In dialogue - Africa

Viewpoints and trends on key issues related to Cotton made in Africa

Astonishing glimpses of a different Africa
That is the Africa by corrupt politicians and starving children. We see a different Africa. And we want to talk about its strengths

Africa, the sick old man of planet Earth, eternally starving, always one step away from catastrophe: Bloated bellies, child soldiers, withered harvests – those are the motifs that seem to find their way into spotlights and viewfinders again and again. Such images have been deeply engraved on our collective memory. But they tell us nothing about the people of sub-Saharan Africa. Pictures cannot depict the will to survive, or show us the grace with which Africans go about surviving. We would like to raise an objection.

In reality, Africa is a continent blessed by nature that supports nearly a billion inhabitants. Africa feeds its people. Over the millennia, Africans have acquired sophistication that permits them to live well, whether in the desert or the rainforest. Even today, most practice subsistence, living off what they plant and harvest, adding value through trade and skilled labor, or bringing produce to market, be it chickens, tomatoes, fish, or millet. Even in urban shantytowns – if remotely feasible – every home boasts its ten stalks of corn. One can only be amazed at the ingenuity and imagination evidenced by dwellings, infrastructure, or entire neighborhoods that seem to arise from nowhere, and are frequently ignored or slated for destruction by city planners and developers. Not without conflicts, not without suffering, and not always without violence – but still, such communities are social miracles, repeatedly discredited by self-styled experts both black and white. African people’s talent, energy, vision, and strength are relentlessly driven underground. Suffocated, those qualities disappear from view, replaced by a mania for planning measured against global standards that delivers only more poverty, debt, and dependence.

The enslavement of millions of black people, the colonization and looting of the continent, the missionaries, the failed aid projects: The continent’s history has systematically robbed it of its autonomy. The invaders decimated the social, economic, and political foundations of the continent’s viability, what had given its people self-sufficiency in food, housing, education, and health.

If Africa today is a continent in need of help, it is primarily due to looting and interventionism by European and North American societies. Yet the continuing monopoly of modernization and industrial progress also obscures the fact that large portions of African society are still capable of self-sufficiency. Where social forces are still at work, where cultural riches are not forgotten, daily life for millions of Africans is modest in scale, but self-sufficient. In the form of families and neighbors, those social forces have contributed greatly to softening the blow of the AIDS pandemic.

But in the meantime, the barrage of discrimination against traditional subsistence-based structures continues with the regulation of farming, home construction, families, and markets – in short, in the entire informal economy. Such ways of life fulfill in many respects the criteria for viable long-term economic development (decentralization, sustainability, ecological equilibrium), but are nonetheless subject to frequent disparagement by itinerant modernization experts – in word and deed, wherever experts recommend razing and rebuilding.

The perpetrators are depriving Africans of the basis for their nutritional self-sufficiency. The process has been going on for decades, from the Green Revolution to integrated agriculture and onward. At the same time, Africans are being denied – in another long-term procedure – the ability to build and inhabit their own homes with any autonomy. Prefabricated housing, built by “construction workers” in conformity with standardized regulations, now characterizes suburban areas where shelter was once offered by traditional dwellings erected independently using local materials in cooperation with neighbors and family members.

Such interventions have contributed to the increased malnutrition and hunger, the rise in homelessness, and the dissolution of the protections once provided by the extended family in favor of a welfare state. Millions of people are robbed of the material conditions of their existence, and then abandoned to their fate.

Modernization’s attack on local structures does not come exclusively from without. It can come from within, as well, with the values of consumerism and urbanization – the allure of city subcultures that widen the gap between urban and rural, old and young. José María Sbert describes such realities when he observes:

The belief in progress is destined to deprive “simple people” – meaning those who are not yet “advanced,” but have already lost access to land held in common and traditional means of autonomous subsistence – of the last vestiges of unconditional support that might, in the face of the market, industry, and the state, have lent them spiritual independence and self-confidence. They are no longer integrated into supportive communities. They care only for themselves. They do not share the fears of their forefathers, but neither do they share their faith. They have learned to look down on their parents, from whom they can learn nothing of relevance. Ultimately, nothing remains to them but to become the workers industry needs, the consumers the market needs, the humans that global humanity needs.

Africa remains the Dark Continent to which researchers, missionaries, merchants, peacekeepers, experts, advisers, and journalists have tried to bring the light of modernity for hundreds of years. They have succeeded. On balance, one has to admit that the basic elements of consumerist society are present, along with the belief in their benefits. While the more observant and perceptive citizens of the wealthy industrialized nations of the North are beginning to comprehend that the road taken might be the wrong one, Africa is working to accelerate the pace at which it races toward the same dead end. No one is more in love with hedonistic, materialistic modernity than today’s African political elite (with apologies to the few exceptions): Criminals from Mengistu to Mobutu, from Idi Amin to Houphet Boigny, from Charles Taylor to Bokassa, plundering and wrecking their own countries, have laid the cornerstone for today’s insanity.

Cabinet meetings, AK-47s, Swiss bank accounts, corruption: That is the world of such African men, and their exclusive preserve. The river of life, where it flows today in Africa, is nourished and preserved by women. Grandmothers care for orphaned grandchildren. Mothers work the fields and sell their produce in green markets and snack bars. Daughters support and nurse parents sick with AIDS. Men make the profits – and the wars. Survival and prosperity lie in the hands of women – and a handful of men.

There is no such place as Africa.

If we turn our attention to the media, we see a cycle of features in repeat mode about a continent in crisis afflicted by famine, war, oppression, and exploitation. You could call the Africa the continent of the six Cs: conflict, criminality, corruption, capital exodus, catastrophe, and contagion. With those stories in mind, the only good news is bad news. In December 2007, a delegation of journalists from various African countries, in Germany at the invitation of the federal president, repeatedly asked, “Where is the positive?” Europe, they said, has an utterly distorted image of Africa.

The story goes that Desmond Tutu, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was asked by a journalist, “Your grace – doesn’t it make you sad, as your long life comes to a close, to see that in spite of all your advocacy of peace and justice, the African continent is still troubled by countless armed conflicts?”

Tutu paused at first, wrinkling his forehead, and then replied, “You’re quite right. It makes me terribly sad to see how little Europe seems to have learned, after setting off two world wars. Whatever will become of poor Europe? Look at Northern Ireland, look at the Basque country in Spain – not to mention the former Yugoslavia. Will Europeans never learn?” The journalist had no further questions.

Among European clichés about Africa, perhaps foremost is the Africa of postcards, coffee table books and travel prospects: awe-inspiring landscapes, wild game, and the orb of the sun glowing magenta as it sinks into the endless veldt. And posing in front of it all, natives in gaudy traditional costumes – along the lines of the motto “Poor But Happy.” When a poll asked American schoolchildren what concepts they associated with Africa, 87 percent said wild animals, 84 percent elephants, and 79 percent jungle. Likewise, 79 percent proposed tigers (there are no tigers on the African continent). The next highest-ranked concepts were spears, tribes, natives, poison arrows, and drums, each volunteered by more than two-thirds.

That is the Africa of glossy travel brochures, where human beings serve only as props and scenery, while the contrasting image is dominated by corrupt politicians, starving children, child soldiers, famine, and civil war. All those things exist, and they should not be denied. But if we can take our eyes off them for a moment, we see a different Africa. And we want to talk about its strengths.

By Reimer Gronemeyer and Matthias Rompel. Printed by permission of Brandes&Aspel.

Gronemeyer, Reimer and Matthias Rompel.
Verborgenes Afrika?
Alltag jenseits Von Klischees.
182 pp. Frankfurt: Brandes&Aspel, 2008.