A slogan painted on trucks and taxicabs all over Africa, much beloved by metaphor-hunting authors, reads: No Condition is Permanent. This is true, but some are recurring. Tyranny in Zimbabwe, famine in Niger, a constitutional coup in Togo, rampant corruption in Kenya, protesters shot in Ethiopia, an epidemic in Angola, civil war in Sudan — those are this year’s headlines, but if you think you’ve heard it all before, you have. Martin Meredith, in his new book The Fate of Africa, writes that “what is so striking about the fifty-year period since independence is the extent to which African states have suffered so many of the same misfortunes.” Some countries, like Nigeria and Zambia, have gone through cycles of reform and decay. But Meredith’s subtitle — From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair — sums up the overall trend. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the heady days of the 1960s, much of the continent was no less prosperous than South Korea or Malaysia. While those Asian nations have transformed themselves into economic “tigers,” however, gross domestic products across Africa shrank during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Africans are getting poorer, not richer. They are living shorter, hungrier lives.The decline of an entire continent confounds our preconceptions about human advancement. The economist Jeffrey Sachs points out in his recent book The End of Poverty that our Hegelian notion of linear progress is relatively new. For most of history, humans lived miserable existences and couldn’t expect better before the afterlife. But since the Industrial Revolution the situation has improved, and not only in the rich countries of Europe and North America. Between 1981 and 2001, Sachs says, hundreds of millions of people, many of them in Asian nations like China and India, emerged from extreme poverty. But a billion have been left behind, most of them in Africa. “The greatest tragedy of our time,” Sachs writes, is that one-sixth of all humans still live a dollar-a-day existence, scraping by on the margins of starvation.
Everyone agrees that African nations are poor and have corrupt governments — but that raises a chicken-and-egg question:
One group — call it the poverty-first camp — believes African governments are so lousy precisely because their countries are so poor. The other group — the governance-first camp — holds that Africans are impoverished because their rulers keep them that way.