All those Africans.
Calderisi, a former World Bank official and a veteran of many years of working on African issues, exposes the dirty little secret harbored by so many saviors of Africa. Indeed, Calderisi has written a book that is positively boiling over with resentment toward Africans. They are dishonest and unfeeling. They are greedy and materialistic. They lack the values, training and even the motives necessary to govern themselves. They are religious, superstitious and prone to brutality. Were it not for Africans themselves, the saviors might actually notch some successes.
Calderisi excoriates Africans for “looking for excuses,” the title of his opening chapter, and hiding behind those they find. These excuses are, in his mind, predictable: colonialism and racism. Calderisi dismisses those who cite the history of European colonialism and the legacy of transatlantic slavery to defend Africans. Slavery wasn’t so bad, he says; at least the peculiar institution delivered some Africans from living in Africa itself. And colonialism had a silver lining. Without contact with Europeans, Africans would be even worse off, he insists.
To be sure, Calderisi does not express himself quite like this. In fact, he is even more blunt and more simplistic in his ideas about the failings of Africans. He has identified an “African character” and claims, “There is a darker side to the African character.”
Darker? Calderisi is deaf to the sound of his unintended pun.
Not to mention that he doesn’t say just how dark he finds the African character, perhaps because he’s impatient to make other sweeping generalizations. He finds, for instance, that “Africans are not savers.” “They are also superstitious.” “Most uneducated Africans are fatalistic,” he adds. “They accept and submit.” But they are not so accepting or submissive. Rather, “Africans can be brutal to each other, especially in groups.”
Am I the only one who feels like I’m reading a field study of animals?
As the author of this piece points out, the aid issue to Africa is a problem. Africa has received huge amounts of foreign aid, often with little discernable progress. But explaining away the history of colonialism and racism ignores the fact that these things shape social reactions. Many Africans don’t trust the benevolent Western nations who are extending a hand — why could that be? Many Africans don’t trust Western-style democracy, and democractic governments, which were often hastily erected as colonizers left African countries, have seen all kinds of problems in Africa — why could that be? And finally, Africa is a pretty big place, with entirely different traditions in different areas — is it really possible to make these kind of character evaluations on a population that is so diverse? Does anyone actually believe that people living in Egypt have the same experience as those living in Somalia or Uganda or South Africa?
And many African governments, like many governments all over the world, are corrupt and/or run by a power-hungry elite and/or always facing over-throw. A whole lot of aid money is channeled through these governments. It’s no wonder that it’s not spent on the people who need it. (As a side note, this is why organizations like The Global Fund for Women are deserving of financial support — they give small amounts of money to groups of women who are starting organizations, businsses, etc, without the beaurocratic government mess).
Over and over, Calderisi shows his carelessness. He also contradicts himself, arguing at times that Africans aren’t hard-wired to behave as they do but are creatures of their circumstances. At one point he admits, for instance, that “very few Westerners would behave differently from Africans in the same circumstances.” This is pretty close to my own view of why Africans don’t always do the right thing. They are responding, I think, to bad incentives. Presented with bad choices, they make bad decisions, but not because they are “bad” themselves. The fault does not lie with Africans, but with their circumstances. By ignoring this fundamental truth, Calderisi comes close to reviving the core canard of racism: that Africans are inherently inferior.
So very few Westerners would behave differently, but yet Africans are inferior to Westerners because they don’t respond to bad choices better than Westerners would. Ok.
And what should we do about it? Give power back to Western nations, naturally:
Probably the most daring of Calderisi’s recommendations is his most wrongheaded. He wants foreigners to run Africa’s elections, schools and public health programs. How this would happen, he does not say. He also is unpersuasive in making the case for why Africans would receive better services at the hands of foreigners than those of their own people. Running elections is extremely difficult, even in places like the United States, which has witnessed two disputed presidential elections in a row. But Calderisi is enamored of the notion of recolonizing Africa, the idea that through their own persistent incompetence, Africans have abdicated their rights to self-governance. He does concede, however, that it is politically impossible for outsiders to take over the running of African governments. So he is left instead with the less appealing option of invoking offbeat mechanisms such as sanctions against African governments that jail even a single journalist. Why he is partial to journalists yet does not threaten a similar cutoff for, say, jailing protesting farmers, he does not say.
Yes, reinstating colonialism seems like a great idea.
Read the whole article.