African Union A Crazy Idea

Jul 08, 2002

THIS week in Durban, South Africa, over fifty African heads of state are gathered for the launch of the African Union. The idea is that in time it will come to resemble the European Union.

Around The World With Gwynne DyerTHIS week in Durban, South Africa, over fifty African heads of state are gathered for the launch of the African Union. The idea is that in time it will come to resemble the European Union.It sounds crazy. Half a dozen of those fifty states have bitter civil wars underway, and half a dozen more are just emerging from them. Fewer than half of them have democratic governments, and most of those are deeply corrupt. Africa is the poorest, worst-educated, most disease-ridden continent — and it has been getting steadily worse for several decades.Yet they want to create an African version of the European Union. How can those fifty-odd rulers talk about a central bank and monetary union, a peace and security council modelled on the UN Security Council and a standby military intervention force, an African Court of Justice — even a united, federal Africa if the visionaries get their way — when they can’t even save their own people from war, famine and disease? The Organisation of African Unity was about political solidarity, not democracy or economic progress, when it was founded in 1963, because Africans were still trying to drive the European imperialists out. But the independence struggles are long over, and solidarity has come to mean simply that brother African rulers never criticise one another no matter how badly some behave. The leap to the idea of the African Union is huge, comparable to the declaration of the European Union after 1989. Whether it will work remains to be seen, but this is a serious initiative.Everybody has their own theory about what is wrong with Africa?’, but these days there is surprisingly broad agreement among African leaders and thinkers that most of the solutions probably lie above the level of the individual state. Hence the African Union. I think they’re right, and I even think I know why. Consider those 50 African heads of state. Why does a continent with just over 10 percent of the human population have almost a third of the world’s countries? The North African countries, mostly white, Muslim and Arabic-speaking, match the global norms: average population around 25 million, and one minority language or none. But south of the Sahara the average population drops to around ten million per country and the ethnic complexity soars: ten, 20, even 50 languages within the same border. That is sub-Saharan Africa’s core problem: an amazingly large number of small ethnic groups, and hardly any big ones.Five hundred years ago, the Eurasian continent contained all the biggest and most technologically advanced civilisations in the world. Africa came next, with iron-working in most places and some fairly large urban centres. Bringing up the rear were the Americas and Australasia, where most tools were of stone and the wheel was high technology.Then the Europeans burst out of Eurasia and overran the rest of the world. They encountered a few larger societies and literally thousands of little ones (there were six hundred languages in Australia alone), and in short order the exterminated most of them and subjugated the survivors. Some of the killing they did by hand, but mostly the highly infectious diseases endemic in Eurasian mass societies, to which people living in smaller groups had no immunity, did the job for them.So the Americas and Australasia have seen almost a complete changeof population in the past five hundred years. Africa got conquered too, but its population survived. Why? Because its people had been in constant strading contact with Eurasia, and over the centuries had gradually developed Eurasian levels of immunity to all the quick-killer diseases that devastated the rest of the world. So the Africans are still there all of them, in their hundreds and hundreds of different ethnic groups.Good. Survival is better than subjugation or extinction. But it means that Africa has to build modern states out of the most ethnically diverse populations in the world. It’s been getting nowhere fast. But if five or ten or fifteen ethnic groups find it hard to coexist in the same state, the solution is not to subdivide it further. Africa will not be better off if it has three hundred countries with an average population of two million. Perhaps the answer is to submerge them all in a sea of other ethnic groups, none of them big enough to dream of dominating the rest.Nobody will say that this is what the African Union is about, but of course it is. It is the first attempt to solve Africa’s problems by moving beyond the post-colonial states. It will be decades before we know if this green shoot can grow into something strong and useful, but at least they are barking up the right tree.Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});