![]() And whether the fervent internalist Ayittey likes it or not, that instability has its roots in colonialism.Ī yittey wants the importance of the West played down. If the mixed-economy modelįailed in Africa, much of the blame must lie not with the model itself but with the instability of those institutions - the law, the press, the military, among others - that often aided and abetted self-serving regimes in the corruptionĪnd mismanagement of the public sector. That this is not as harmful as Ayittey suggests: postwar France, for instance, with its substantial state sector, was characterized by a prosperity that puts the late 1980's and the 1990's in the shade. Western European readers, at least, will know There's no question that local markets have been ruined by appalling socio-economic experiments in Africa, but it is not the only continent to have lived through a protracted phase of state ownership. That state ownership is especially inimical to Africa, whose great indigenous traditions, according to Ayittey, are based on the cornerstone of free trade. But the argument founders in its insistence As a rule, Ayittey tells us, ''theĬhief bandit is the head of state himself.'' Not many citizens of Guinea or the former Zaire or the Central African Republic or Nigeria - to name a few at random - would disagree with him. The means of enrichment is statism itself - ownership by the state (and thereforeīy the rulers of the day) of most of a nation's resources, which are squandered or embezzled by ministers, senior civil servants, army officers and their numerous friends and relatives. The establishment of defective political and economic systems in postcolonial Africa - systems that bear little or no relationship to Africa's own indigenous systems.'' The worst of these successor systems has been theĬentralized ''vampire'' or ''mafia'' state, created to enrich elites and isolate them from the mass of citizens. Internalists, including Ayittey, believe the heart of the matter is ''incompetent leadership and Imperialism, the slave trade, an unjust international economic system and exploitation'' by multinational corporations. This healthy skepticism forms part of a broader argument against the ''externalists,'' as Ayittey calls them, and in favor of the ''internalists.'' Externalists see Africa's difficulties arising from ''Western Quack revolutionaries and grasping kleptocrats'') and their political progeny - who complain about the insurmountable problems of the past while plundering their countries' resources. Wailing over colonial legacies'' is ''disingenuous,'' he writes too often it is Africa's leaders - both the early postcolonial figures (a band of ''crocodile liberators, Swiss-bank socialists, Not only is it hostile to the old Marxist paradigms it is based on a profound suspicion of history.Īyittey, the author of an earlier volume entitled ''Africa Betrayed,'' believes that too many Africans and Western liberals play the historical card as a convenient excuse for the continent's difficulties. But his ''common-sense'' revolution could not be farther fromįanon's. ![]() There's a distinct echo, above all, in Ayittey's call for radical change the length and breadth of the continent. He is nonetheless a writer who takes no prisoners - especially when it comes to Africa's postcolonial leaders - and his description of a continent in chaos at the end of the millennium has one or two poignant echoes of Fanon's Africa in the His belief that precolonial Africa was a self-regulating paradise of free markets and minimal government gives the impression of a vast and complex landscape retouched and simplified to suit the neo-liberal Yet some of Ayittey's thinking is not so new. Old orders began crumbling with them, from apartheid in South Africa to Stalinism in Ethiopia. Ayittey's robust, provocative ''Africa in Chaos'' is typical of the vigorous torrent of scholarship and journalism that has begun to rethink Africa since the end of the 1980's, when old ideologies fell away and The difference is that there is far less lamentation. The same could now be said about dozens of nations and erstwhile nations, both in and outside Africa, in the aftermath of the cold war. Nations struggling to throw off the weight of colonialism: ''national consciousness'' in these places, he lamented, was ''an empty shell,'' and almost everywhere the tribe was preferred to the state. Not this writer.Įarly 40 years ago, in ''The Wretched of the Earth,'' the great polemicist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon pinpointed the weaknesses of newly independent In and out of Africa, many people blame colonialism for the continent's troubles.
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