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For decades, Africa could count on the cold war as an economic resource. The U.S. and the former Soviet Union muscled each other through African proxies, pouring in money to prop up pro-Western or pro-Communist surrogates. Now the big powers' priorities have gone elsewhere. Russia's most prominent expert on African economies, Sergei Shatalov, devotes his attention to his own country's debt problems. Europe's available investment capital is being diverted to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states.
Americans are thinking more about their own problems as well. Says Herman Cohen, the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs: "What the Africans really have to worry about is not competition for our resources from the former Soviet Union but from Los Angeles and the Third World that lives in the U.S."
Business investors make hard calculations. Companies building plants to take advantage of cheap labor, an African plus, look for other assets as well: a reliable infrastructure, basic security and some hope for good returns. Capital and operating costs in African countries are 50% to 100% higher than in South Asia, where the return on investment is nine times as great; 25 years ago, the regions were even.
The external world's interest in Africa threatens to become merely charitable -- a matter of humanitarianism, a moral test for the West. Should the wealthy nations allow Africa to drift further and further into the margins? Says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution: "I don't think we could live with ourselves, or would want to, if we sat by while millions of people of a different color are condemned to misery and death."
But even doom has nuances, and like Africa it has a thousand layers of meaning. The "margin" of one thing is also the center of something else. Africa has its own "centers," its resources of vitality and resilience. It operates by its own inner dynamics and metaphysics. Africa looks hopeless, but it is not. In many ways the continent is headed in the right direction for the first time in centuries. Real changes for the better are occurring. Africa is evolving African solutions.
The continent's inner rhythms of development were shattered 400 years ago by the intrusion of Europeans, who brought in alien controls, boundaries and forms of government. But for the first time since 1444, when the Portuguese sailed into the "land of the blacks" to establish slaving forts, Africa is mostly free from outside interference. Despots are falling; here and there, democracy precariously takes hold. Improvised alternative economies flourish.
The continent remains connected to its powerful and -- to outsiders -- mysterious genius. Africa is different, still an inchoate self. There is a Europe, with its shared history, shared culture, shared economies -- all . accomplished the hard way, over many centuries. There is not -- yet -- an Africa of defined, stable boundaries and economies, not yet a sense of shared destiny.