A New Colonialism?

William Pfaff

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995

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Summary:  Many African nations seem hopelessly destitute and anarchic. European nations have the moral obligation and the colonial expertise to give wise succor.

William Pfaff writes a syndicated column for the International Herald Tribune. His latest book, on nationalism, its origins, and its consequences, is The Wrath of Nations (Touchstone).

The destitution of Africa has been an all but forbidden topic in political discourse for reasons as comprehensible as they are disabling. The time has arrived, however, for honest and dispassionate discussion of this immense human tragedy, for which the Western countries bear a grave if partial responsibility and which will worsen if not addressed.

THE RETURN OF BWANA

Much of Africa needs, to put it plainly, what one could call a disinterested neocolonialism. Africans acknowledge the immensity of their crisis and the need to consider hitherto unacceptable remedies. The democracy movement, which in the past few years produced a series of national conferences to end dictatorships, is foundering. Fewer than a third of sub?Saharan Africa's nations have anything resembling multiparty politics. The Congolese author Ange Séverin Malanda says, "From now on, the danger in several parts of the continent is of pure destruction or generalized destabilization. The destabilization is already evident in Somalia, Liberia, and Angola. The pure destruction began to be realized in Rwanda on the sixth of April 1994, annihilating every contemporary African standard of reference. Genocide there accomplished the unimaginable and the unlimited." A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross says of Liberia that "no moral barriers remain . . . every reference to the principles and values which found and bind a community of men have disappeared . . . virtually nothing remains except horror and cruelty." The Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, writing in anguished response to the repression of minorities in Nigeria, has questioned -- as have some Western commentators -- the postcolonial convention that frontiers must be left as they are. Any program, however, for redrafting frontiers on the principle of ethnic self?determination must explain why the equitable redivision of Africa on ethnic lines would be more feasible than it has proven in the Balkans, where the pursuit of this principle has engendered war after war, from the Serbian uprising of 1804 to the present war in the former Yugoslavia.

In Africa, any attempt to redraw borders on ethnic lines would seem certain to accelerate political disintegration and inspire new conflicts. It is now the convention in right?thinking Western circles that Africa's tribes and ethnic groups are repressive colonial inventions and that nothing significant distinguishes Zulu from Xhosa, Masai from Kikuyu, or Tutsi from Hutu, notwithstanding the reactionary Western sciences of ethnology and anthropology.

Nor does the idea of a new form of colonialism stand much chance of acceptance, but in the absence of an alternative it must be considered. It has separately been proposed by the Kenyan historian Ali A. Mazrui,ffi editor of the final volume of the UNESCO General History of Africa, and by several Western observers of Africa, including the present writer.

THE MISSING MIDDLE

Most of Africa, I have argued, lacks the crucial educated middle and professional classes and the mediating private and public institutions that compose a "civil society." Civil society makes democracy possible; without it democracy has failed and will continue to ...

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