By Jon Jeter

Colonialism and racism, the late, great Martinican poet, politician and intellectual Aime Cesaire wrote, are at odds with reason and knowledge, and a betrayal of the Age of Enlightenment’s most basic values. I thought of Cesaire while reading Nicholas D. Kristof’s Sunday column in the New York Times in which he argued that “bad governance” is chiefly to blame for Africa’s poverty.

In one sense, Mr. Kristof is correct: for much of the past 100 years, sub-Saharan Africa has been governed by the twin imperialist movements of the 20th century: colonialism, which arrested the continent’s industrial and social development, followed by a system of globalization that has rebranded colonialism as “free trade” but only strengthened the West’s control over Africans’ resources—and deepened their poverty and exploitation.

By complying with the financial advice proscribed by Wall Street and its emissaries in the U.S. government, European Union, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Africans’ political leadership is guilty of roughly the same bad governance as a freed slave, who, upon his emancipation, turns to his former slave master for advice on how to live free.
But Mr. Kristof, a Pulitzer-Prize winner and proponent of sweat-shops as an effective anti-poverty tool in the developing world (the two things are not unrelated in my view) defines African malfeasance as corruption, that old canard of white folks—from Detroit to DC, Angola to Zambia —whenever the natives take over. Playing the role of Coleman Young or Marion Barry in Mr. Kristof’s latest drama is Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, who has led the former British colony known as Rhodesia since its independence in 1980.

President Mugabe is a former guerilla fighter who was once jailed (and tortured) by thugs working for Rhodesia’s Prime Minister Ian Smith, and he remains revered by many Africans for providing free health care and education to Zimbabweans in the years after independence and, for his steadfast support of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. But he has brutalized his countrymen and looted the public till with increasing frequency over the last dozen years; no serious person can honestly defend the man or his actions.

But as I wrote in my first book, Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People, sub-Saharan Africa lacks the kind of value-added industries that characterize every prosperous economy since the end of the feudal period. Under colonial rule, industrial development on the sub-continent typically consisted of a hole in the ground, and a railroad to the sea. Zimbabwe’s southern African neighbor, Zambia, for example, inherited a country with no colleges or universities and fewer than a dozen college graduates when it won its independence from the British in 1964. Overly reliant on raw commodities like coffee, cocoa and minerals (gold from South Africa’s mines is shipped to Europe to cut; raw Kenyan coffee is roasted in Europe and the U.S.) that fetch increasingly less on the world market, the first generation of African leaders—including Mugabe– tried to expand their countries domestic manufacturing industry but their efforts were soon thwarted by multilateral lenders like the World Bank and Fund, who strong-armed them into opening their markets to foreign-made products by paring tariffs on goods shipped into the country, cutting public subsidies to vital industries, selling state-owned enterprises to private investors, reducing government spending on health care, education, land reform and roads, and paying exorbitant interest rates on loans as a condition of borrowing money.

In nearly two generations since Africans began to free their countries from colonial misrule, more than 40 sub-Saharan African countries have liberalized their markets as part of the “structural adjustment programs” peddled by Western donors. In doing so they have abandoned the industrial strategies that are the only thing known to fuel prosperity in the modern era. The result is that Africa accounts for only two percent of world trade, a share less than it was 50 years ago. Since 1990, manufacturing activity on the continent has declined by a third, per capita income by a quarter.

In Zimbabwe, Mugabe has focused cynically on land reform, deploying ragtag black militias to drive white farmers off their land. This is not just retribution, however; as recently as 2002, 70 percent of the arable farmland belonged to 1 percent of the population. The problem is not that Mugabe’s land reform effort went too far; it didn’t go far enough.
Broad-based agricultural reform has been a key component in every country’s transition from agrarian economy to industrial powerhouse (see Homestead Act of 1862 in the U.S., or China’s Green Revolution). Instructive is how Rhodesia and neighboring whites in apartheid South Africa handled land reform efforts, parceling land out for a song to white veterans or city-dwellers who had never farmed a day in their lives, (Ian Smith was the son of a Scottish butcher) and then giving them low-interest loans for equipment, seeds, and fertilizer.
If the farmer failed to turn a profit the first time out, the provincial government would forgive the loan, and tell him to take another stab at it. This went on and on until the farmers got it right and ultimately created, in southern Africa, one of the best classes of commercial farmers in the world.

But with their stalled economies, heavy indebtedness, and lenders’ restrictions on public spending, African leaders are largely discouraged from doing for their own, what their countries previously did for European settlers.
Like any good bootleg preacher though, I want to bring this home, both to Cesaire, and once again to our nation’s first black president, Barack Obama. I have never met the man but of course, the word most commonly used to describe him is “brilliant.” Cesaire indicates that intellectualism cannot co-exist with colonial attitudes, that the act of oppression is antithetical to reason.

So how is it that a columnist for our nation’s best newspaper, who has won American journalism’s highest award, go to Africa and return with, as Fred Hampton used to say, “explanations that don’t explain?” Similarly, how is it that a constitutional attorney, trained and hired by the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the land–Columbia University, Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School—and yet he can’t see that war crimes were inarguably committed by his predecessor and that he is obligated to prosecute them? Would an intelligent commander-in-chief escalate a war against the undefeated empire-killer, Afghanistan, which poses no military threat to us? Would a smart president mimic Herbert Hoover’s response to the worst economic crisis since World War II, or FDR’s?

In 1996, the World Bank prodded another southern African country, Mozambique, to repeal tariffs that discouraged growers from selling their cashews on the world market. Their rationale was that abolishing the export tax would lower the price of processed nuts while increasing the price that peasant farmers could demand for their unprocessed cashews in a more competitive market.

Within 4 years, ten of the country’s 15 cashew processing plants had shut down, leaving 7,500 of the industry’s 12,000 workers jobless. Without the protectionist measure, foreign processors were able to outbid Mozambican factories for locally grown cashews, driving up the selling price. But Mozambique’s isolated peasant farmers, accustomed to selling their nuts at a set price to government agents, had no idea how to negotiate with buyers, no clue about how to get their products to market without government assistance, and no hint, really, of who, what, or where this free market was. Five years after the government lifted the tax, Mozambican growers were getting less for their nuts than they were before, not more.

This came as no surprise to Mozambique’s government officials who predicted all of this to the World Bank and urged against the measure. But, as one Mozambican official in the foreign ministry told me when I was there 10 years ago, “they didn’t listen to us.
I guess because we did not go to Harvard.”