Black Mans Burden

Other newly arrived foreigners, instantly recognised for the fresh meat they are and aggressively pestered at every step, treat the avenues of the Senegalese capital as an assault course they hold their heads down and keep moving. Just make eye contact here, and you are soon trying to extricate yourself from the purchase of a smuggled watch or a young girl.

But Hodari is not interested in watches or young girls. Nonetheless, he positively likes these contacts. His palm rises to meet theirs with a resounding smack, and, in his laughing, self confident American way, takes the initiative from them.

 

From the window of my hotel off Avenue Georges Pompidou, I see that after three days here Jangar Hodari has found himself a rickety wooden bench in the shade of a corner shop. A powerfully built man dressed in a Cardinals baseball cap and Negro Leagues T-Shirt, he passes the day in the company of a curious and ever-friendlier entourage of street people. He has, for the time being, become a street person himself.

Despite the African name he has adopted, Jangar Hodari is a middle-class black Missourian from St Louis. He has taken time off, he tells me, to see West Africa. the place I originally come from.

His object of pilgrimage in Dakar is nearby, the illfamed island of Goree. For more than 300 years, Goree was West Africas principal slave-shipping post.

With its weighing rooms, fattening rooms, loading door looking seawards to embarkation and a hopeless future, I, like most white visitors, find the slave house on Goree Island a sad and eerie place.

As a black man, Hodari tells me, it makes his flesh crawl. He hears voices crying out, he says, and he wants to help.

How, indeed, does anyone cope with an entire continent that, from the great disrupting upheaval of the slave days to the present, has failed to put itself to rights? Here is a continent whose entire GDP south of the Sahara is equivalent to just one fifth of that of France. Here, half the population of 600 million Africans lives on less than $1 a day. Here, out of 1,000 children born, 90 are dead before their fifth birthday.

Hodari, for all his good will, has no answers. I have no answers either. Ten years ago, when I lived and worked in black Africa, I thought I did recovery, however challenging, lay in getting the economics right.

And so, partly, it does. But after 20 years of generous bilateral aid, four World Bank structural adjustment loans and two sector adjustment loans, and two IMF structural adjustment facilities, the prospects for the vast majority of Senegalese remain bleaker than ever. Today, poverty, illiteracy and low life-expectancy place Senegal 13 plac-es from the bottom of the UN development table of 173 countries.

Why is Africa struggling so hard to so little result? Sitting beside Hodari, I can only think the reasons are other than purely economic. In coming to Africa, Hodari is attempting to build self-confidence out of a painful and degrading past, trying to confront the fate that has made him. He makes me wonder how Africans see their ability to control their lives, Economics aside, can African failure or success lie in that same question of self-confidence?

Suggest to a Senegalese that Africans, battered so long by disappointment, have lost their sense of self-confidence, and you will be vigorously rebuffed. Africans, I am told, have every belief in individual capacities.

But as the days pass and I move from one encounter to another, I am struck by a deep anguish, a sense of helpless drift that approaches despair. What Africans have lost is faith in leadership and many of the social institutions that cripple their individual efforts.

One morning at the Dakar railway station, I meet Daly Fall. A graduate in economics, Fall scrapes a living as a freelance forwarding agent. If he could, he would leave Africa tomorrow.

Like all Africans, Fall tells me, he believed that education was the key to a better life. But as Frances once powerful colonial influence has declined, so have educational standards. Today, more than 40 per cent of Senegalese children do not go to school at all.

But the truth, as an entire despairing younger generation of Africans knows, is that education, intelligence and hard work are not enough. In a system where an entrenched and privileged elite maintains a firm grip on the reins of political and economic power, Africans rise by connection, by favour-granting, patronage and corruption. It is generally accepted by most young Senegalese that to get ahead one must not only be educated, but dishonest as well.

It is a realisation that leads to vast frustration, anger, and an outraged sense of injustice. Some of this feeling is vented through political activity and a lively press. But even in a plural system such as Senegals democracy has its limits. While many of the advantages of the countrys formerly strong ties with France are eroding, in business and politics Senegal has proved reluctant to relinquish a dirigiste, statist style of control bequeathed by its colonial ruler.

But at least,I say to myself as the days progress, Africans can fall back on the traditional social institutions. Not all Africans agree. When I suggest over dinner one evening to Mamadou Nilamj, a senior port official at the Dakar docks, that the extended African family provides a safety net in the absence of western-style social security, he smiles.

How can I save enough to make a real safety net? Niamj responds. For the family head is feeding not only me, but his two wives and their children, and two other related families as well in all, 30 dependents. However compassionate, the traditions of the extended family which preclude accumulation of capital, prevent millions of Africans from making any kind of investment in their future.

At least religion helps hold things together. I think one afternoon as Dakar comes to a standstill for Friday prayer. I am wrong again. The marabous, or sect leaders, of Senegals large and highly influential Islamic brotherhoods are closely connected to the political elite. For ordinary Senegalese, religious influence peddling and the hidden relations between Islam and the state are a source of much frustration.

And what of Africanness itself? Since independence, African leaders from Senegals Leopold Senghor to Tanzanias Julius Nyeerere have promoted a semi-mystical, elevated concept of the African character. Carrying such labels as Negritude or African Humanism, it identifies a special quality in African social ties - a propensity for egalitarianism, a certain ease, intimacy and compassion between all brothers of the great African family that is entirely foreign to the European mind.

It is evident that such a philosophy, while oiling the wheels of human relations, is also a basis for human abuse. Easy, informal relations without the clear-cut accountability of a civil society are just one blurred step away from corruption.

Has Africa now wholly lost self-confidence? I do not think so. One day I met Cheikh Faye, the son of a farmer. The winner of a scholarship in business management and mineral engineering at Penna State University in the US, he today runs a successful private mining consultancy. Faye has chosen, despite the odds, to return to Africa. However slow, he assures me, there is change on the continent. African elites are as loath as ever to permit radical change.

But Africa cannot escape worldwide trends. As globalisation and the pressures to privatise advance, the tight control of African economic elites recedes. As former colonial rulers disengage themselves from African clients, external support for political cliques diminishes.

So fierce is the disillusion that large numbers of educated Africans are no longer buying into the institutions of the past.

Africa needs change. A pre-condition to doing anything about its overwhelming problems is a belief that it is worth it. The hope is that self-confidence may return to the point that outsiders such as Jangar Hodari will want to reinvest in Africa, frustrated young people such as Daly Fall will cease to want to escape, and highly educated experts such as Faye will want to return to it. The very real risk is that Africans will be driven so far to the wall before real change comes that untold violence will accompany it.

A return of self-confidence might avoid it. Towards the end of my stay in Senegal, I met Jangar Hodari one last time. Running the Dakar street gauntlet heavily load-ed with video and soundrecording equipment, he was off to the docks and the ferry that runs to Goree Island. He wanted to film the Slave House, use it to elicit support from the local black community back in St Louis, and end up doing something more than simply sit on a rickety wooden bench. In the end, psychological adjustment may prove as vital to African recovery as any economic structural adjustment.