A Continent Gone Wrong

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is more frequently blamed for Africa's ills than the legacy of 80 years of colonialism. This year will mark the centenary of the Berlin Conference, at which Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Portugal, among others, agreed to divide Africa into "spheres of influence." Borders were established without regard for traditional tribal boundaries and loyalties, thus setting off fierce antagonisms between rival groups within the same country. Once the domain of powerful kingdoms such as Dagomba in western Africa and Matabele in central Africa, the land was carved up in the intense competition for natural resources and cheap labor.

However irrational, the new boundaries were inherited by African leaders when the Europeans departed. In all but a few instances, African leaders themselves all too willingly reproduced and perpetuated the worst aspects of the mismanagement, greed and elitism bequeathed to them by the colonial powers. Even so, Africans blame their former colonial masters for instilling a taste for Western-style material goods, corruption and the pursuit of power. '

No group has lavished more treasure on grandiose schemes, and has less to show for it, than Africa's leaders and the bloated, inefficient bureaucracies that serve them. Nigeria's Shagari, for instance, began the construction of a new capital city about 300 miles northeast of Lagos, at an estimated cost of $16 billion. Yet hundreds of thousands of Nigerians in the slums of Lagos lacked running water, adequate sewage systems, medical care and educational facilities. President El Hadj Omar Bongo of Gabon, an oil-producing country with a foreign debt of $1 billion, built a $27 million conference center with a facade of imported Italian marble for the 1977 summit meeting of the Organization of African Unity in the capital of Libreville.

Even in the poorest African capitals, such as battle-scarred Ndjamena, Chad, government officials can be seen in convoys of Mercedes-Benz limousines, scattering cyclists and pedestrians as they pass. Owning a Mercedes is so potent an African status symbol that in East Africa a Swahili word was coined to describe the elite that drives them: wabenzi, literally, men of the Mercedes-Benz.

Last year President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaïre was accused by his former Foreign Minister of embezzling $1 billion in Belgian currency from the state treasury. Western sources estimate Mobutu's personal fortune at nearly $4 billion, most of it in Swiss banks. In 1976, Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, not content with being President-for-Life, declared himself Emperor and staged a $20 million ceremony for the occasion. Bokassa crowned himself with a gold-and-diamond diadem that cost $2 million. (Nearly two years later, with covert assistance from France, Bokassa was deposed.)

Osusu ("corruption" in Ashanti) is ubiquitous both in government and in the commercial sectors. Gambian police are currently investigating the mysterious disappearance of about $1 million, apparently caused by a syndicate of bank clerks who systematically defrauded the accounts of illiterate farmers. "The figures are coming at us so fast," said a police officer, "that sometimes we think our investigators are making them up." In 1980, a Gambian bank clerk tried to telex $2 million to an overseas account; he was caught