The continent is flush with causes for hope
ALBANY TIMES UNION

By PEG CLEMENT
First published: Sunday, July 13, 2003

Whenever I come back from an assignment that involves living in Africa, relatives and friends always ask, "But isn't Africa just one, big, hopeless place? I mean, is there any hope at all? Isn't it just a mess?"

Well, it is big, I reply -- 55 countries and three times the size of the United States. But Africa is not one place, I add (leaving the "hopeless" and "mess" parts for later). It is a thousand places, a million.

It is a multitude of climates. Mild, Highveld days with soft air, but also sere heat that dries your sweat in a flash, and desert chills and snowy mountain peaks right on the equator. Humid islands, and rain forests constantly dripping leeches.

It's black and white people, Lebanese and Southeast Asians, expatriates and African albinos and Chinese aid workers. Tall Maasai and short Hottentots.

It's the weak and sick, but it's also the hearty and healthy.

We know it is poor -- the media does its job informing us of that -- but then again, it is rich. Terrifically rich -- in petroleum, potassium, copper, soils, offshore fishing reserves, diamonds, human capital, time and place and story and legend and history.

Across its breadth, the countries have more colors than a child's watercolor box -- in the women's cloth wraps, in the sunsets especially over the Sahara, in the ocean's navy greens off Mauritius, in the wild and woolly Johannesburg markets selling 35 different orange and

red and green vegetables, and 25 varieties of pink and tangerine and yellow fruits. On the other hand, the monochromatic sub-Saharan dullness in the rural areas -- the one drab color of tan, and more tan (with shades maybe of coffee, rust, walnut, henna, khaki) -- can be oppressive.

Now for the mess. Yes, it's a mess. A mess, and messy. Travel writer Paul Theroux calls it "higgledy-piggeldy." The mess of Africa for me is epitomized in Cape Verde (which is neither), a part-Portuguese, part-Brazilian-African, part-mestizo potpourri of all types. The continent is a mess of countries, whose guide books tell you 100 languages and dialects are spoken there, as in Tanzania. Diversity was invented here, I think. It's chaotic.

It's a clutter of all the sensationalized stories: famines and killer bees, and coups d'etat and despots and tin-pot dictators meting out their tyranny. A confusion of anarchic teenage rebels with AK47s, and other teenagers living as orphaned heads of household in shacks and on side streets. A stew of almost impossible corruption, blood di@@hyphen@@amonds, national debts, malaria, Ebola, failed land reforms, genocide in Rwanda. A muddle of fouled-up policies by "Big Men" (the "M's" -- Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Mengistu of Ethiopia, Moi of Kenya and Mubarak of Egypt) in harsh and unforgiving places. A mess of setbacks coupled by a few precious success stories that we must always find and highlight.

Is it hopeless, people ask me?

Maybe the one hopeless thing about the continent is our understanding of it. What is hopeless? Is it the people themselves or is it only their governments?

I saw grandmothers -- ambuyas they are called in Zimbabwe -- taking care of 13 grandchildren, all orphaned by AIDS, in a two-room hovel in the shanty towns of Harare. They were growing a few backyard tomatoes to sell as their livelihood.

I heard of Cosmos, who was dying of HIV/AIDS and whose last hope was to sweep floors for four days -- and earn enough money to pay for his own coffin and funeral. He did it, then died.

Can you listen to the music of Miriam Makeba and Dot Masuka and Oliver Mtukudzi (who is coming to Schenectady's Central Park on July 27) without hoping as Africans do for order and peace, cold beers in a cool place, brotherly love, smiling kids on laps?

Ever hopeful, Shona peasants in Zimbabwe name their newborn children Lovemore, Happimore, Everjoy, Perfect.

In Madagascar, farmers slash and burn their fields after the long dry season. New shoots of young grass come up green -- a vivid viridescent I have seen nowhere in America or Europe.

Perhaps we should concentrate on that green. Zero in on the next generation -- Africa's youthful mass -- and help them know new behaviors, new skills, new attitudes: responsibility for their actions, the culture of democracy, what life can look like without graft, and abstinence or marital fidelity to combat HIV/AIDS.

Care for the dying adults, yes; but turn our attention and resources now to the kids. In textbooks, in community centers, in churches.

These are not my ideas; they come from a frazzled Zambian AIDS worker.

There's plenty of hope: Consider that two-thirds of all Malawians do not have AIDS (we only hear of the one-third who do). Senegal's incidence of HIV/AIDS last year was only 0.5 percent. Uganda's is down to 5 percent from 16 percent a few years ago. Last month, a well-known Mozambican journalist, in a huge feat of courage, publicly admitted he has AIDS. A Ugandan athlete did so, too.

South Africans shook off the shackles of decades of apartheid in a long, painful struggle that ended pretty peacefully at the ballot box. The civil war in Mozambique has ended; Angola's just might, Sudan's can.

Madagascar, through unrelenting people power, kicked out its cranky old dictator Ratsiraka a few months ago. So did Kenya, at the ballot box, in December; Big Man Moi is finally gone and members of parliament have introduced three new anti-corruption bills.

In Nigeria, a woman named Sarah Jubil ran for the presidency. Benin passed a law banning female circumcision. Angola is making public all its oil payments, under a new push to stamp out corruption and attract aid and investment.

The International Monetary Fund is happy with Mozambique's work to combat poverty, making it eligible for more favorable financial assistance; it has one of the world's fastest-growing economies right now. Tanzania is taking in Somali Bantu refugees and agreeing to grant them citizenship. This is all good news.

Somehow, Africans themselves are maintaining optimism in the face of the odds against them; we must be optimistic, too.

Our job half a world away is above all to work hard at staying informed, to be generous, to encourage direct investment, to support their home-grown initiatives, to help African girls get into, and stay in, school. To feel compassion, not pity.

Our job is to help Africa regain its relevancy even as international donors run to Iraq with suitcases of funds and dossiers of projects.

Let the place be a mess -- a pluralistic, diverse, rich, disorganized cacophony of peoples and voices and languages -- but let us also help it to stay hopeful.

Peg Clement of Delmar recently returned from her sixth two-year residency in Africa. She is a senior associate at the State University of New York's Center for International Development, working on democracy projects in Africa. Parts of this article previously appeared in different form in the Altamont Enterprise.