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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 40

AFRICA

The Scramble for Survival


By LANCE MORROW -- With reporting by William Dowell/Abidjan,
J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Marguerite Michaels/Nairobi


    The Great Rift Valley can be seen from space. It shears
down the eastern shoulder of Africa, a vast geological gash,
one of the mysteries of the continent's power. Human life began
in the Rift, as if it were gleaming up through a crack in the
world.

    Africa has a genius for extremes, for the beginning and
the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of
Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more
vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant.
Nowhere is there a continent more miserable.

    Africa -- sub-Saharan Africa, at least -- has begun to
look like an immense illustration of chaos theory, although
some hope is forming on the margins. Much of the continent has
turned into a battleground of contending dooms: AIDS and
overpopulation, poverty, starvation, illiteracy, corruption,
social breakdown, vanishing resources, overcrowded cities,
drought, war and the homelessness of war's refugees. Africa has
become the basket case of the planet, the "Third World of the
Third World," a vast continent in free fall.

    In the face of political instability and disintegrating
roads, airports and telephone networks, and other disincentives,
investors from Europe, America and Japan are withdrawing from
sub-Saharan Africa and looking elsewhere; Africans too are
pulling out their money. Why risk expropriation or failure in
a continent with a weakness for one-party kleptocracy, where
drainage by corruption often equals or exceeds the legitimate
intake?

    Cynics in Kenya refer to President Daniel arap Moi's
mining interests as "That's mine! That's mine! And that's mine!
. . ." Expatriate businessmen estimate that wealthy Nigerians
have enough money in personal deposits abroad to pay off the
country's entire foreign debt, more than $36 billion. Zaire's
President Mobutu Sese Seko has a personal fortune that has been
estimated from $4 billion to $6 billion, not far below the level
of the country's external debt. He has isolated himself from his
people -- and from gathering political unrest -- aboard a luxury
yacht that cruises the Zaire River.

    If it is to recover, Africa in the coming years will need
all its mystical powers of resilience. AIDS is devastating the
continent's population. It has hit as hard among the
cosmopolitan, educated elite as among the villagers, a fact that
threatens continuing development. If the rate of infection
continues to increase, the effect could be like that of World
War I upon the youth of Britain, France and Germany. Yet in the
strange arithmetic of apocalypse, aids will not serve as an
ultimate check on over-population. According to World Bank
projections, sub-Saharan Africa's population will rise from 548
million today to 2.9 billion by the year 2050. The huge increase
in mouths to be fed threatens to swamp any foreseeable economic
growth and force living standards ever downward.

    There are 160 countries on the United Nations' annual
development index, a measure of comparative economic and
political progress: 32 of the lowest 40 are in Africa. Between
1960 and 1989, Africa's share of the world's gross national
product dropped from 1.9% to 1.2%. Since 1980, sub-Saharan
Africa's external debt has tripled to about $174 billion.

    For decades, Africa could count on the cold war as an
economic resource. The U.S. and the former Soviet Union muscled
each other through African proxies, pouring in money to prop up
pro-Western or pro-Communist surrogates. Now the big powers'
priorities have gone elsewhere. Russia's most prominent expert
on African economies, Sergei Shatalov, devotes his attention to
his own country's debt problems. Europe's available investment
capital is being diverted to Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet states.

    Americans are thinking more about their own problems as
well. Says Herman Cohen, the Assistant Secretary of State for
African Affairs: "What the Africans really have to worry about
is not competition for our resources from the former Soviet
Union but from Los Angeles and the Third World that lives in the
U.S."

    Business investors make hard calculations. Companies
building plants to take advantage of cheap labor, an African
plus, look for other assets as well: a reliable infrastructure,
basic security and some hope for good returns. Capital and
operating costs in African countries are 50% to 100% higher than
in South Asia, where the return on investment is nine times as
great; 25 years ago, the regions were even.

    The external world's interest in Africa threatens to
become merely charitable -- a matter of humanitarianism, a moral
test for the West. Should the wealthy nations allow Africa to
drift further and further into the margins? Says Larry Diamond,
a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution: ``I don't think we
could live with ourselves, or would want to, if we sat by while
millions of people of a different color are condemned to misery
and death."

    But even doom has nuances, and like Africa it has a
thousand layers of meaning. The "margin" of one thing is also
the center of something else. Africa has its own "centers," its
resources of vitality and resilience. It operates by its own
inner dynamics and metaphysics. Africa looks hopeless, but it
is not. In many ways the continent is headed in the right
direction for the first time in centuries. Real changes for the
better are occurring. Africa is evolving African solutions.

    The continent's inner rhythms of development were
shattered 400 years ago by the intrusion of Europeans, who
brought in alien controls, boundaries and forms of government.
But for the first time since 1444, when the Portuguese sailed
into the "land of the blacks" to establish slaving forts, Africa
is mostly free from outside interference. Despots are falling;
here and there, democracy precariously takes hold. Improvised
alternative economies flourish.

    The continent remains connected to its powerful and -- to
outsiders -- mysterious genius. Africa is different, still an
inchoate self. There is a Europe, with its shared history,
shared culture, shared economies -- all accomplished the hard
way, over many centuries. There is not -- yet -- an Africa of
defined, stable boundaries and economies, not yet a sense of
shared destiny.

    Jung once wrote, "Different people inhabit different
centuries." Something in the African clock of development got
smashed when Europe broke into the continent. And when the
colonialists pulled out, they left the economic, political and
cultural infrastructure reconfigured in such a way that the new
countries served Europe better than they served one another.
This result was not necessarily intentional but was profoundly
damaging nonetheless. Robert Ruark touched on the cultural
destruction in his novel Something of Value: "If you change a
man's way of life, you had better have something of value with
which to replace it."

    Who knows what Africa would have become had it been left
alone? In any case, Africa today is changeable and still
shattering into new configurations. There is now a Burkina Faso,
an Ivory Coast, a Ken ya, a Nigeria, but the nation-state has
been an imposition from the West, and a sometime thing. Once
there was a Liberia (founded in the early 19th century by freed
American slaves); now Liberia is splintered in feudal fashion.
There are two Sudans, each at war with the other.

    The nation-states were dictated more by a European
cartography of power than by any internal dynamic of
allegiances. What is often missing is a social contract between
the governing and the governed. In fact, millions of Africans
have found that their economic energy, their sanity and even
their survival depend on how they succeed in outmaneuvering the
state.

    Zambia, called Northern Rhodesia in its colonial
incarnation, has begun to work hard in forming a social contract
with its people. The country's story is a synopsis of some of
the things that have gone wrong -- and something of an object
lesson.

    At the time of its independence from Britain in 1964,
Zambia was the richest black country in Africa south of the
Sahara. It had $1.1 billion in foreign reserves, plus the
world's second largest copper-mining industry. It also had
emeralds, other gemstones and immense fertile areas. It had the
potential to become southern Africa's breadbasket, and President
Kenneth Kaunda promised every Zambian a pint of milk and an egg
a day by 1970.

    Arriving in Lusaka today, a visitor might think Zambia is
a country emerging from war. Stretches of road in the capital
look as if they have been under mortar bombardment. Buildings
are dilapidated, vehicles rattletrap. Thousands live in
tin-shelter shantytowns. Unemployment and crime are running
high. Zambia has become one of the poorest nations anywhere,
with one of the world's highest per capita foreign debts --
nearly $1,000 for each of its 8 million people; average annual
income per person is less than $290. As in many African
countries, a small layer of extremely wealthy people flourishes
above the impoverished mass.

    Kaunda ruled for 27 years, then gambled on elections last
year and lost. When the Movement for Multiparty Democracy
government took over last November, its members were stunned by
the decay and confusion they found. Morale among civil servants
was abysmal, corruption pandemic. The new Minister of
Agriculture found his office building vandalized; employees had
stolen not only the light bulbs but also the lighting fixtures.

    What happened to Zambia? Complex things, most of them bad.
Kaunda took some principled stands against Ian Smith's
white-dominated Rhodesia, which later became Zimbabwe, and
against South Africa, but these acts vastly increased the cost
of transporting Zambia's copper. In 1968 Kaunda announced the
nationalization of 20 foreign companies; in 1969 he began a
takeover of the copper industry. Nationalization undermined the
confidence of private companies and discouraged foreign
investment.

    Assistant Secretary of State Cohen argues that African
independence leaders were often close to European left wingers,
"who implemented in Africa the biggest socialist fantasies that
they weren't able to implement in their own countries -- mainly
government ownership of everything and government engineering
of the economy at every level." Here formed a destructive
paradigm: the state came to own and manage 80% of the formal
economy. Senior managers were appointed for political reasons,
not for competence; the enterprises, incompetently run, lost
money. Tribalism, provincialism and nepotism flourished and led
to over employment -- along with resentment and low morale.
Kaunda, like other African leaders, used the bloated public
sector to keep politicians happy and to balance rival tribes.

    Then the arrangement began to collapse. In the early '70s
OPEC multiplied the price of oil severalfold, and world copper
prices tumbled -- a disaster for Zambia, since copper exports
had never accounted for less than 90% of foreign exchange
earnings. Foreign debt began to mount. In the end, copper
production dropped from 700,000 tons at independence to less
than 450,000 tons today, partly because of serious
underinvestment; equipment is old and inefficient.

    The Kaunda regime, for political reasons, neglected to
diversify, especially to encourage agriculture. Today, with only
5% of its arable land cultivated, Zambia is still considered one
of the world's few real farming frontiers. But to stay in power
and appease the urban masses, Kaunda kept food prices low,
thereby encouraging rural people to come to the towns while
discouraging those who remained in the countryside from growing
crops for sale. Result: Lusaka's population has increased
tenfold to 1.2 million since independence.

    In the Ivory Coast the surface is much different. For
years it was one of Africa's success stories, an exception,
President Felix Houphouet-Boigny's French-veneered miracle.

    Step off a plane at Abidjan's international airport into
the liquid heat of an African morning, and the veneer still
seems to be there. An advertisement framed in a distinctive
aluminum-and-glass case beckons: BENSON & HEDGES. decouvrez
l'or. The two hands languidly reaching for a cigarette in the
ad are white.

    It is a glimpse of a country caught between Europe and
Africa, with a certain dead-end, alienated aping of French
elites, something that does not work anymore -- if it ever did.
The Ivory Coast is still charming and agreeable, with an
endearing -- to foreigners -- Frenchness. Almost everyone speaks
French in Abidjan. Paris has Le Drugstore; so does Abidjan,
along with a cafe named La Rotonde and the Charles de Gaulle
Bridge.

    But the Gallic lamina is thin. The Ivory Coast's
population, 13 million, consists of 80 ethnic groups, each of
which speaks a different dialect. The miracle country is growing
somewhat threadbare. Throughout most of the 1970s, the Ivory
Coast enjoyed annual economic-growth rates of 6% to 7%, the most
vibrant in former French West Africa. The trend has reversed
since coffee and cocoa prices collapsed in the 1980s. High oil
prices mean a gallon of gasoline sells at $5. From 1986 to 1989,
export earnings dropped from $3.2 billion to $2.5 billion, while
costs continued to rise. Total debt, $12 billion, rose from 37%
of gross domestic product in 1979 to 130% in 1991, effectively
crowding out the private sector's ability to tap into domestic
credit sources. "They mortgaged their soul to the West," says a
diplomat. Now, with an integrated European market about to
become reality, the attention of French businessmen is being
distracted away from Africa. And a unified European Community
may force Paris to adopt a Europe-first policy, denying the
Ivory Coast its privileged position within France.

    Billboards picturing Houphouet-Boigny, 86, are everywhere.
They show Le Vieux in a charcoal-gray leisure suit surrounded
by enthusiastic young Ivory Coasters, the camera angle chosen
to make the tiny President look as tall as everyone else.
Houphouet is regarded as a master politician. Says a Western
diplomat: "When the Ivory Coast won a regional soccer game,
everyone was convinced it was because Houphouet managed to buy
off the other teams. They feel he is capable of anything."

    But Le Vieux, many Ivory Coasters believe, is surrounded
by corrupt advisers. Although his policies helped make the
country richer than its neighbors, he also stripped his
government of credible economic alternatives and virtually
guaranteed that the politicians who come after him will not be
able to sustain the prosperity.

    One symbol of the Ivory Coast's profound cultural
disjunction is a huge edifice that rises from flat green fields
at Yamoussoukro, Houphouet's native village: the Basilica of Our
Lady of Peace, which cost some $175 million, a gesture of
lifeless grandiosity. Amid the grazing goats and the lagoons,
the basilica looks like an ill-shapen mushroom, massive from a
distance and strangely sterile up close. Ismail Serageldin,
director of the technical department at the World Bank, observed
during a recent Cairo lecture dealing with culture shock that
there were "certain symbols of a society dissociated from its
own people." The most spectacular of all, said Serageldin, "may
be the basilica in the Ivory Coast. In all the mosaics, the only
black person is the portrait of the President." Yet a young
local woman asks a Westerner, "Do you think a poor country like
this shouldn't have the right to something that grand?"

    Houphouet-Boigny is old. Forty-three percent of his
country's population is age 15 or younger, and most are
uneducated. Last year university students rioted, and an elite
military assault team attacked their dormitories. The army sees
the students as pampered rich kids. Class differences are
rising. The future may belong to the educated young -- or it
could be dictated by the embittered, uneducated masses from
which the army and the gendarmerie draw their recruits. As
elsewhere in Africa, there are two deadly races: economic growth
against population, and basic education against ignorance.

    There was much optimism in Africa in the 1970s, in the
first full decade or two after the granting of independence.
Africa had its Golconda of commodities -- cocoa, coffee, copper
and palm oil -- and their prices were high. Africans borrowed
against those prices; the world happily lent. Unlike other
countries now heavily indebted, African nations owe the bulk of
their debt to First World governments, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank rather than to commercial banks
and other private creditors.

    The cheerleading slogan for Africa, coined by Tanzania's
Julius Nyerere shortly after his country won its independence,
was "We Must Run While They Walk." It caught the mood of
euphoria and ambition, the dash of social heroism. Now the sense
of heroic hope is mostly gone. Vast stretches of Africa are in
worse shape than when they became independent. People routinely
live at subsistence levels. Says Denys Lawrie, a mining
consultant who works in West Africa: "Africans have wasted 20
years." The world's attention has gone elsewhere, and African
leaders know their rations of aid will be smaller.

    What is the danger if the industrialized world withdraws
all help? Senegalese President Abdou Diouf has warned that
allowing Africa to fall apart could lead to a population surge
toward Europe and the U.S. Perhaps. On the other hand,
neglecting Africa carries no immediate, urgent threat to the
rest of the world. Black Africa has no nuclear powers. Why pour
in more money to be misspent or rerouted to private Swiss
accounts?

    Perhaps in reaction, a new sense of realism has become the
vogue in Africa, and the slogan for the continent's chastened
'90s might be "Learn to Walk Before You Try to Run." In 1989
the World Bank issued a landmark report titled Sub-Saharan
Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. It warned that if
Africa's slide into underdevelopment continued, some countries
would soon find themselves in worse poverty than the most
stricken Asian lands in 1900.

    The assessment marked the end of the era of Mau-Mauing
Westerners into a chic guilt. The World Bank, the IMF and the
so-called donor countries made it clear they wanted to wean
African countries from thinking of aid as a permanent fact of
life. Part of the trend, especially in West Africa, has been to
move African executives trained at the World Bank into key
decision-making posts within national governments. The Ivory
Coast's Prime Minister, Alassane Ouattara, for example, worked
for the IMF for nearly two decades before taking a post at home.

    The World Bank report looked at the African regression:
modest development after independence in the '60s, stagnation
in the '70s, decline in the '80s. Factors such as drought and
the oil crisis obviously played a role. But the principal cause
of the continent's wasting disease was seen as a fundamentally
wrong approach to economics. Instead of developing and
diversifying agriculture, most African countries tried, often
ineptly or corruptly, to industrialize at a time when much of
the world was already on its way into the postindustrial age.
African industrial products never had a chance to compete in a
high-tech world. Farmers who could not overcome unrealistic
price controls, or simple neglect, moved into overcrowded
cities. That meant enormous quantities of food had to be
imported and paid for in hard currency.

    Ingenious capital schemes were concocted to finance new
projects. Socialized, centrally directed economies -- dressed
up in ideological pretensions and encouraged by guilt-ridden
sympathizers in the First World -- enabled Africa's traditional
grafters to operate on an industrial scale.

    The World Bank's Serageldin draws a fascinating graph. The
vertical y line represents bonding -- quite literally the ties
that bind a society together. The horizontal x axis represents
options and opportunities -- freedom. Each society and each
individual must make a trade-off, represented by an oblique line
that angles up between the x and y coordinates. Someone who opts
for traditional social bonds loses opportunities, but someone
who chooses total freedom risks losing the social ties that give
his life meaning. The U.S. and other developed countries rank
high on options and opportunity, low on social bonds.
Traditional societies like Africa's usually rated strong on
bonding, are low on options and opportunities. "We have visions
of reality that are different," says Serageldin. Therein lies
the problem. "Bonding, imposed on a modern, institutional
structure, becomes nepotism" -- a universal African practice.
The worst outcome, he says, is to have neither one nor the
other: "If we trade bonds for options but do not succeed
economically, we risk catastrophe" -- precisely what has
happened in the American big-city ghettos.

    Despite 30 years of failure in Africa, many of the social
ties still exist. How long they can endure is another question.
"There is a mood of Afro-pessimism," says Serageldin. "It is
sustained by press images of famine and slaughter that tend to
swamp the positive achievements."

    Much of the real energy of Africa, and its future, lies
outside present government structures. Africans have been even
quicker than Western donors to cut themselves off from corrupt
government and nonfunctioning states. They simply ignore their
governments because they have their own economy. Variously
called the "informal sector" or the "parallel" economy, it is
the real engine of life.

    The U.N. International Labor Organization has estimated
that the informal sector employs 59% of sub-Saharan Africa's
urban labor force. If this sector is included, the size of
Zaire's economy increases threefold. In many respects Africa is
ahead of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe when it
comes to free markets and regional economic ties.

    Salaries in Africa become living wages only by unofficial
dealing -- by baksheesh, bribing, finagling, operating off the
books, bartering, finding a thousand intricate routes around the
occlusions of law and bureaucracy. A telephone-company repairman
in Lagos earns $60 a month. Therefore, the only way one can get
a phone repaired is to "offer him a little something" on the
side; in one day the repairman can pocket his official pay. No
tip, no repairs -- which may be why most phones in Lagos do not
work.

    The second economy is endlessly inventive. It embraces
everything from street vendors selling cigarettes and candy in
a Dar es Salaam market to the intricate border smuggling of
Zambian gemstones. At least 10 million of 26 million Kenyans
make a living from small-scale cash-crop farming, carpentry,
metalworking, tailoring, illicit brewing and running private
transport. Secondhand clothes are imported from Europe and
America and sold by the roadside. Packing cases are fashioned
into furniture. Oil drums are made into roofing sheets, frying
pans, barbecues, stoves, knives and lamps. Cars that cannot be
repaired are salvaged piecemeal and turned into donkey carts.
Much of this unofficial labor is carried out in the open air and
is called jua kali -- "hot sun." As multinational companies are
driven away by government policies and demands for kickbacks,
as state enterprises fail and lay off workers, the jua kali
economy is booming.

    The official minimum monthly wage is 5,000 shillings ($17)
in Tanzania, where a loaf of bread costs 190 shillings and a
pair of trousers 4,000 shillings. "Nobody in Tanzania expects
to survive on his salary," says Thomas Mrima, a truck driver
who plies between Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire. "Everybody makes
money with everything he can lay his hands on. They steal
government stores and sell them over the border. They use
government machinery for private building contracts." Ripping
off the government has become a popular sport: it is thought of
as stealing from thieves.

    So Africa improvises its own unofficial social contract,
one deal at a time. People are brilliant at adapting to the
impossible conditions created by their governments. That is the
difficulty: such adaptation has allowed ramshackle government
practices to continue too long, postponing the catharsis the
continent needs to purge itself of corruption and incompetence.

    Frustration over Africa has led some outsiders to the
conclusion that Africans are hopeless at organizing anything.
The reverse is true: they are ingenious organizers and able
businessmen. The problem is bad government.

    The trouble has arisen in part because of the gap between
national aspirations and the practical problems of putting
together a working government. Says Cyrus Reed, head of the
African Studies Center at the American University in Cairo:
"These countries were extremely fragile, yet they set goals that
even the most organized governments would have had trouble
fulfilling." Nearly all African leaders realized the first
challenge of government is keeping the loyalty of the people;
the solution was patronage. As that became more expensive and
resources dwindled, the leaders turned toward the World Bank and
the IMF to bail them out. So the countries went deeper into debt
and dependence.

    Now they are beginning to find ways out. If the '80s were
the lost decade, the '90s show signs of hope. In 1990 more
African nations introduced multiparty politics than in all the
previous 25 years. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, 38 of
Africa's 47 states were ruled by one party or by military
juntas; today about half those countries have held free
elections or adopted democratic reforms. Many Africans are
talking about a second revolution.

    Mali, Liberia and Congo have announced legal moves to
recover assets they say were stolen under previous one-party
regimes. In the case of Mali, the Swiss Foreign Ministry has
decided to reroute part of its country's aid to Mali to pay for
Swiss lawyers -- clever rerouting -- to investigate whether
Swiss aid money was wrongfully deposited in Swiss banks during
the 23-year reign of deposed President Moussa Traore. Nigerian
President Ibrahim Babangida has a bolder if unrealistic idea:
he suggested last year that African states might demand
reparations from the West for the damage done by the slave
trade. The estimated cost: $130 trillion in loss of people and
production potential over the centuries. The estimated chance
of success: zero.

    Europeans, as the historian Basil Davidson writes,
destroyed the moral universe of the continent. Colonialism
imposed a different cultural universe with its alien definitions
of God and progress and the rule of law. Now postcolonial Africa
is defined as being on "the margins" of that universe. But, says
Babacar N'Diaye, the president of the African Development Bank,
"even if marginalization is true, it is not my concern. What I
have to do is to create my self-respect. To create my
self-respect is to put my house in order. There is a tremendous
venue for intra-African trade we have not developed. We can cut
our military expenditures and develop health and education. I
don't like the word marginalization because Africans are using
it to make demands from the developed world to pay attention to
Africa. I think we must pay attention to ourselves."

    Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, by contrast, embraces
the word. "A little neglect would not be bad," he says. " The
more orphaned we are, the better for Africa. We will have to
rely on ourselves. We have to go back to the year 1500, where
we left off building an economy integrated in itself, able to
produce its own food, its own tools, its own weapons."

    It seems a plausible, even indispensable vision: Africans
reunited at last with themselves, with their cultures and
governments, brought home after centuries of terrible
alienation. But then Museveni goes on, "Today 50 out of 100
Ugandans can't read or write. If 90 out of 100 can read and
write and start to be guided by science and rationality, that's
the day of liberation."

    It may be a long swoop from Africa's year 1500 to
European-sounding formulas about "science and rationality." In
1961, with civil war erupting around him and his own
assassination only days away, Patrice Lumumba, the newly
independent Congo's first Prime Minister, wrote a letter to his
wife in which he conjured a splendid vision: "History will one
day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught
in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations . . .
Africa will write her own history, and . . . it will be a
glorious and dignified history."

    Perhaps. For the moment, African glory lies around a
historical bend of the river, in some unseeable future.