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Mali, Liberia and Congo have announced legal moves to recover assets they say were stolen under previous one-party regimes. In the case of Mali, the Swiss Foreign Ministry has decided to reroute part of its country's aid to Mali to pay for Swiss lawyers -- clever rerouting -- to investigate whether Swiss aid money was wrongfully deposited in Swiss banks during the 23-year reign of deposed President Moussa Traore. Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida has a bolder if unrealistic idea: he suggested last year that African states might demand reparations from the West for the damage done by the slave trade. The estimated cost: $130 trillion in loss of people and production potential over the centuries. The estimated chance of success: zero.
Europeans, as the historian Basil Davidson writes, destroyed the moral universe of the continent. Colonialism imposed a different cultural universe with its alien definitions of God and progress and the rule of law. Now postcolonial Africa is defined as being on "the margins" of that universe. But, says Babacar N'Diaye, the president of the African Development Bank, "even if marginalization is true, it is not my concern. What I have to do is to create my self-respect. To create my self-respect is to put my house in order. There is a tremendous venue for intra-African trade we have not developed. We can cut our military expenditures and develop health and education. I don't like the word marginalization because Africans are using it to make demands from the developed world to pay attention to Africa. I think we must pay attention to ourselves."
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, by contrast, embraces the word. "A little neglect would not be bad," he says. " The more orphaned we are, the better for Africa. We will have to rely on ourselves. We have to go back to the year 1500, where we left off building an economy integrated in itself, able to produce its own food, its own tools, its own weapons."
It seems a plausible, even indispensable vision: Africans reunited at last with themselves, with their cultures and governments, brought home after centuries of terrible alienation. But then Museveni goes on, "Today 50 out of 100 Ugandans can't read or write. If 90 out of 100 can read and write and start to be guided by science and rationality, that's the day of liberation."
It may be a long swoop from Africa's year 1500 to European-sounding formulas about "science and rationality." In 1961, with civil war erupting around him and his own assassination only days away, Patrice Lumumba, the newly independent Congo's first Prime Minister, wrote a letter to his wife in which he conjured a splendid vision: "History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations . . . Africa will write her own history, and . . . it will be a glorious and dignified history."
Perhaps. For the moment, African glory lies around a historical bend of the river, in some unseeable future.