Gerald Caplan - The Betrayal of Africa: A Groundwork Guide

Slavery Today

Kevin Bales & Becky Cornell

The Betrayal of Africa

Gerald Caplan

Sex for Guys

Manne Forssberg

Technology

Wayne Grady

Hip Hop World

Dalton Higgins

Democracy

James Laxer

Empire

James Laxer

Oil

James Laxer

Cities

John Lorinc

Pornography

Debbie Nathan

Being Muslim

Haroon Siddiqui

Genocide

Jane Springer

The News

Peter Steven

Gangs

Richard Swift

Climate Change

Shelley Tanaka

The Force of Law

Mariana Valverde

Series Editor

Jane Springer

Copyright 2008 by Gerald Caplan

Published in Canada and the USA in 2008 by Groundwood Books
Fifth printing 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

128 Sterling Road, Lower Level, Toronto, Ontario M6R 2B7

or c/o Publishers Group West

1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

We acknowledge for their nancial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Ontario Arts Council.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Caplan, Gerald L.,

The betrayal of Africa / Gerald Caplan.

(Groundwork guides)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-88899-824-8 (bound).

ISBN: 978-0-88899-825-5 (pbk.)

1. Africa. 2. AfricaForeign relations. I. Title. II. Series.

HN773.5.C36 2008 960 C2007-906794-8

Design by Michael Solomon

For Dylan and Peyton the future

The story of Africa is literally the story of the human race. The ancestors of our species rst evolved in Africa well over 3 million years ago. Its exciting to visit the University of Addis Ababa to see the wonderfully preserved skeleton of an adult female forerunner of us humans, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974; about 3.2 million years old, its called Lucy, after a Beatles song. In 2006, the bones of a 3.3 million-year-old baby ape-girl were unearthed in Ethiopia. Her nders named her Selam, meaning peace in the local language, which might have been the derivation of the words salaam or shalom peace in Arabic and Hebrew. From Selam and from Lucy eventually evolved our more direct ancestors, some of whom moved on from Africa to populate the entire world. Of course, this was so long ago that it seems to have little to do with todays world. But every person on earth can trace her or his roots back to Africa.

Africa is both a continent and a universe, or, more accurately, many mini-universes. In the days when it was still considered a primitive backwater that the white world had the right to dominate, the map of the world showed Africa to be only slightly larger than Europe. This was an outright racially motivated distortion. In fact, all of Europe could t into Africa three times over. Africa is the second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. It includes ve time zones, at least seven climates and, despite the one-dimensional jungle stereotypes, enormous geographical diversity. Divided into fty-four independent countries, Africa is inhabited by some 900 million people with a wide variety of backgrounds, cultures, customs, religions, appearances and ways of life. Even skin color varies strongly, from deep black to light brown. Countries differ wildly by size. Half of all Africans live in the four countries of Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and South Africa, while many of the other half live in countries far too small to be economically viable on their own.

A good reection of Africas endless diversity is the existence of several thousand ethnic groups and two thousand languages. Many countries contain as many as twenty ethnic groups and languages, and some contain far more. A European language English, French or Portuguese is the ofcial language, even if its sometimes spoken only by the well-educated minority. Africans from Ghana, for example, communicate with Africans from Zambia exclusively in English, although both speak one or more local languages. One of the signicant and widely recognized divisions is between the north, largely Arabic and Muslim, and the far more heterogeneous countries of sub-Saharan Africa. In a real sense, North Africa is qualitatively different from Africa south of the Sahara desert, and both northerners and southerners recognize this difference. The Africa we mostly hear about is sub-Saharan Africa, and its the forty-eight countries of that huge region of the continent that this book concerns.

But its only possible to discuss some thing called Africa, even sub-Saharan Africa, with great caution. Treating Africa as a single entity has been a trap for many, from nineteenth-century European imperialists to twentieth- and twenty-rst-century white racists to those Africans themselves who advocate a USA a United States of Africa. Yet despite the regions extreme complexity and diversity, and despite its many hundreds of mini-universes, a combination of factors allows us to generalize about several critical aspects of Africa today. Whatever the historical background, whatever the lingua franca, whether former colonies or not, whatever their religions, cultures, geography, climates, whether theyve had self-styled Marxist rulers or free enterprisers, whether landlocked or blessed with ocean location, whether democracies or dictatorships the overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan African countries nd themselves in a remarkably similar predicament. A large number of common patterns prevail across this vast territory, responsible for much of the reality of present-day Africa. It is these shared characteristics, how they came to dene the continent, and possibilities for the future that this book will investigate.

Even the uninformed outsider in the rich world is aware of the African condition: underdevelopment, conict, famine, AIDS, wretched governance. The better-informed know that at the time of its independence in 1957, Ghana, the second African country to free itself from colonial rule, was in development terms on a par with South Korea, near the bottom of the scale. Today, the United Nations Human Development Index ranks South Korea as 28th among 177 nations, Ghana 138th. Ghanas per capita gross domestic product is $550, South Koreas is $16,500. For many, this is a vivid and accurate symbol of the African record in the past half-century.