Africa
A brief spotlight was turned on Africa at the
beginning of July. The G8 leaders (of the United States, Britain,
Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia) assembled at
Gleneagles to discuss Africa, climate change and that sort of thing. The
Live 8 concert for 200,000 in Hyde Park, intended to attract attention
to poverty in Africa, passed off without incident. About 225,000 people
walked through Edinburgh in a similar cause. Then the bombs went off in
London and Africa was forgotten again, except by the servants of God who
unobtrusively live and work in that mighty continent as Africa's light
and salt.
I went to visit some of them in Kenya a couple of weeks after the G8 was
over. Nairobi gets chilly in July. Barely fifty miles from the equator
its 5,200ft elevation means that night temperatures sometimes drop to 50
degrees, and so the friend who met us at Nairobi airport was dressed in
a jacket, sweater and tie. Africa is a continent of riches - the
vegetable abundance is legendary - and there is the vast mineral wealth
- diamonds, gold, copper, oil, uranium, cobalt, bauxite and so on.
Africa is also a prey to violence (in Kenya rape is the topmost crime),
corruption, disease, drought and famine. In Kenya the parliament has
passed a new constitution which is not universally popular, and there
were street demonstrations in Nairobi the day before we arrived.
Students enthusiastically joined in the protest; one man was killed in
this mini-riot. In the papers were headline articles, photographs of
bleeding men, and troubled leading articles questioning whether the
police use of guns was not becoming a first rather than a last resort.
During the colonial period in the history of Africa white patterns were
imposed on black landscapes. Nearly half the frontiers fixed during the
Victorian scramble for Africa were straight lines, cutting through some
190 culture groups. Kenya's eastern and southern borders are such lines
on maps for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Later civil wars were
encouraged by such artificial boundaries and spurious national
identities. Initially there was a tiny educated class to sustain
democracy. Fifty years ago black Africa's population of 200 million
included only 8,000 people who had been to secondary school.
The dawn of African independence was joyful and expectant; today there
is a more sombre mood. Kwame Nkrumah inherited one of the richest
countries in Africa with a competent administration and an established
parliament. By 1965 Nkrumah had reduced Ghana to a corrupt and bankrupt
despotism. Elsewhere the new rulers followed suit with looting on a
large scale, starving their country's hospitals, schools and roads of
funds. Mobutu, the ‘Zairean Caligula’, ran the most grotesque tyranny of
all, chartering Concorde for his own personal use, seizing a third of
the state's revenue; other tyrannies took barbaric and bizarre forms.
Idi Amin, Mandela, Mugabe, Gaddafi, Nasser, Mobutu, Obiang - you
couldn't make up their stories. Since Nkrumah's days Africa has been
through 186 coups, 26 wars and seven million dead. There are many areas
in which it is impossible for missionaries to work.
Africa contains 70 per cent of the world's AIDS sufferers. By 2000 a
fifth of South African adults were established to be HIV positive, yet
Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, treated Aids as a white
capitalist conspiracy. Today Africa is the world's poorest continent.
Half its 880 million inhabitants live on under a dollar a day and its
entire economic output is less than that of Mexico.
Western political and economic policy has not been uniformly helpful, to
say the least. Western farm subsidies and tariff barriers cripple
African producers, outweighing foreign aid. Tony Blair and the leaders
of the richest nations in the world cannot redeem Africa. The condition
of these countries is beyond the reach of foreseeable government
solutions. That is frustrating to the multitudes who, having rejected
the redemption of Christ, have to pin their hopes in the redemption of
Caesar. African rulers and the politicians who run their nations are
regarded by the citizens as yet another burden they have to bear in the
struggle for survival. From the outside Africa looks hopeless, but
inside Africa the continent never feels hopeless. Africans live on a
mixture of stoicism, humour and hope. The influence of the Christian
gospel has been immense, enabling Africans to survive calamities and
thwarted expectations that would drive unbelievers to despair. In the
church the people speak positively of better days ahead at all levels of
national life. The non-Christian African hopes the environment will
steadily become too unhealthy for vice to thrive. The Kenyan man in the
street thinks, ‘This government is not what the people hoped for, but it
is our government. We elected it and if it doesn't measure up we can
dump it come 2007.’ The Christian is encouraged by the amount of light
and salt in the nation.
There are always spurts of economic improvement throughout the vast
continent; more Africans have shoes than twenty years ago; more homes
have corrugated iron roofs, thatch has almost disappeared, and even the
iron roofs are being steadily replaced with tiles as the tide of
prosperity slowly spreads out from the cities, in spite of political
failure. The number of African millionaire businessmen has increased
greatly. Democratic freedoms also advance; in an increasing number of
countries presidents have been forced to allow newspapers to print
stories that twenty years ago would have landed their editors in jail
for life. Radio stations now broadcast the views of callers that
formerly would have brought swift retaliation. Almost everyone with a
job has a mobile phone, so news and views spread ten times faster than
before. Someone has asked whether the Rwandan genocide could have
happened if there had been mobiles; they are certainly transforming
commerce.
Newspaper editors have much more to target. After decades of
dictatorship, in December 2002 Kenyan voters swept Mwai Kibaki to power
in Kenya at the head of his N.A.R.C rainbow coalition on an
anti-corruption ticket. 'Corruption will now cease to be a way of life
in Kenya,' Kibaki promised. Then the very first law Kibaki's parliament
passed rewarded politicians with 172 per cent salary increase. MPs'
take-home pay is now about £65,000 per annum (compared with a British
MP's £57,500 gross) and the Kenyan MPs' fat package of allowances
includes a £23,000 grant to buy a duty-free car, together with a monthly
£535 fuel and maintenance allowance.
It
seems an obscene decision when Kenyans' average annual per capita income
is $200. Teachers, civil servants and police are paid a pittance. Will
men of quality aspire to those professions if the pay demeans the
office?
The largest slum in the world is a couple of miles from the Nairobi
parliament building. The Kibera neighbourhood occupies one square mile
of space where 1.2 million people live. A huge infusion of refugees have
gravitated to such slums dotted around Nairobi. Hundreds of thousands of
Rwanda Tutsis fled to Kenya from Hutu genocide. Sudanese non-Muslims
flowed down from the northwest. Victims of revolution in faraway Congo,
from nearby Zimbabwe and from distant Somalia and Ethiopia have all
drifted into gatherings of refugees from those nations in the various
slums. They attend the churches and sit together in groups, as do the
members of distant Kenyan tribes who have come to the capital looking
for work.
The city's poor residents burn whatever they can to keep warm. Wood,
charcoal and even dung are the primary sources of energy in Kenya and
much of Africa, providing heat for the home and cooking. Clean fuels
such as natural gas and electricity are luxuries. Why do most Africans
in the 21st century have to rely on dirty energy sources which encourage
widespread respiratory illnesses? For the same reason that they are
poor; in many countries, though not in Kenya, beneficial economic
activities are prevented by their oppressive governments. A business
cannot be started without a licence, and licences are available only to
those with government connections. Even if it were possible to operate a
business few would have the necessary capital. While their governments
have been borrowing as if there were no tomorrow, most Africans cannot
obtain a loan at any reasonable rate of interest.
The former British High Commissioner to Nairobi is the outspoken Sir
Edward Clay. Last year he denounced the 'Mount Kenya Mafia' as gluttons
who were so overfed they left the signs of their theft in their trail as
clearly as if they had been sick. He said in the language of an Old
Testament prophet at his most disdainful, ‘The evidence of corruption in
Kenya amounts to vomit, not just on the shoes of donors but also all
over the shoes of Kenyans and the feet of those who can't afford shoes.’
In February this year Clay boldly produced another set of accusations
alluding to the fact that £550 million had been stolen since Kibaki's
government assumed power two years ago. Kenyan ministers responded by
accusing the British envoy of being a white colonialist whom nobody need
listen to. Britain is a nasty former colonial power - that happens to
have just increased Kenyan aid massively to £1 million a week. More aid
equals more Mercedes-Benzes while the tax-paying Brits funding all of
this drive around in their Vauxhalls and Rovers.
On June 8 Kenya's 2005-6 budget was read out by finance minister David
Mwiraria to a cheering parliament. It declared that the government had
allocated £3 million for the purchase of a fleet of new vehicles for the
Office of the President. A further similar sum has been set aside for
the maintenance of the existing car-pool of vehicles. Does this
expenditure have anything to do with the arrival of £1 million a week in
aid from the UK?
African
nations have to produce their own prophet-like Edward Clays, pitiless in
their resolve to make pariahs of black Africa's cruel and rotten
governments. Where is the satire, where the anger, where the mockery and
derision that these men deserve? That is one duty of a Christian
journalist. Didn't Christ dismiss Herod as a fox and the Pharisees as a
nest of vipers? Should not the law of God be declared from the pulpits
to the WaBenzi as earnestly as to any other sinners? On the flight to
Nairobi on July 12 one read a report in the Times of the son of the
President of Equatorial Guinea, Teodorin Nguema Obiang, who had just
spent nearly one million pounds on three luxury cars in a shopping spree
in South Africa. Most of the citizens of Equatorial Guinea survive on
less than a dollar a day. He stayed in Cape Town in the £700-a-night
Mount Nelson Hotel and ran up a bill of £1300 for champagne.
The pulpits properly do not focus on such people because those men of
greed are not sitting in the congregation. They are a soft target for
preachers who want to display huffin'-puffin' moral outrage while
avoiding exposing the sins of the very people sitting before them.
Preachers need also to pray for all that are in authority, even when
moral leadership is lacking in many nations. This passivity of the
people before a ruling class of greedy men is suffocating the people of
Africa. You ask how such men can stay in power all over the continent.
The reason is that political revolution is virtually impossible in
contemporary dictatorships, and the small people in Africa passively
tolerate, even in some cases sneakingly admire, their leaders' greed and
rascality. The cult of the Big Man is the taproot of Africa's suffering.
That culture has to change, and nothing but the gospel of the God-man
who displayed greatness in self-denial and in the sacrificing service of
others can do it.
Evangelical Christianity has been an immeasurable force for good in this
continent. It has overcome superstition with truth; into the immorality
of paganism it has brought the ten commandments and the Sermon on the
Mount. It has brought a message of forgiveness of sins and a reconciled
God to those who did not know the Christ of the Bible. It has injected
the power of the indwelling Spirit enabling ordinary men and women to
live lives of self-control, modesty, love and holy living. It has
established the family and brought its own censures against polygamy. It
has educated, treated, fed and brought hope to a multitude of Africans.
It has quietly worked against evil systems, such as apartheid and
African tyranny. Humble men and women have spent heroic lives in little
villages in the hills and bushes of Africa spreading a gospel of grace,
education and godliness, preaching the free offer of God's mercy to all
men. All the support we rich Christians in the west can channel into the
support of such men, especially in bringing the best Christian books to
them, must be encouraged.