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Hope for Africa?
| Article
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18915 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1991 |
2,032 Words |
| Author
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Peter J. Duignan
Peter J. Duignan is the coauthor of Why South Africa Will
Survive and the United States and Africa: A History. He was
also coeditor of the five-volume set Colonialism in Africa and
the influential United States in the 1980s. Duignana is a
senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. |
TROPICAL GANGSTERS
Robert Klitgarrd
New York: Basic Books, 1990
281 pp., $22.95
Black Africa embarked on the road to independence after 1957 in a mood of confidence and anticipation. The end of the empire was supposed to usher in peace, prosperity, and new dignity. Academics, policymakers, and experts in the West and Africa alike were optimistic. The beneficent combination of central planning, state intervention, foreign aid and expertise from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, massive education campaigns, and industrial development would create a new prosperity--or so most intellectuals and development economists (Keynesians) believed.
By contrast, few politicians or experts before or during the independence struggle predicted the plethora of coups and ethnic dissensions, the administrative venality, the economic crises, or the tyrannical rule that so often succeeded colonial domination. Liberal observers were convinced that socialism and single-party governance of the kind adopted in Guinea, Tanzania, and elsewhere would benefit the people.
The optimism of earlier decades has since given way to pessimism and despair. Hunger stalks the land, and the droughts continue; diseases spread (especially AIDS), the deserts advance, and the forests recede. Tyrants rule in most states: Blood flows without end as civil wars wrack Angola, Mozambique, the Sudan, and Ethiopia. About half the world's refugees are in Africa. This pessimism finds sophisticated expression in World Bank reports, studies put out by public agencies, and academic inquiries written from contrasting political perspectives. All agree as we enter the 1990s that Africa is a continent in turmoil and decline.
The new development policies
Tropical Gangsters provides a superb case study of what went wrong in Africa generally as well as in Equatorial Guinea specifically. Robert Klitgaard asks the essential question: "How can one help a recalcitrant, inefficient, sometimes corrupt government move forward?" He shows why economic development is so difficult in Africa. He explains why foreign aid and experts have usually failed to increase the material well-being of the ordinary person and have instead enriched the ruling elites.
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