Setting Africa Free
The Battle for Zimbabwe
By Geoff Hill
Struik Publishers, Cape Town, South Africa, 2004
304 pp., $21.95 (cloth)
The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives
By Robert Guest
Smithsonian Books, Washington, D.C., 2004
288 pp., $27.50 (cloth)
Guest’s is the best book I’ve ever read on Africa. His recent post as Africa editor for The Economist magazine has taken him to countries most reporters never visit, let alone write about. His stories of genocide in Rwanda, disease in Zambia, and corruption nearly everywhere are told with immense sympathy for the personal tragedy visited on so many. He tells the story of Nestor Nebigira who fell in love with the wrong woman: a Hutu marrying a Tutsi was unacceptable in Burundi. The family fled to the Congo and then to Tanzania, where Guest talked to him in a refugee camp. Formerly a successful businessman, Nestor was now selling combs from a tiny shack with a mud floor. He lives with the knowledge that his children will always be in danger. Having mixed tribal parents renders them outcasts; as Nestor recounts, there is a local saying: “the son of a snake is a snake.”
Guest’s admiration for the Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, is obvious in his analysis of the grave harm caused by lack of property rights in most African countries. He concisely explains how tribal conflicts and disputes over mineral rights led to the systematic death of hundreds of thousands, and displacement of millions, in Angola, Rwanda and Burundi, Congo, and Sierra Leone.
Guest also documents the petty hindrances that stand in the way of doing business in poor countries, another theme of de Soto’s work. Traveling on the beer run with a truck driver for the Guinness company, Guest finds that a 360-mile journey that should have taken 18 hours turns into a four-day, sweat-inducing nightmare. Occasionally extorted and continually delayed by 47 roadblocks, the truck finally arrives at the destination with only two-thirds of the original cargo. One tedious delay of 10 hours was over a bribe of $12. Remarkably, Guinness still manages a small profit in Cameroon and remains in business, for now. But with roads wasting away and rarely repaired, the outlook is not good.
Guest contrasts these tales with stories of great hope: the success story of Uganda in battling AIDS; the political stability and rapid growth of Botswana; and South Africa’s growth since it threw off the shackles of apartheid. He is cautiously optimistic too, that South Africa will not go the way of Zimbabwe. Even though their histories have similarities, Guest reckons the differences are probably more important: a powerful business class in South Africa, its recent ability to attract pro-black foreign investment, and–perhaps above all–free elections.
Few have abused democracy so thoroughly as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, according to Hill, African correspondent for the Washington Times newspaper (among other affiliations). In his book, he narrates the history of Zimbabwe, from colonial times to independence in 1980 and to the fateful past few years. He treats Mugabe fairly, reporting that, at least until 1989, he was far less violent than many other African leaders. But since then Mugabe’s performance has been far less satisfactory. The IMF’s Executive Board this September “regretted that weak governance, corruption, and the lack of respect for the rule of law have undermined confidence, and led to capital flight and emigration, with negative spillover effects on neighboring countries.”
Hill, less constrained in what he can say than the IMF’s Board, notes that, by all reliable accounts, the Zimbabwean president has brought about the intimidation and torture of thousands of his citizens, had many of his political opponents killed, and stole the last election in 2002. In the process, he has also run the economy into the ground and blamed it on the IMF, among others. Hill reports that Zimbabweans now translate IMF as: “It’s Mugabe’s Fault.”
Despite the challenges facing the continent, Guest is largely positive about its future. But he says that it is only through the institutions of a free society, not external aid, that Africa will join the ranks of the globalized, and healthier, world. External aid given to countries that are not broadly democratic and free has always failed, he argues, and the more aid given to corrupt countries (even for combating AIDS) the slower Africa’s advance will be. Hill, exasperated that few African leaders have so far taken a strong stand against Mugabe, adds that unless the continent’s leaders choose democracy over despotism, Africa is unlikely to really flourish. When change does come in Africa, one hopes that the authors of these fine books will be there to herald and describe it.
Roger Bate is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
