The World Online

Three hundred miles above the earth, the Pisces satellite maps out the geography of our planet. As it orbits it records the great mountain ranges, deserts, forests—even the trajectory of clouds, storm systems, and ocean currents. Beyond these natural features, the satellite also records images of human development, of economic geography. These images are especially stark at night where some regions of the planet glow in extravagant displays of energy, vitality, and abundance. But as the Pisces passes over the great land mass of Africa, it records only a void. Over 100 years after Joseph Conrad’s famous book, Africa remains, literally, the heart of darkness.

The question that has been gnawing at me since my first encounter with Africa almost 20 years ago is just how did we get here? How did the birthplace of humanity, home to so many of the world’s most precious natural resources, a land of rich diversity, arable soils, and bountiful game, become the modern era’s cliché of deprivation?

A few statistics bear repeating: of the United Nations Development Program’s list of the world’s 25 least developed countries, all 25 are located in sub-Saharan Africa; Africa is the only place on earth where in some regions life expectancy is actually in decline; while the continent account for 15 percent of the world’s population, it produces only 1.3 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, accounts for just 1.6 percent of international trade, and receives less than 1 percent of all international direct investment. For many people, consciously or not, the entire continent of Africa has come to be symbolized by late night images of emaciated children with flies lingering on unkept faces.

Yet it hasn’t always been so. The bifurcated and polarized world of today, with its glaring cleavages between the haves and the have-nots, is a relatively new development in human history. As economist Jeffrey Sachs notes in his book The End of Poverty, 200 year ago we were all poor. Today a growing chorus of experts is warning that this state of economic disequilibrium is untenable; something is going to have to give—and a better understanding of what has and is going wrong in Africa is central to humanity’s ability to form an adequate response.

It was night the first time I landed on the continent of Africa. I recall the hustle and confusion of Nairobi’s airport just outside Kenya’s capital city. It seemed a swirl of colors, textures, and aromas all blending into a distinctly third world sensory experience. The most distinctive quality was that of the air. It felt heavy, as if the humidity, pollution, and odors added weight onto your skin. You had to part through it.

During the drive into the capital I felt as though I were entering a completely different planet. Even at night, the sides of the roads were teeming with people—vendors, beggars, hordes of young men smoking cigarettes and staring aimlessly as cars streamed by. The periphery of the city is surrounded by shanties of corrugated aluminum and plywood. The smell of humanity without access to basic sanitation creates a lingering impression.

At the time of my arrival, Kenya had been ruled for a generation by Daniel Arap Moi, a Kikuyu representing one of the country’s strongest and most influential tribes. His rule managed some nominal claim to democratic legitimacy by periodically holding something called a “one party election.” You could vote for him, or choose not to vote. His autocratic style of governing did lead to periodic outbursts of decent. While I was in Nairobi protests broke out by a group known as the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy. The demonstrations were quickly squelched by the military, but the incident did make the nightly news in America, and for that brief thirty seconds Africa was brought into the Western mind.

Despite these periodic protests, Kenya has long been held out as one of the great economic and political success stories of the continent. It has managed to maintain relative political stability and prosperity throughout much of its independence. That is what made the recent crisis in which thousands were butchered and driven from their homes all the more startling. The international community sat by helplessly after a contested and most likely fraudulent presidential election led the country to break along ethnic lines and descend into the chaos of ethnic cleansing, tribal schisms, and criminal anarchy.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice shuttled to the region in an effort to broker peace, and the feeling within the African Union was that the stakes couldn’t be higher. Given the past decade of chaos that has plagued Kenya’s neighbors in Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, Chad, and the Congo, the growing feeling on the continent was that if Kenya’s government couldn’t keep it together, what African country could?

The ease to which Kenya could descend into anarchy driven by ethnic division is instructive on an essential problem facing the continent as a whole: what is the meaning of the nation-state in Africa? What does it mean to be a Kenyan, or a Sudanese, or a Ugandan? The borders that demarcate these countries into sovereign entities bear very little resemblance to any ethnic, cultural, or linguistic cohesiveness. Kenya, or any African nation for that matter, cannot point to an organic evolution that bestows upon it some agreed-to legitimacy. There is no relationship between the national tradition and the people, such as that of the French to France.

The nations of Africa and their boundaries are colonial inventions—dark gifts that keep on giving. Most of the political borders that divide the continent merely reflect the competing spheres of European influence at the turn of the last century. The “nation” of Nigeria alone contained as many as 250 ethno-linguistic groups; the Belgian Congo was once ruled by 6,000 individual chiefdoms.

As Britain’s colonial-era Prime Minster Lord Salisbury glibly put it, “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were.”

To most Africans, the political borders crossing the continent are just lines on a map. In Africa, the old adage that the map is not the territory is a truism, one holding a loaded gun. Without agreed-upon political legitimacy, most Africans continue to identify themselves not with the state, but with the tribe.

One of the first people I met in Kenya was a man named Akili. He became my Swahili teacher and all-purpose guide into African culture. One evening over dinner he explained to me the problem as he saw it. “We lack institutions. Nobody seems to know where the government’s money comes from or goes, how the system actually works. There is no window into the government, and with no window, no grassroots legitimacy.”

Many African governments simply morphed into crude cleptocracies following independence. Their rule is maintained simply through terror or bribery. Of the top 10 most corrupt states on earth according to the United Nations, 8 are located in sub-Saharan Africa. One stand-out, the Central African Republic, was recently categorized as being “beyond a failed states” by the International Crisis Group. The report goes on to describe the nation as being “virtually a phantom state, lacking any meaningful institutional capacity.”

This corruption and inefficiency which have grown out of Africa’s post colonially constructed nations, make the proper distribution of international aid nearly impossible. Over the last 50 years the developed world has provided billions of dollars in aid to Africa, yet large swaths of the continent still remain without even the most basic sanitation, clean water, schools, or access to health care. This lack of a return on investment has invariably led to a growing “donor fatigue” within the developed world.

In the late 1970s and throughout the ‘80s, as international aid began to wane, African nations began to look to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for loans to keep their economies afloat. In a brief decade, many countries took on suffocating debt. External debt held by the nations of sub-Saharan Africa amounted to $6 billion in 1970. That figure ballooned to $86 billion by 1983 and has been growing ever since. In some instances just servicing the debt accounts for as much as 40 percent of a country’s annual income. This has led to a pernicious cycle, a nation wide poverty trap.

One of the more tragic aspects of this debt is how little of the resources went to improve the overall condition of the average African. A review of World Bank-funded projects finds numerous airports, hydroelectric or coal burning power plants, port infrastructure—much of which is geared towards the interests of international corporations exporting raw materials. This survey finds only a few serious, concerted or well-organized public health, education, or village-level economic development initiatives. As University of Toronto Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon puts it, “People don’t need the Internet when there is no food to eat.”

Many who follow the path towards sustainable development in Africa are slowly coming to the conclusion that there must be a better way forward—an empowering option beyond governmental aid or corporately slanted loans.


The Great Rift Valley is one of those sites you will never forget. The horizon spans out into such a distance, it seems to defy traditional perspective. For two weeks I backpacked across the Rift with a small group of international students. With us was a short, 30-something Tanzanian man named Pius. Those weeks traveling with Pius opened my eyes and gave me the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the world looking out from the continent.

Looking through this lens, I discerned a pattern in which the world looks to Africa as a backwater of incompetence and inferiority. As President Clinton said on his historic tour of the continent, “For too long we have asked what can we do about Africa, or for Africa, but not what can we do with Africa.”

The West has, since colonial times, since slavery, viewed the continent as a periphery of civilization: as either a region to be exploited or a problem to be ignored or solved—but a problem all the same. What my experience with the people of Africa taught me is that they don’t need charity as much as they need fairness. Fairness should be the new paradigm the developed world uses in creating strategies for dealing with Africa.

While the Western world, and the US in particular, preaches the miracle of free trade, Africa’s experience has been far from even-handed. US cotton subsidies alone work to distort the international market enough to off set all the US direct aid to cotton-producing counties in Africa. Other subsidies that distort the concept of free trade in Africa include the European Union’s annual cattle subsidy, which amounts to $900 per cow per year. The Europeans subsidize each of their cattle with more money than most Africans earn in a year. In Japan that annual cattle subsidy is $2700 per cow.

There appears to be a lingering racial assumption that African entrepreneurs are ill-equipped to compete on the global playing field, that a continent of people is somehow genetically or geographically handicapped. Yet my experience spoke loudly to the contrary. If anything, it is impressive what many Africans have managed to accomplish given the host of disadvantages apportioned to them. If American farmers, with all the benefits of technology, market access, and infrastructure, can’t compete globally without multi-billion dollar subsidies, how can we justly judge Africa’s lack of competitiveness?

Nothing would improve the lives of average Africans more than fair and open access to the world’s markets. Enabling small farmers and entrepreneurs to sell their goods competitively abroad would bring with it the benefits of village-level prosperity that could have vast and important political consequences.

In the coming decades Africa will continue to need significant international support in the form of direct aid and grants. But ultimately it will be up to Africans to create a more prosperous future for Africa, and that will require wrestling control away from the more corrupt regimes and developing national institutions capable of taking effective advantage of the aid that is provided by the international community. Village-level economic development fostered through fair trade practices could help in tipping the political power balance.

The international community can also help in the transition away from the model of post-colonial authoritative regimes by demanding a new level of accountability and transparency as a condition of continued aid. A further inducement of debt forgiveness could be attached to a program of economic and political reforms. The Earth Institute’s Jeffrey Sachs outlines this three-pronged formula of fair trade, direct aid attached to political and economic reform, and debt forgiveness in his book The End of Poverty, and believes that this approach could accomplish more in the coming decade than the last 50 years of World Bank mega-projects and IMF loans ever did.

This program could also hopefully act to help open the window into the government that Akili spoke of. Once a government becomes accountable to its people, the people have a much greater opportunity to feel like stakeholders, and that is one of the first important steps in the development on the journey to legitimate nationhood. The borders may at last take on meaning.


If the Pisces satellite had mapped out the earth at night at the turn of the 20th century, all the world would have been black. That image is a reminder of how quickly history can be written. The decades ahead may lead Africa into even further despair, violence, and turmoil; or this could prove a turning point, a pivot in history. Regardless of the outcome, the 21st century is likely to be remembered as the African century. How we address the challenges and opportunities facing the continent will be one of the defining characteristics of our era, and the outcome will matter to everyone. As anthropologist Christopher Stringer continues to remind us, “We are all Africans under the skin.”