon's work of 10 years ago...

...Miss First presumes that the prosperous Africans she meets constitute part of an elite, and that the average African is mired in poverty...

...Yet the book was published in England as The Barrel of a Gun, by Allen Lane...

...Her analysis of the 1965 clash between the Action Group and NNDP parties in Nigeria's old Western Region (setting off the country's violent chain of events) is that "the farmers attacked the big men who had sided with the ruling clique of the NNDP...

...What happened, of course, was something else entirely...

...We can only hope that Africa's leaders are less preoccupied with labeling heroes and villains, and more skeptical of Leftist panaceas...

...But no European invented African slavery, or ever perpetrated more awful crimes against Africans than the Simbas did against thousands of educated Congolese, not to mention the Nigerians' treatment of the Biafrans...

...There were rich and poor on both sides...

...I wonder how many Congolese she talked to in Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville), where the Simbas rounded up persons who had attended school, tied them in bags and tossed them over a waterfall to their deaths...

...Miss First pictures the tribal chief leading Socialists against capitalists...

...Similarly, France's proposal that its civil servants help administer former colonies free of charge becomes a subversion of Africanization...

...In any event, no tribe is willing to pay the price for prosperity in advance under government order...

...No matter that Miss First criticizes African governments for wasting potential development funds by gainfully employing thousands of political hacks and their relatives...

...she seems to have interviewed everyone, read every word and footnoted everything...

...Africa's pockets of deep poverty coincide either with a lack of resources, as in Niger and Upper Volta, or with backward tribal conditions, as in rural Zambia...

...The overriding problem with Power in Africa, however, is that its meticulously gathered data is woven into a background the author largely misperceives...

...She complains that unskilled laborers in Nigeria were offered only about $17 a month in the early '60s, and that in 1959 most petty traders there netted only $420 a year...

...Power in Africa undertakes to revise the Leftist position...

...So simplistic an observation contributes nothing to our understanding of Africa's enormously complex problems...

...The uninitiated will not easily identify the more obscure names, and may have to reread certain narrative passages to keep the dramatis personae straight...

...Where Miss First does not readily discern a revolutionary class, she drafts one from an unyielding history...

...Awolowo's supporters understood his economic theory to be that if a job were available, a Yoruba should get it...

...In accusing Western governments of imposing their economic values on Africa, the author imposes her own economic division on African society, blithely overlooking its tribal foundation...

...The prevailing view was that the leaders of the independence movements of 1956-64—when almost 75 per cent of all Africans were delivered from European rule —would direct their countries to the prosperity colonialism had long denied...

...Social change is an unmitigated good, despite the fact that satisfactory social relationships have long been the Continent's strength...

...The statesmen of Africa clawed at each other for wealth and power, in the process transferring substantial portions of their nations' treasuries to personal bank accounts in Switzerland...

...Everyone I knew in the Western Region at the time believed the Action Group represented Yoruba tribal aspirations—especially the desire to see Yoruba Chief Obafemi Awolowo released from prison— while the NNDP represented the Moslem minority and the Hausa tribe's effort to control the West's government...

...Miss First, let us call her that, examines Africa's liberation years and postindependence turmoil in luxuriant detail...

...There are a few minor discrepancies, too— several comments on Nigeria appear to have been written before the collapse of Biafra, others after...

...She accuses them of restoring "Ghana's elitist politicians," failing to acknowledge that Nkrumah himself epitomized elitist politicians...

...Ghana's military regime became the first independent government in Africa to surrender power willingly to a democratically elected replacement, but Miss First refuses them credit, insisting their motivation was selfish...

...Although she convincingly soils the image of the coup's engineers, she glosses over the widespread hatred of Nkrumah that made them popular...

...Its author, according to the book jacket, is "Ruth First," a former Johannesburg resident who moved to Britain after her 1963 detention for opposition politicizing...

...When the legendary freedom fighters fell in military coups d'etat, few rallied to support them...

...But the very thoroughness of her research leads her at times to assume the reader knows African history as well as she does...

...But even those tribes that are willing to sacrifice a degree of tradition to prosperity (and the economic reorganization it entails) desire to minimize the attendant social change...

...She scathingly indicts the extravagance, graft and corruption of the Continent's independent civilian regimes...

...What does the Left say now...

...Guided by the liberation parties, the Continent would achieve true Socialism and black brotherhood...

...She mentions, for example, that Nigeria under civilian rule was a multiparty state—without explaining that each party represented a particular tribe, effectively rendering the country a union of small one-party states...

...An article on Ghana by Ruth Weiss in last December's Interplay emanated, I suspect, from the same pen (although Ruth First writes that her married name is Slovo...

...Admittedly, these earnings would not go far in a Western department store, but they could buy a lot in a Nigerian market, especially at 1960 prices...

...Miss First admits that the economy was floundering under incompetent government administration and that the state development program was failing, yet insists the new regime's policy, "far from restoring the health of a dependent economy, has delivered it to the system responsible for the poverty and exploitation of all the Third World...

...As for a colonial regime which offered Africans free education and gave administrative jobs to young men with the best academic records, in her view it was only fostering an elite...

...recently returned from second trip to Africa REMEMBER HOW the Left interpreted Africa's "national liberation...

...Today one army faction supplants another as African governments slide toward a Latin American sterility...

...Thus the initial failures of Socialist policies in Ghana, Guinea and Mali are attributed to subversion or poor organization, not to the inappropriateness of the policies, because these countries were "furthest committed to social change...