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You will note that there is not yet much stable democracy. Mali is still struggling to institutionalize democratic practices, and Rawlings still runs Ghana after two questionable elections. Neither of these countries--along with Eritrea and Mozambique--qualifies as anything other than a one-party state, despite token oppositions. Many African leaders, good and bad, share Museveni's belief that real multiparty elections are a luxury these fragile states cannot afford until they have the education, the middle class, the rule of law and the firm economic base on which American-style democracy rests.
But it's easy to see only the Africa that's broken. While many of these countries cannot quite stand on their own, what they want from the West is no longer just a benefactor but a partner. Although the U.S. trade-liberalization bill passed two weeks ago by the House of Representatives is mostly symbolic in easing the terms for America's minuscule trade with Africa, it moves in the right direction of shifting aid from handouts to the development of sustainable economies.
There is a word we heard over and over in Africa: ubuntu. It's different in every dialect, but the meaning is always roughly the same: a complex, highly nuanced precept governing the way individuals relate to the community. Ubuntu is the organizing principle of the African mind, defining the pre-eminence of the interests of the community over the individual, the duties and responsibilities the individual owes the community, the obligation of the individual to share what he has with the community. It is both blessing and curse, the root of Africa's strong families and social customs and the root cause of its debilitating corruption and crime. Yet as the continent embraces Western ways, its people do not want to lose everything African. What we need to encourage--what Africa needs to make for itself--is lives and systems that mesh modernization with an African way of doing things. That's what works.
Photographs for TIME by Greg Marinovich and Christopher Morris