Introduction: The Many Voices of Africa

It has been the year of Africa, the year, according to Our Common Interest, the report of Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa, when a combination of indigenous resolve and cash from Western governments was to launch a new assault on the roots of poverty in the continent, stimulating trade, increasing aid, tackling corruption, cancelling debt. In the months since the appearance of the Commission’s report, events in African countries have had higher than usual media visibility — but not because of progress in combating poverty. It’s been the familiar cavalcade of war, famine and mass killing — in Sudan, then Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire, then Sudan again. In the West, in the world’s lucky countries, it may have been the year of Africa; but for many Africans, in much of Africa, it was another year of living on the edge.

Still, the Commission could be right to see change on the way. In a number of African countries things do seem to be getting better. Across the continent civil wars are fewer and gross national product is on the up. The mistake is to generalize. The very word Africa — that sonorous trisyllable — seems to invite grandiloquence. Because the continent has a clear geographical unity it is tempting to hold forth about it. Cecil Rhodes wanted to colour everything imperial red from the Cape to Cairo; since then the tendency has been for Westerners — and often Africans too — to seek to impose a single reality, a general explanation, on the whole place. So one newspaper report can say that ‘Africa has never been more dangerous, nor more ready to join the rest of the world’; another that ‘Africa is coming together, taking its fate into its own hands.’ Which Africa is being discussed in each case? Can Botswana, that haven of stability, be more dangerous than ever? Is Equatorial Guinea ready to join the rest of the world? Is the African Union ‘taking its fate into its own hands’?

The idea that the diverse polities of Africa — even of sub-Saharan Africa — form a single entity is, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, the product of European colonialism, of romantic imperialism. It is a notion since embraced by other epic dreamers: Rastafarians, pan-Africanists and now, it seems, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In truth Africa is far less homogenous — geographically, culturally, religiously and politically — than Europe or the Americas. South Africa and Burkina Faso have as much in common as Spain and Uzbekistan. To say that Africa has ‘never been more dangerous’ because of wars in Congo or Sudan, is like saying Eurasia has never been more dangerous because of Chechnya. It is generalizing that is dangerous. A century of colonization by Europe, which failed to bring Cecil Rhodes’ vision to pass, is the principal source of any historical affinities that exist between one African country and another. And this is the ultimate source of the combination of strategic interest and moral concern that finds expression today in the Commission for Africa, a body that brings together the great and the good of both continents.

Our Common Interest duly warns against generalization, then goes on to generalize. Africa, it says:

‘has suffered from governments that have looted the resources of the state; that could not or would not deliver services to their people; that in many cases were predatory, corruptly extracting their countries' resources; that maintained control through violence and bribery, and that squandered or stole aid.’

All of this is true. But why the past tense? Has the violence and corruption ceased? And why are there no specifics of this looting and embezzlement? Should those responsible not be named and the exceptions be applauded? The recommendations of the Commission include, after all, an unprecedented level of debt forgiveness and financial aid to African governments. There is, to put it mildly, some risk of throwing good money after bad. A look at the list of Commissioners provides a clue to this reticence in the report. They include two African heads of state, former President Benjamin Mpaka of Tanzania and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. On the whole African big men don’t pull their neighbours down, whatever their crimes against their own people. That’s why South African President Thabo Mbeki refuses to condemn Robert Mugabe. And why Mugabe gives refuge in Zimbabwe to Mengistu Haile Mariam, Meles Zenawi’s murderous predecessor. Perhaps it is surprising that those who drafted the report of the Commission, a well-researched and frequently forceful document, got as much plain talk into it as they did.

The optimism of the Commission should not be dismissed, either. The capacity for hope in the face of catastrophe is a characteristically African gift. How else could people who suffer so much survive? In Sudan, where I work part of the year, the conflict in Darfur has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, victims of a government counter-insurgency campaign that uses tribal militias as proxy fighters. In January 2005, members of this government concluded a peace agreement with rebels in the south of the country, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, ending the twenty-year civil war there. The government calculated, no doubt, that international pressure over the massacres in Darfur would be constrained by unwillingness on the part of the West to put in jeopardy the deal with the SPLM. And they were right. Despite huffing and puffing by various parties, the government of Sudan got away with mass murder. The North–South peace deal in Sudan is called, optimistically, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, but comprehensive peace in large parts of the country is absent. Peace there, as a Sudanese saying has it, is the milk of birds.

The language of peace-making is everywhere, though. Sometimes it is curiously belligerent. ANGELIC PEACE LOCOMOTIVE CRUSHES LIFE OUT OF WAR DEVIL MONGERS was the headline in one Khartoum newspaper reporting the agreement. The less peace there is, the more people want to hear the magic word. A South Sudanese hip-hop artist, Emmanuel Jal, and a veteran northern Sudanese musician, Abdel Gadir Salim, recently recorded an album called Ceasefire. The two singers have never met: their album was made by sending recorded tracks back and forth between London, Khartoum and Nairobi, in Kenya, where Jal has been living. The result of this collaboration-at-a-distance is a wondrous fusion of the 6/8 merdoum rhythm of western Sudan with rap techniques honed in the dance halls of Nairobi. The songs are in a mix of English, Arabic, Nuer (Jal’s native language) and Sheng, a street language that is Kenya's equivalent of the Spanglish spoken by Latinos in North America. In July, Jal performed in Cornwall at one of Bob Geldof's Live 8 concerts. In August, he sang at the memorial event in London for John Garang, leader of the SPLM, who was killed in a helicopter accident shortly after the formation of the new government in Khartoum.

To meet him, Jal is the model of a modern hip-hop artist, all torn T-shirt, fatigues, neck chains, and back-to-front baseball cap. His lyrics, though, are a long way from the febrile swagger of gangsta rap. Jal was a child soldier in Sudan, where guns are easier to get hold of than iPods, so he has seen enough of the real thing. As anti-war poetry, his songs, 'Gua' (‘Good’ in Nuer) and ‘Ya Salaam’ (‘Yo! Peace’ in Arabic), may not be quite in the Wilfred Owen league. But Wilfred Owen never had this array of tablas and saxophones and ululating backing vocalists supporting him:

‘Just think for a minute

It will be so good when there’ll be peace in my homeland

Not one sister will be forced into marriage

Not one cow will be taken by force

And not one person will starve from hunger again

Children will go to school, I hope we can do this

I can’t wait for that day’

Our Common Interest puts a stress on culture as a driving force in the fate of nations. By ‘culture’ the report means mainly political culture, the energy of local communal organizations and, contentiously, religious networks. There’s a tip of the hat to language and the arts, but this could have been taken further. Take Jal's multilingualism — striking on the world stage, but not so remarkable in sub-Saharan Africa, where everyone speaks two languages at least. The continent is home to more than 2,000 of them — 2,058 according to the website www.ethnologue.com (and they’re not counting Sheng). That’s a third of the global total. Most of these languages were born to blush unseen, known beyond their spoken range only by proverbs, part of the great treasury that the Commission on Africa refers to as ‘intangible cultural heritage’. No one has counted the number of proverbs in Africa. A recently-published collection of sayings of the Akan of Ghana catalogues 7,015 from this single ethnic group. As Francis Bacon wrote, ‘the genius, wit and spirit of a Nation are discovered by their proverbs’. If every African language boasted as many proverbs as the Akan do there would be fourteen million altogether, enough to tie several government commissions in knots.

Language is an area where Africans have an edge over Europeans or Americans. And in this respect many outsiders such as myself, who claim some understanding of African countries, practise a double standard. No respectable British or American news organization would dream of sending a representative to France who was not fluent in French, or to Russia without Russian, but it is rare to find a Western journalist — or a foreign aid worker — who speaks any African language properly. This is true even in places that have been the subject of quite intense, long-term, sophisticated news coverage, such as South Africa. How many of the Western correspondents who have made their reputations there speak Sotho, Xhosa, Sindebele or Afrikaans?

Some months back I called in on an acquaintance in Nairobi, Dr Bellario Ahoy, a medical doctor who served for many years in the Sudan People's Liberation Army and has recently been appointed to a post in the new government in South Sudan. In the interstices of war service, Dr Bellario managed to make a collection of proverbial lore in his native language, Dinka. Like all such collections these Dinka sayings combine universal received wisdom with cultural specificities, clichés with odd and striking images, admonitions with their opposites. Some are oracular and hard to understand. When I saw him, Dr Bellario, contemplating the destruction of his homeland, quoted the words of the early twentieth-century Dinka prophet Ariathdit. On returning home after long imprisonment by the British, Ariathdit spoke these words, which have become a Dinka catchphrase: Piny nhom abi riak mac, ‘the land may be spoiled yet it will remain intact’.

Dr Bellario glosses the phrase as Ariathdit's realization that although he had lost his battle against the British, this did not mean that the whole Dinka world would be destroyed. War and peace, good and bad fortune, all offer the chance of renewal. This dignity in the face of catastrophe is a kind of optimism. It combines fatalism, opportunism, and a sense of the limitations of human understanding. As the Mongo, in neighbouring Central Africa, put it, the root does not know what the leaf has in mind. Dr Bellario has a personal project that he would like to organize: a cultural exchange scheme where young people from one area of Sudan will go and live in the territory of another tribe and learn their language (and presumably their proverbial wisdom too). In other parts of Africa, not held back by war, this has happened already. Though most African countries are still predominantly rural, they will, on average, become fifty per cent urban in a couple of decades. And, as elsewhere in the world, the city is the site of hybrid vigour. Sheng, the language of East African hip-hop, is an example: a third-generation hybrid, mixing Swahili (an East African lingua franca, with a Bantu backbone and Arabic extremities) with English, our familiar Anglo-Saxon creole, it has spread by hip-hop artists like Jal, and by the drivers and turnboys who operate matatus, the devil-may-care minibuses that are the core of the public transport system in East Africa.

Kwani? is a literary and political magazine published in Nairobi. (The name means ‘So What?’ in Sheng.) Although most of the contents of Kwani? are in English, the magazine includes pieces where Sheng gets one of its earliest outings as a literary language. In the same spirit, the editor of Kwani?, Binyavanga Wainaina, has celebrated the visual art of matatus, intricately customized vehicles whose paintwork is startling enough to cause a traffic accident. ‘Brash, garish public transport vehicles,’ he calls them, ‘so irritating to every Kenyan except those who own one, or work for one‘. On the streets of Nairobi the turnboys hang from the doors of matatus, half-cut on miraa (the stimulant leaf favoured by Somalis, grown in central Kenya), calling out destinations at the stopping points and cramming passengers into the vehicle until the wheels splay outward and the transmission hangs a few inches from the ground. Herds of these matatus careen around Nairobi with cool disregard for other road users. It is hard not to be struck by them, or be struck down while trying to make out the intricate typography of the slogans that bedeck them: HARD TARGET, SWEET BABY, HAPPINESS, SLANDER, DOWN WITH HOMEBOYS, TOLERANCE OF LADIES, DESTINATION. And, seeming to confirm the upbeat conclusion of the Commission for Africa, NO CONDITION PERMANENT. Another Kenyan commentator, Joyce Nyairo, compares the traffic in Nairobi to music. Matatus, she says, are jazz.

African music, like language, has been the site of endless mutation, within Africa and beyond. It is Africa’s most triumphant export. Jal’s Nilotic hip-hop and his duets with Abdel Gadir Salim are just one expression of an inexhaustible hybridity that has had the peoples of northern countries dancing to an African beat since the late nineteenth century. Music is where the traditions of Europe and African meet on equal terms. As the musicologist Stephen Brown puts it:

‘One of the most important events of the twentieth century was the marriage of African and European musical languages. It wasn’t just one marriage, but a series of marriages — in the American South, in Cuba, in Jamaica, in Brazil, and, of course, Africa. There is something about each of the two music cultures that seems to need the other… European music provided harmonic progressions organized round a tonal centre — an idea which, once you've heard it, is irresistible. African music offered its polyrhythms, rhythms that occur in layers — a kind of beat which, once heard, is hard to live without.’

Hard to live without. Africa is part of everyone’s life, whether they know it or not. Along with ivory, slaves, diamonds, gold and oil, it has given us the soundtrack of modernity. And — here is one generalization it is safe to make — Africa is where we come from. Our ancestral home is in the Rift Valley, somewhere between Nairobi and the Red Sea. This is worth remembering: if it were not for Africa we would not be here at all.