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There was much optimism in Africa in the 1970s, in the first full decade or two after the granting of independence. Africa had its Golconda of commodities -- cocoa, coffee, copper and palm oil -- and their prices were high. Africans borrowed against those prices; the world happily lent. Unlike other countries now heavily indebted, African nations owe the bulk of their debt to First World governments, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank rather than to commercial banks and other private creditors.
The cheerleading slogan for Africa, coined by Tanzania's Julius Nyerere shortly after his country won its independence, was "We Must Run While They Walk." It caught the mood of euphoria and ambition, the dash of social heroism. Now the sense of heroic hope is mostly gone. Vast stretches of Africa are in worse shape than when they became independent. People routinely live at subsistence levels. Says Denys Lawrie, a mining consultant who works in West Africa: "Africans have wasted 20 years." The world's attention has gone elsewhere, and African leaders know their rations of aid will be smaller.
What is the danger if the industrialized world withdraws all help? Senegalese President Abdou Diouf has warned that allowing Africa to fall apart could lead to a population surge toward Europe and the U.S. Perhaps. On the other hand, neglecting Africa carries no immediate, urgent threat to the rest of the world. Black Africa has no nuclear powers. Why pour in more money to be misspent or rerouted to private Swiss accounts?
Perhaps in reaction, a new sense of realism has become the vogue in Africa, and the slogan for the continent's chastened '90s might be "Learn to Walk Before You Try to Run." In 1989 the World Bank issued a landmark report titled Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. It warned that if Africa's slide into underdevelopment continued, some countries would soon find themselves in worse poverty than the most stricken Asian lands in 1900.
The assessment marked the end of the era of Mau-Mauing Westerners into a chic guilt. The World Bank, the IMF and the so-called donor countries made it clear they wanted to wean African countries from thinking of aid as a permanent fact of life. Part of the trend, especially in West Africa, has been to move African executives trained at the World Bank into key decision-making posts within national governments. The Ivory Coast's Prime Minister, Alassane Ouattara, for example, worked for the IMF for nearly two decades before taking a post at home.
The World Bank report looked at the African regression: modest development after independence in the '60s, stagnation in the '70s, decline in the '80s. Factors such as drought and the oil crisis obviously played a role. But the principal cause of the continent's wasting disease was seen as a fundamentally wrong approach to economics. Instead of developing and diversifying agriculture, most African countries tried, often ineptly or corruptly, to industrialize at a time when much of the world was already on its way into the postindustrial age. African industrial products never had a chance to compete in a high-tech world. Farmers who could not overcome unrealistic price controls, or simple neglect, moved into overcrowded cities. That meant enormous quantities of food had to be imported and paid for in hard currency.