1 - Disappointments of independence

Summary

I plead sickness,

I am an orphan,

I am diseased with

All the giant

Diseases of Society,

Crippled by the cancer

Of Uhuru

Far worse than

The yaws of

Colonialism,

The walls of hopelessness

Surround me completely,

There are no windows

To let in the air

Of hope!

Okot p'Bitek, Song of Prisoner, p. 50

Democracy, prosperity and self-rule – this was the vision of African independence. But today, few Africans express satisfaction with the fruits of uhuru. Those heady days of anti-colonial mobilization, demonstrations and demands, though only three decades old, seem now a dream from which one has awakened to another historical epoch. What went wrong?

For Western students of Africa, the disappointment is largely of our own making. Our expectations in the 1960s were too grand, too romantic and profoundly unfair. Surely, we thought, the sufferings of the African people would give birth to a new man, a man of virtue committed to collective betterment and democracy. But exploitation and powerlessness do not create any special virtue. Sceptics now, we endorse the novelist Ayi Kwei Armah's lament – ‘The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born’.

A more positive view is expressed by professional developmentalists employed by international agencies. Publicly, they speak of Africa's problems, but also of the ‘vast potential’ of nations bubbling with ‘the ferment of development’. Privately, however, they are generally less sanguine.