By Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
02/03/2000The Asian Wall Street JournalPage 10
(Copyright (c) 2000, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. delegate to the United Nations, has dedicated
his
month's tenure as president of the Security Council to focusing on the
crises
plaguing Africa. With the continent devastated by AIDS, half of sub-Saharan
Africans living in poverty, and half of the world's civil wars on African
soil, this attention has come none too soon. It's hard to disagree with
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who last week called Africa "a cocktail of
disasters."
It wasn't always this way. A pundit writing in 1325 might well have thought
he was living in the African millennium. After all, Mansa Musa, the great
emperor of the kingdom of Mali, had made the pilgrimage to Mecca just the
year before, displaying wealth so lavish that Cairo's gold market was
depressed for the next dozen years.
Musa's empire was only one of several in Africa. Before the Merovingian
kings
ruled France and before the Crusades to the Holy Land, Great Zimbabwe was an
extensive empire with trading networks that reached to the Swahili coast on
the Indian Ocean. From the European Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Kongo's
empire covered more than 12,000 square miles, encompassing much of what is
now Angola, Congo, the Congo Republic and Gabon. Moreover, the rich trading
settlements of Sofala, Kilwa, and Mogadishu had long ago become Africa's
portals in a vast Indian Ocean trading system stretching all the way to
China.
By 1325 the empire of Ethiopia had been Christian for a thousand years, and
it was an extension of the great kingdom of Axum born during the
pre-Christian era. Europeans were desperately seeking Ethiopia's fabulously
rich and powerful mythical emperor, Prester John, believing that he
possessed
the Fountain of Youth, the secret of eternal life. It was the search for
Prester John as an ally against the Muslims in the Crusades that helped
inspire Henry the Navigator to send ships down the West African coast.
For another century, most of Europe's gold would be mined in today's Mali,
where soon a great library and center of learning would arise at fabled
Timbuktu. In 1325, then, all signs pointed to this millennium as Africa's.
What happened? Some who believe Africa's failure to triumph was the result
of
the malevolence of foreigners: the slave trade (European in the Atlantic
Ocean, Arab in the Indian Ocean) and the colonialism that followed it.
Others
blame the difficulties of the African environment: impenetrable forests,
trackless deserts, unreliable rainfall, too few rivers, too many diseases.
And, of course, for the past few centuries many Westerners have speculated
that the blame lay with the innate inferiority of Africa's people. Only this
last theory would offer reason for long-term pessimism, and the history of
Africa -- including those 14th-century triumphs -- is sufficient to refute
it.
Still, if Africa's past glories reveal its potential, its present situation
poses real challenges to us all. As we enter a new millennium, that cocktail
of disasters requires the world's attention. And the U.S., as the last great
power, can exercise its leadership in the search of solutions.
There are two essential elements of a global agenda for Africa. The first is
a serious commitment to help with AIDS. Twenty million Africans are
infected,
11,000 more each day. Fourteen million have died, and 10.8 million children
have been orphaned. Vice President Al Gore promised at the U.N. a greater
financial commitment from the Washington, and this is most welcome. But the
sums so far promised are paltry in the face of the disaster.
The problem requires imagination as well as money. Many governments and
nongovernmental organizations have urged industrialized nations to consider
modifying their intellectual property laws in order to allow poor countries
to produce the new AIDS drugs at cost. (One of the less-noticed casualties
of
the World Trade Organization debacle in Seattle was that nothing came of
President Clinton's willingness to be flexible on this issue.) It is surely
a
scandal that millions of people continue to suffer and die when they could
live longer, better lives with the help of drugs that could be produced at
prices they could afford. It does no good to blame the drug companies; it is
their job to produce profitable innovations. What is lacking is the
political
imagination and commitment to find a solution that takes into account both
the industry's interests and the needs of afflicted Africans.
The second essential element of a plan for Africa is a well-organized
program
of substantial debt forgiveness. Some have argued for this as a form of
reparations for slavery or colonialism. But there is an equally compelling
reason, one that looks forward rather than back: To continue to impose the
costs of debt repayment on Africa is to condemn hundreds of millions of
people to lives that are nasty, brutish and short.
Not all the news out of Africa is bad. Despite the recent coup in the Ivory
Coast and the fratricidal warfare in some countries, the broad trend of the
continent's politics is democratic. South Africa, the giant of the south;
Nigeria , in the west, the continent's most populous nation; Uganda, in the
east, once a country drenched in blood: These three nations enter the new
millennium with fledgling democracies struggling with burdensome political
legacies. It is time to support these signs of hope with more than rhetoric.
--- Mr. Appiah and Mr. Gates are professors of Afro-American studies at
Harvard
and co-editors of "Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African
American Experience" (Basic Civitas Books).
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