FOREIGN PARTS

world. Ben Bella’s war and Nasser’s Arab nationalism had little bearing on blackAfrican events. Where both writers fail fundamentally is in omitting to pause and reflect, in a little depth, on what has been happening and why, and on where the deepest trends lie in the engagement and reconciliation of black Africa with the rest of the world. In respect of their main theme, black Africa, they tell a tragic tale, and admit as much. ‘After decades of mismanagement and corruption,’ Meredith writes on his last page, ‘most African states have become hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good.’ He quotes the Ghanaian Kofi Annan: ‘In reality, fifty years after the beginning of the independence era, Africa’s prospects are bleaker then ever before.’ Arnold, among his other activities a chronicler of aid, seems also to abominate it. ‘[Africa’s] problems are daunting,’ he concludes, ‘and Africa has fallen into a habit of dependence that must be broken.’ I do not dissent. Yet neither writer chooses or dares to confront the true dilemma of the Dark Continent. Black Africa is indeed condemned to much suffering. Since independence (but not, for the most part, before) it has suffered on a gargantuan scale. Pandemics ravage the continent; innocent generations are cursed. Incapable of preparedness, it is a continent vulnerable to the caprice of climate, to the consequences of drought or flood. For the most part it is incompetently administered and corruptly governed. None of this will foreseeably improve. The incompetence and corruption, and the unpreparedness, are the whelps of a despair at a presumed, predestined inability – indeed, a mute unwillingness – to compete either as nations or as folk with a world where white men’s values, or (prevailingly) white men’s technocracy, faute de mieux, masquerade as civilisation. A mute unwillingness? The despair is doubly rooted. Bantu philosophy, of which these writers appear to know nothing, imbues the great body of those whose ‘history’ they presume to write. It makes no space for the competitive, atomised, grotesquely self-regarding, reductive existence of modern Western man, acquisitive of chattels, wealth, and status, and with his deferred rewards. There has been negligible osmosis. The tower block had and has no medium of relation to the mud hut. There endures, therefore, an African anamnesis – that half-aware, half-recollected treasure of a previous

Darfur, 2003

innocence and truth-inlife, in the compound, in the tribe – which haunts the modern soul and saps the will to run the race that inner Africa never sought to enter. This world of ours and of the authors of these books, and the life-denying motives and legitimate goals of the black politicos, generals and ambitious thugs their histories focus upon, do not concern, au fond, black Africans or black Africa except in

terms of the suffering and its concomitant despair. These books have their usefulness. Yet the valuable history of independent black Africa remains to be written. It will be written in the light of that era still to evolve when the neurosis of the political assertiveness willed upon black Africa, in its fabricated statehoods, will have given place to the grace and inspiration of négritude–a melding Africanness which our Manichean world can already, just perceptibly, be seen to crave. To order these books, see order form on page 78

R ICHARD D OWDEN Over the Mountains And Far Away

T HE C HAINS OF H EAVEN : A N E THIOPIAN R OMANCE

★By Philip Marsden (HarperCollins 298pp £14.99)

T HIS IS THE land where the 1984 famine took place – the famine ‘of biblical proportions’, the phrase that Michael Buerk used to jab the suffering into our souls. It was a resonant allusion. We know this place. Almost every year since then the television cameras have been back to remind us, panning across the vast, harsh landscape of barren mountains, thatched huts and meagre fields. And we know Ethiopians too. Wiry little people dressed in white garments, with wrinkled faces and dark, patient eyes, tending their goats and sheep and hacking the soil with mattocks or ploughing with oxen. That is how Moses, Isaac and Jacob lived, and Ethiopians knew those names before they were known

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