THE CULPRITS? Slavery, colonialism
and destabilization of governments tore
at the fabric of Africa. Pictured above:
Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales, on a
tour of Freetown in 1925; a depiction of
a slave roundup—capturing people to be
sold as slaves—in 19th century Africa.Periscope AFRICA
14 NEWSWEEK.COM
take their turn at the public trough.
Elections are not honest and those in
power do not abide by their results.
There is bad governance. Public funds
are dispersed on ill-founded projects.
There is no accountability. The public
sector is corrupt. Economies are ham-
pered by bad policies which inhibit
competition and create conditions
that are unfavorable for investment.
To many, though, this is blam-
ing the victim. They point the fin-
ger instead at Europeans and even
Americans. The feeling is widespread
amongst aid professionals and Afri-
cans themselves. In the Congo, a
reporter for El Mundo was threat-
ened by militiamen who shouted,
“You whites are the cause of every-
thing bad that happens in Africa.”
Not everything perhaps, but plenty:
Slavery, colonialism, destabilization
of governments during the Cold War.
As Americans are still experienc-
ing 400 years on, slavery corrodes
everything it touches. More than 12
million Africans were kidnapped
and exported as slaves. They were
purchased with guns, which led to
endless internecine conflict. Colonial-
ism was almost as destructive. When
the Europeans met in Berlin in 1884
to divvy up Africa, boundaries were
set based on European claims and
natural dividers, like rivers. The new
colonies contained many different
ethnic groups and ethnic homelands
stretched across colonial boundaries,
confounding notions of nationhood.
Sierra Leone has at least 16 different
ethnic groups. It was a recipe for frag-
mentation and perpetual conflict.
There’s a third explanation for
Africa’s predicament: “It’s nobody’s
fault.” Jared Diamond and Jeffrey
Sachs have written bestsellers argu-
ing that the real villain is geography.
In Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argued
that Asia had wheat and barley
and animals like horses that could
be domesticated, while Africa had
zebras, which cannot. Diamond pos-
ited that the Sahara Desert created a
physical barrier to advances spread-
ing southward. Sachs has argued that
the causes are geography and climate,
e.g., being landlocked and tropical.
The problem is that just like Ein-
stein failed in his search for a “unified
field theory,” no one has managed to
come up with a compelling Grand
Unification Theory of Why Africa is
Screwed Up. The most likely answer
is that it’s not a single factor, but an
accumulation. Take the Singapore
comparison. It is tropical. It has mul-
tiple ethnicities and became inde-
pendent from Britain at roughly theOCTOBER 18, 2019