The reality of Africa

I'm reading yet another book on Africa, a continent and a subject that fascinates me endlessly. Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, by Richard Dowden (PublicAffairs, New York, 2009) is a history, gazetteer and travelogue all rolled into one. It covers recent events -- the last couple of decades -- and the reasons therefor in most of sub-Saharan Africa.

Like most journalists of our time, Dowden, an Englishman, lays a lot of the blame for Africa's ills at the feet of the evil colonialists. How could the British, French, Portuguese, Belgians and others have the temerity to inflict upon the poor Africans roads, hospitals, power and water and the other evils of the civilized world?

That is the legacy left to Africa by the wicked imperialists. But what has happened to Africa since the British and others lost the will to govern and decamped in the 60s and 70s? At page 263 we read this:

According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, Europeans were only three times richer than Africans at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Today they are twenty times richer and the gap is getting wider. By 2000 Ireland's 4 million people, once among the world's poorest, produced more wealth than 200 million West Africans, including the mighty Nigerians with their abundance of oil and gas. The entire continent south of the Sahara, apart from South Africa, produced less than tiny Belgium.

The figures tell the story that the living standards of most Africans fell during the last three decades of the twentieth century. In 2008, on the UN Human Development Index, the world league tables that measure human well-being, African countries fill twenty-eight of the thirty bottom places for health, education and per capita wealth.

Some African countries are beginning to improve, but most Africans are still worse off than they were thirty years ago. By 2000 some 315 million Africans out of a total of about 770 million were living in absolute poverty. Only 15 per cent lived in "an environment considered minimally adequate for sustainable growth and development," says Paul Collier of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford.

According to the World Bank, it will take at least a decade of strict policies and sweat to achieve and maintain growth rates of more than 7 per cent. That is the target if Africa is to get back to the levels of prosperity that African countries enjoyed when the imperials powers left at the beginning of the 1960s.

The italics are mine. The conclusions are for you to draw. More on this tomorrow.