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Jung once wrote, "Different people inhabit different centuries." Something in the African clock of development got smashed when Europe broke into the continent. And when the colonialists pulled out, they left the economic, political and cultural infrastructure reconfigured in such a way that the new countries served Europe better than they served one another. This result was not necessarily intentional but was profoundly damaging nonetheless. Robert Ruark touched on the cultural destruction in his novel Something of Value: "If you change a man's way of life, you had better have something of value with which to replace it."
Who knows what Africa would have become had it been left alone? In any case, Africa today is changeable and still shattering into new configurations. There is now a Burkina Faso, an Ivory Coast, a Kenya, a Nigeria, but the nation- state has been an imposition from the West, and a sometime thing. Once there was a Liberia (founded in the early 19th century by freed American slaves); now Liberia is splintered in feudal fashion. There are two Sudans, each at war with the other.
The nation-states were dictated more by a European cartography of power than by any internal dynamic of allegiances. What is often missing is a social contract between the governing and the governed. In fact, millions of Africans have found that their economic energy, their sanity and even their survival depend on how they succeed in outmaneuvering the state.
Zambia, called Northern Rhodesia in its colonial incarnation, has begun to work hard in forming a social contract with its people. The country's story is a synopsis of some of the things that have gone wrong -- and something of an object lesson.
At the time of its independence from Britain in 1964, Zambia was the richest black country in Africa south of the Sahara. It had $1.1 billion in foreign reserves, plus the world's second largest copper-mining industry. It also had emeralds, other gemstones and immense fertile areas. It had the potential to become southern Africa's breadbasket, and President Kenneth Kaunda promised every Zambian a pint of milk and an egg a day by 1970.
Arriving in Lusaka today, a visitor might think Zambia is a country emerging from war. Stretches of road in the capital look as if they have been under mortar bombardment. Buildings are dilapidated, vehicles rattletrap. Thousands live in tin-shelter shantytowns. Unemployment and crime are running high. Zambia has become one of the poorest nations anywhere, with one of the world's highest per capita foreign debts -- nearly $1,000 for each of its 8 million people; average annual income per person is less than $290. As in many African countries, a small layer of extremely wealthy people flourishes above the impoverished mass.
Kaunda ruled for 27 years, then gambled on elections last year and lost. When the Movement for Multiparty Democracy government took over last November, its members were stunned by the decay and confusion they found. Morale among civil servants was abysmal, corruption pandemic. The new Minister of Agriculture found his office building vandalized; employees had stolen not only the light bulbs but also the lighting fixtures.