A New Colonialism?

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The destitution of Africa has been an all but forbidden topic in political discourse for reasons as comprehensible as they are disabling. The time has arrived, however, for honest and dispassionate discussion of this immense human tragedy, for which the Western countries bear a grave if partial responsibility and which will worsen if not addressed.

THE RETURN OF BWANA

Much of Africa needs, to put it plainly, what one could call a disinterested neocolonialism. Africans acknowledge the immensity of their crisis and the need to consider hitherto unacceptable remedies. The democracy movement, which in the past few years produced a series of national conferences to end dictatorships, is foundering. Fewer than a third of sub-Saharan Africa's nations have anything resembling multiparty politics. The Congolese author Ange Séverin Malanda says, "From now on, the danger in several parts of the continent is of pure destruction or generalized destabilization. The destabilization is already evident in Somalia, Liberia, and Angola. The pure destruction began to be realized in Rwanda on the sixth of April 1994, annihilating every contemporary African standard of reference. Genocide there accomplished the unimaginable and the unlimited." A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross says of Liberia that "no moral barriers remain . . . every reference to the principles and values which found and bind a community of men have disappeared . . . virtually nothing remains except horror and cruelty." The Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, writing in anguished response to the repression of minorities in Nigeria, has questioned -- as have some Western commentators -- the postcolonial convention that frontiers must be left as they are. Any program, however, for redrafting frontiers on the principle of ethnic self-determination must explain why the equitable redivision of Africa on ethnic lines would be more feasible than it has proven in the Balkans, where the pursuit of this principle has engendered war after war, from the Serbian uprising of 1804 to the present war in the former Yugoslavia.