[Marxism] Why is Africa poor?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/rice
Why Is Africa Still Poor?

by ANDREW RICE

REVIEWED HERE:

The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair--A
History of Fifty Years
by Martin Meredith
BUY THIS BOOK

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
BUY THIS BOOK

The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption and African Lives
by Robert Guest
BUY THIS BOOK

A slogan painted on trucks and taxicabs all over Africa, much beloved by
metaphor-hunting authors, reads: NO CONDITION IS PERMANENT. This is true,
but some are recurring. Tyranny in Zimbabwe, famine in Niger, a
constitutional coup in Togo, rampant corruption in Kenya, protesters shot
in Ethiopia, an epidemic in Angola, civil war in Sudan--those are this
year's headlines, but if you think you've heard it all before, you have.
Martin Meredith, in his new book The Fate of Africa, writes that "what is
so striking about the fifty-year period since independence is the extent to
which African states have suffered so many of the same misfortunes." Some
countries, like Nigeria and Zambia, have gone through cycles of reform and
decay. But Meredith's subtitle--From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of
Despair--sums up the overall trend. It's hard to imagine now, but in the
heady days of the 1960s, much of the continent was no less prosperous than
South Korea or Malaysia. While those Asian nations have transformed
themselves into economic "tigers," however, gross domestic products across
Africa shrank during the last two decades of the twentieth century.
Africans are getting poorer, not richer. They are living shorter, hungrier
lives.

The decline of an entire continent confounds our preconceptions about human
advancement. The economist Jeffrey Sachs points out in his recent book The
End of Poverty that our Hegelian notion of linear progress is relatively
new. For most of history, humans lived miserable existences and couldn't
expect better before the afterlife. But since the Industrial Revolution the
situation has improved, and not only in the rich countries of Europe and
North America. Between 1981 and 2001, Sachs says, hundreds of millions of
people, many of them in Asian nations like China and India, emerged from
extreme poverty. But a billion have been left behind, most of them in
Africa. "The greatest tragedy of our time," Sachs writes, is that one-sixth
of all humans still live a dollar-a-day existence, scraping by on the
margins of starvation.

How can one continent be so out of step with humankind's march of progress?
Everyone agrees that Africans are desperately poor and typically endure
governments that are, to varying degrees, corrupt and capricious. The
dispute is about causes and consequences. One group--call it the
poverty-first camp--believes African governments are so lousy precisely
because their countries are so poor. The other group--the governance-first
camp--holds that Africans are impoverished because their rulers keep them
that way. The argument may seem pedantic, but there are billions of dollars
at stake, and millions of lives. The fundamental question is whether those
who are well-off can salve a continent's suffering, or if, for all our good
intentions, Africans are really on their own.

Recently, the poverty-first crowd has been making a lot of noise. The
weekend before the July G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, millions of
people watched as pop stars in cities around the world played concerts
organized by Africa crusader Bob Geldof. The event's platform--forgive
Africa's debts, increase its development aid, end trade policies that
undermine its exports--echoed the recommendations of Sachs, the antipoverty
movement's house economist. A Columbia University professor and an adviser
to Kofi Annan, Sachs has lately become a favorite brain of the US Weekly
set: Bono wrote his book's introduction, and he recently starred alongside
Angelina Jolie in an MTV special about their travels in Kenya. The
celebrity endorsements amplify Sachs's serious argument that for too long,
rich countries have done too little to help the poor. At the end of the
Gleneagles summit, world leaders announced that they would increase global
aid by about $50 billion by 2010. Sachs says the poor need much more, right
away: about $75 billion a year, half of it for Africa. "I reject the
plaintive cries of the doomsayers who say that ending poverty is
impossible," he writes.


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