There’s a new feel-good factor in Africa, a mingled sense of pride, optimism and confidence that the future is in its people’s hands. Its economy is booming and the ‘developed world’ is again beating a path to its door, not as colonial invaders this time, but as putative collaborators.
It’s seems very different from my experiences of the continent – but more of that later.
First, let’s look at the figures. The UK’s gross domestic product shrunk by 4.3% in 2009, according to the British Chamber of Commerce. The GDP of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, grew an average of 4.5% in the same period – with Nigeria recording a whopping 6.9% increase.
Vast oil reserves have been discovered in both East and West Africa. Democracies are springing up like maize in the fields. China and India are investing billions of dollars in the emerging economies. The World Bank has moved away from writing out cheques and is working on programmes to develop Africa’s ‘human capital’; one aim is to stop the brain drain of the continent’s best talents, another is to enlist the help of the African diaspora to encourage entrepreneurial projects at home.
I know this because I attended an event on Monday organised by the City group of the Black Solicitors Network (BSN) and hosted by Freshfields. The event was Africa Emerging Markets: Opportunities and Challenges and the topic was how British lawyers could form partnerships with African firms to share expertise and build capacity.
The speakers were educated and knowledgeable professionals, and entirely convincing – as you would expect from international lawyers and financiers and vice-presidents of multinational oil corporations. There was lots of good-natured laughter, too, some inspired by Nigerian ‘in-jokes’ which I didn’t get.
I left the meeting uplifted and sure that the continent, for so long blighted by the slave trade, post-colonial wars and disease, was coming into its own.
This feeling bolstered the optimism I’d felt after conducting a podcast interview with Rwandan lawyer Thierry Ngoga Gakuba. Some 800,000 people had been killed in the 1994 genocide and all institutions and infrastructure destroyed. They started from zero, he told me, and yet 16 years later the country was functioning again. The bar association was 500 strong, around half of them women, and there were elections in six months’ time.
So why was my own experience of Africa so different? Chronology, mostly: the world has moved on.
I’m old enough to have lived through the half century or so since the first African country became independent of Britain, its colonial master. That country was the Gold Coast, which became Ghana almost exactly 53 years ago – on 6 March 1957.
The process of liberation accelerated after that as, in prime minister Harold Macmillan’s words to the South African parliament in 1960, the ‘wind of change’ blew through the continent. Northern Rhodesia became Zambia, Tanganyika became Tanzania, Bechuanaland became Swaziland, South West Africa became Namibia and so on. (A whole generation of British children knew this because the names on the stamps they collected kept changing.)
The most significant independence for me, though, was Nyasaland becoming Malawi – because in 1983 I landed at Lilongwe airport, the country’s capital, to teach English. I was there almost five years and it was a life-forming experience that opened my eyes to a culture quite different from my public school and suburban upbringing. My youngest child was born there – on the bedroom floor a hundred miles north of Lilongwe. But that’s another story…
There was another side to life there, too. There was polio, leprosy, malaria, AIDS and other illnesses you preferred not to think about. Apartheid was still alive and well in South Africa and Malawi was ruled by a life president who censored books and jailed political opponents.
Malawi had been independent since 1964, and yet the worst colonial attitudes were still but shallowly buried. The only black Malawians at the sports club were bar staff, waiters and gardeners. Most Europeans didn’t trouble with the local languages, apart from to learn a few imperative forms of verbs. A white Zimbabwean woman told my wife (who was a nurse) that it was acceptable to prescribe out of date penicillin ‘because it is only for my garden boy’.
Malawian women were very much second-class citizens. Educated ones rarely married, in part because by the time they had finished their education they were deemed too old, and partly because they might show up their husbands’ ignorance. Secretaries rarely wed, either – because to get the job, it was assumed, they had to sleep with the boss. In some tribes, uncles had sex with their nieces once they reached a certain age. Girls and women knelt to serve men their food and drink.
Most tellingly for me, perhaps, was the time when one of my girl pupils (she was 22 years old) became head of her boarding house at school. I congratulated her and said there was no stopping her now: she could go right to the top. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Women are not as clever as men.’
Oh, really? Just ask Paulette Mastin, chairwoman of the BSN City group, or Mary Boakye, head of Africa financial markets group at City firm Denton Wilde Sapte, or Rosalind Kainyah, vice-president of external affairs at Tullow Oil, or any of the other African women speakers at Monday’s event. They might beg to differ with my pupil of 20-something years ago.
