Africa: one continent, two worlds

This is the Maghreb, the western or "sunset" countries of North Africa. They are all Arabic countries, all Muslim. And many of them, along with next-door Egpt and other Arabic Muslim countries of the middle east, are in turmoil.

But the unrest -- dare we say revolution? -- won't easily spread through sub-Saharan Africa, even though countries such as the Congo, Uganda and Zimbabwe are poverty-stricken, chaotic and ruled by corrupt and incompetent "Big Men" who would seem to be ripe for the picking...or should we say "shooting".

Why not? The Globe and Mail's man in Africa, Geoffrey York, provides some answers in a thoughtful analysis, published today. Here's a sample of Mr. York's reasoning.

Revolution is often a luxury of an educated middle class, and much of Africa is too rural and too poor to sustain a national uprising. Dictators in sub-Saharan Africa often defend their power through a politically loyal military – in contrast to Egypt, where the troops tolerated protest.

Technology is another factor: Internet access is still relatively low in most of Africa, making it harder to organize protest. And the ethnic and religious rifts in many African countries are a huge obstacle to the organization of national protests.

Forcus on that last sentence, please, because it's the key to understanding Africa. York is saying, in another what, what V.S. Naipaul said in The Masque of Africa, reviewed here earlier this week.

The problem ... make that a problem with Africa is the culture of Africa. Underneath a thin veneer of western civilization [Is that not an oxymoron? Ed.] you find the real Africa, bedevilled by tribalism, supserstition and ignorance.

All the goodwill and foreign aid we keep throwing into the Dark Continent is not going to change that. The only hope is that the Africans will change themselves -- evolve, in other words -- and that will take centuries. Don't hold your breath.

Vote for the Big Man or God'll get ya!

Speaking of African belief in the supernatural (see yesterday's review of V.S. Naipaul's The Masque of Africa), The Economist reports this week that 80% of South Africans describe themselves as Christians, and two-thirds believe that the Bible, as the Word of God, should be interpreted literally. A politician would be foolish not to build God ... or the gods ... into his campaign oratory.

Looks notwithstanding, South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma, is no fool. Here's what he said to an African National Congress election rally on February 5th.

"When you vote for the ANC, you are choosing to go to heaven. When you don't vote for the ANC, you should know that you are choosing that man who carries a fork, ...who cooks people."

Mr. Zuma, who happens to be a "lay pastor" of an evangelical Protestant sect, assured the party faithful that "when you are carrying an ANC membership card, you are blessed. When you get up there, there are different cards used, but when you have an ANC card, you will be let through to heaven."

And if you don't have an ANC card? What if you should defect to the opposition? Then "you will struggle until you die. The ancestors of this land...will turn their backs on you."

So in one short speech President Zuma invoked the Christian deity and the spirits of the ancestors. He missed Allah, but there aren't as many Muslims in South Africa as in, say, Nigeria. The backing of God and the ancestors should be enough to get the ANC its customary overwhelming majority.

Book review: The Masque of Africa

Walt spent several hours, this weekend, reading The Masque of Africa, by V.S. Naipaul. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010). Not much of Naipaul's work since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature has appealed to me, but this latest book is an exception.

For the moment, Naipaul has left off writing philosophical novels and returned to the travel genre, which he does so well. He also returns to Africa, where he lived decades ago, and which is the site of one of his best books, A Bend in the River.

Although The Masque of Africa could be described as a travelogue of Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa, the book has a much larger narrative and purpose: to discover and describe "the nature of African belief".

The author looks at the influence of Christianity and Islam -- mercifully, he avoids the phrase "the mosque of Africa" -- and judges those foreign religions a thin veneer over the cults of animism, superstition and witchcraft which are still at the core of "modern" African society and culture.

Naipaul writes: "An unspoken aspect of my inquiry was the possibility of the subversion of old Africa by the ways of the outside world.... The older world of magaic felt fragile, but at the same time had an enduring quality. You felt that it would survive any calamity.

"I had expected that over the great size of Africa, the practices of magic would significantly vary. But they didn't. The diviners everywhere wanted to 'throw the bones' to read the future, and the idea of 'energy' remained a constant, to be tapped into by the ritual sacrifice of body parts.

"In South Africa, body parts, mainly of animals, but also of men and women, made a mixture of 'battle medicine'. To witness this, to be given some idea of its power, was to be taken far back to the beginning of things. To reach that beginning was the purpose of my book."

Although Naipaul comes across as increasingly tired and tetchy in his old age -- not unlike Walt -- he does a truly masterly job of showing why Third World peoples who refuse to abandon their ancestral illusions for the civilised values of the West are condemned to backwardness.