A Continent Gone Wrong

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Beset by regular breakdowns, it produced five tons last year. In accepting such largesse, African leaders have mortgaged themselves to outside interests. Observes a Nigerian film maker: "We build palaces but can't run them, we import cars we can't repair, we are attracted by everything that glitters. We are slaves to another culture."

One of the major exceptions to the litany of failure is South Africa, which has become sub-Saharan Africa's premier economic and military power. But this has been achieved at an unacceptable price: the disenfranchisement of its 21 million blacks, who account for 70% of the population. They are allowed to work, but cannot vote in central-government elections. They have little freedom to choose where they work or live. Many are forced to settle in bantustans, or black homelands, that the white government has set aside to segregate blacks while exploiting their labor. The elaborate canon of apartheid laws means that activist blacks who speak out against the government too forcefully, or who are simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, can be detained, jailed or fined at the whim of South African authorities.

Independence, paradoxically, has not freed most of Africa from the yoke of foreign domination and meddling. Cuban soldiers act as proxies for the Soviet Union in Angola and Ethiopia; East German military advisers are present in Mozambique and Ethiopia. The regime of Ethiopian Chairman Mengistu Haile Mariam has paid homage to Moscow by erecting a statue of Lenin in Addis Ababa. Mengistu allows the Soviets to maintain a naval base on the Dahlak Islands in the Red Sea. Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, often with Moscow's backing, has emerged as the continent's chief troublemaker. Gaddafi has been behind unsuccessful coups in at least half a dozen nations from Gambia to the Sudan.

Of the former colonial powers,

France maintains the most visible presence, stationing troops and dispensing both military and economic aid to more than 20 countries. Some 300,000 French now live and work in Africa, more than twice the number during colonial times. Last summer, President Francois Mitterrand dispatched 2,000 soldiers and eight Mirage and Jaguar jets to forestall Soviet-and Libyan-backed insurgents intent on overthrowing the government of Chad's President Hisséne Habré. The U.S. provided AW ACS planes and antiaircraft missiles to Chad; it has also negotiated the use of port facilities and airstrips in Kenya and Somalia. "We are undergoing a second colonialization," protests a Tanzanian academic. "Our present leaders are just like the old tribal chiefs who signed pacts with colonizers for a few beads. Friendship and military pacts are now penciled up in return for guns, aid or cash loans. Africa is up for grabs."

One result of growing foreign influence has been a debilitating loss of confidence among Africans themselves. "What kind of people are we?" asks one African leader. "Are we not forced to admit that our continent lives in absolute poverty?" Such questions underscore a painful truth. "The years of freedom have mounted up, mocking the plausibility of the excuses for failure," British journalist Ian Smiley wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. "Africa is back where it was 50 years ago."

Perhaps no single factor