A Passage to Africa
George Alagiah
296pp, Little, Brown, £16.99
"I want you to do me a favour," writes George Alagiah. "I'd like you to forget what you think you know about Africa today." It is a strange way to introduce this review of his life on the continent, since much of what people have heard came through his own news reports, seen by millions over the past decade.
But one wouldn't want to be too judgmental about this apparent contradiction. As the former BBC Africa correspondent points out, he is a child of Africa himself, having moved to Ghana, aged five, from his native Sri Lanka. And when, having finished his education and established his career in the UK, he returned to the continent in 1990 as a TV news reporter, he was a man on a mission: "I wanted to challenge the image of Africa as a place of tribal savagery and greedy, callous leaders," he says. Whether he achieved this mammoth task is open to question, but his writing of this book is certainly a further attempt to do so.
No one denies that the continent has huge problems. As Alagiah explains, since 1966, when his family experienced the coup that ended Kwame Nkrumah's Ghanaian rule, Africa has witnessed more than 80 violent or unconstitutional changes of government. Each year, 5m of its children die before their fifth birthday (over two-thirds of the global total), and social indicators show that life for many of its people is getting worse.
The extent of Alagiah's challenge is unwittingly exposed by his own publicity blurb, boasting his coverage of "the civil war and famine in Somalia... the genocide in Rwanda... the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone... the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire... and the devastating floods in Mozambique". But Alagiah's affinity with the continent does come across in the honesty with which he tackles some of the more emotive issues, which would not have made it to camera at the time.
In 1994, Alagiah made his name covering the horrors of the Rwandan refugee camps, where 3,000 Hutu refugees were dying each day from cholera and starvation. His reports played a significant role in launching the international relief effort; yet Alagiah now reveals that at the time he was racked with doubt. He knew, as did the relief agencies, that many of those desperate people were responsible for the murder of 1m Tutsis over the previous two months. "The genocide was forgotten, and cholera became the story. That was all the newsroom wanted to know about... For those few days I was following the herd instinct. Temporary though the lapse was, I regret it still."
Alagiah also admits to mixed feelings towards those close to death who had no history of mass murder. He describes a visit to one Somali village during the 1991-92 civil war in the east African state. He felt pity for its starving inhabitants, but he says: "The degeneration of the human body, sucked of its natural vitality by the twin evils of hunger and disease, is a disgusting thing... To be in a feeding centre is to hear and smell the excretion of fluids by people who are beyond controlling their bodily functions... surreptitiously to wipe your hands on the back of your trousers after you've held the clammy palm of a mother who has just cleaned vomit from her child's mouth."
Later, when US troops were sent in to restore food supplies held up by the warring factions, Alagiah had expected the humanitarian situation to improve. However, his hopes soon evaporated. Within hours of touching down the soldiers "stormed" a foodstore, forcing its three Somali guards to the floor at gunpoint. Even in Alagiah's eyes, the reputation of the Americans appeared seriously damaged. "It was beginning to look like America versus the Somalis. And if it was going to come to that, I was with the Somalis... Why, when the rich world intervenes, does it still have to do so in such an overbearing and insensitive way?"
And when, a few months later, the body of a US soldier who had been killed with 17 colleagues in a gun battle was jubilantly dragged through the streets, Alagiah could understand the emotions. "It was the celebration of the weak when the strong are brought down to size. They were rejoicing in the belittling of America's power, not the murder of one of its sons." Some may feel the worldwide reaction to the bombing of Afghanistan shows that the US still hasn't learnt this lesson.
Alagiah does see some rays of hope for Africa's future, in the perspective of new-style leaders such as Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Museveni is more interested in addressing the problems caused by four decades of leadership by Africans, albeit with European and superpower backing, than by the preceding years of colonial rule and exploitation. He believes that rather than remaining dependent on the west, through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, African countries should be building an independent future.
But the underlying theme running through all Alagiah's stories of horror and catastrophe is ethnic division. From Zaire to Zimbabwe, from South Africa to Sierra Leone, historic nations have been torn apart, creating people with split allegiances that have been exploited by dictatorial rulers. As Museveni told Alagiah: "I speak the same language as the people in the Congo. I share the same dialect as the people of Tanzania and Kenya; my people in the north of Uganda speak the same language as they do in southern Sudan... these are the real affinities."
Every one of Africa's land borders, drawn up in 19th-century Europe, cuts through at least one ethnic culture area, 177 in total. When the Organisation of African Unity first met in 1963, its leaders decided to respect these borders for fear that neighbourly disputes could lead to conflict. Now, after 40 years of civil wars, this no-change policy must surely be discredited. How can rival ethnic groups ever rebuild the trust to create prosperous nations? This, far more than slavery and colonialism, has been Europe's continuing legacy.
As the conflagrations in the former Soviet Union over the last 10 years have shown, ethnic rivalries, once unleashed, are almost impossible to contain. And given that neither Nato nor the UN will be sending troops en masse to impose peace across Africa, who can say that the next four decades will not be as bloody?
