LOSERS 499Pretense and promises are vulnerable to truth and experience. When
the dream vanished, when people came to know the difference be
tween the systems, communism lost its legitimacy. The walls came
down and the Soviet Union collapsed, not by revolution, but of aban
donment.... the ecological inheritance [of Africa] could never have been less than
difficult. Africa was "tamed" by its historical peoples, over many centuries,
against great handicaps not generally present in other continents, whether
in terms of thin soils, difficult rainfall incidence, a multitude of pests and
fevers, and much else that made survival difficult.^9
All the ills that have hurt Latin America and the Middle East are ex
ponentially compounded in sub-Saharan Africa: bad government, un
expected sovereignty, backward technology, inadequate education, bad
climate, incompetent if not dishonest advice, poverty, hunger, disease,
overpopulation—a plague of plagues. Of all the so-called developing
regions, Africa has done worst: gross domestic product per head in
creasing, maybe, by less that 1 percent a year; statistical tables sprinkled
with minus signs; many countries with lower income today than before
independence. The failure is the more poignant when one makes the
comparison with other parts: in 1965, Nigeria (oil exporter) had higher
GDP per capita than Indonesia (another oil exporter); twenty-five years
later, Indonesia had three times the Nigerian level.^10
The pain of reality hurts more for the initial exhilaration. With in
dependence, the burden of exploitation would be lifted. Time now
for rewards. Some early growth figures seemed to confirm this: "Some
areas—like the Rhodesias, the Belgian Congo, Morocco, Gabon,
Kenya—were given as growing at 6 to 11 per cent per year, rates
among the highest in the world."^11 Few people deflated these esti
mates to take account of upward bias in countries moving toward ur
banization and a growing share of monetized, hence countable,
transactions. And no one paused to ask why the colonial powers were
so quick to leave. People wanted Africa to do well. Here is a Western
observer, writing in 1962:
Africans in general are the most present-minded people on earth....
Without significant exception, all African leaders... share the passionate
desire to acquire all the good things which western civilization has pro
duced in the two millennia of its history. They want especially to get the
technological blessings of American civilization, and to do so as quickly as