Somalia’s famine is an extreme case. But even what is normal in Africa would be considered appalling elsewhere. Slum dwellers across the continent live without electricity or running water. Schools are in collapse, often devoid of books or desks. Phones in many countries hardly work. Hospital wards are scenes of dilapidation and decay, not recuperation. To drive down a country road at night in Liberia is to put your life in the hands of rebel bandits. To do so in Zaire is almost impossible: many of the colonial-era highways have been reclaimed by jungle. The battle cry of African freedom, issued with such hope and fury three decades ago, has been suffocated by dictators, autocrats and rebel warlords. An altogether different cry is going out now, a plea for help: “Invade us, please.”
That may be overstated, but the prickly, blame-the-colonialist attitude of the early independence years is fading fast. Sovereignty is not the issue it once was: political freedom has precedence. Opposition activists in Kenya hail U.S. Ambassador Smith Hempstone, an archconservative, for using economic and political pressure to force reform upon President Daniel arap Moi. When Moi calls his foes lackeys of “foreign masters,” he’s using rhetoric that few Kenyans respond to anymore. Some human-rights activists in Zaire have openly urged U.S. forces to spirit away President Mobutu Sese Seko. Liberians have called for U.S. intervention to spare them from tribal conflict, and Sudanese Christians have urged the United Nations to protect them from a war with the Muslim and Arabized north that has ravaged their territory.
In the Africans’ view, the West owes them. It was the CIA that helped put Mobutu in power in Kinshasa and propped him up while he reportedly bilked the treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, some Zaireans say, it’s Washington that should get him out. Somali warlords aren’t using only Soviet weapons: after dictator Mohamed Siad Barre switched allegiance to Washington at the height of the cold war, more than $600 million in U.S. economic and military aid flowed in. Washington is only helping to clean up a mess it helped make in the first place.
Somalis do not want-and don’t expect-a colonial-style occupation of their country. They welcome a helping hand, but they want it to let go. And they’re picky about which helping hand they’ll accept. The United States, in part because it has no colonial legacy in Africa, is seen as an impartial party. Plans to send peacekeeping troops from Italy, a former colonial power, could easily prompt a violent backlash. “Most people don’t want to see even a single Italian,” says Abdikareen Haji Abdi, a 39-year-old Somali chemist. “We will kill them with stones if they come.”
America as favored big brother? It’s certainly a change. Many Africans believe that now that the cold war is over, Washington’s aims are less malign. Some Africans are even happy with Western economic leverage over their governments: better to have Western bankers in control, they say, than corrupt and unaccountable rulers surrounded by greedy tribal cronies. Other Africans, however, remain deeply suspicious of Washington’s designs, as well as policies pushed by Western groups like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They see a new-style colonialism developing: faceless institutions controlling countries at arm’s length, with Western interests foremost in mind.
Even in devastated Somalia, not everyone welcomes U.S. intervention. At least one potent force is opposed to both the status quo and the West: Islamic fundamentalism. Moslem hard-liners already have taken power in Sudan, and are growing in strength in other parts of North Africa and the Horn. Somali fundamentalists don’t hide their ambition for power, and have threatened to fight the Americans if they don’t leave soon. “If it takes confrontation, we will confront,” says Abdulkadir Abdulle, of the central committee of the militant Al-Ittihad group. “You know what happened in Afghanistan.” Abdulle also says that fundamentalists are willing to cooperate with the Americans-if they’re sincere about wanting only to feed people. Such a simple aim is not, historically speaking, normal. But a little abnormality might be just what Africa is asking for.
