Into the House of the Ancestors: Inside the New Africa by Karl Maier

From the Publisher

Experience Africa's vibrant and volatile struggle at the crossroads between tradition and modernity . . .

INTO THE HOUSE OF THE ANCESTORS

"Rich . . . fascinating." --The New York Times Book Review

"A master of eyewitness description and of the telling interview, [Maier] has unearthed Africa's hidden heroes and heroines." --Financial Times

"Maier has written a sensitive and complex narrative. . . . excellent descriptions of the lives and experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary individuals in different parts of Africa." --Richard Leakey, The Times (London)

"A remarkable book. . . . It is no easy task to articulate an intangible undercurrent in an area so geographically large and culturally diverse, but Maier has succeeded admirably. Maier gives us hope that [the Africans] can rebound and even thrive. Highly recommended." --Library Journal

Howard W. French

He introduces the reader to his subject through a rich variety of Africans, from computer scientists and doctors to guerrilla fighters and traditional healers. — The New York Times Book Review

Howard W. French

He introduces the reader to his subject through a rich variety of Africans, from computer scientists and doctors to guerrilla fighters and traditional healers. —The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Although many books have portrayed the problems of today's Africa, Maier, former Africa correspondent for the Independent of London, takes a more hopeful view. His aim is not to sanitize the image of sub-Saharan Africa but to "celebrate the spirit" of ordinary people striving to better their world. Thus he describes trailblazers like a Ghanaian sociologist working to help the elderly, and he explains how Mozambique's once socialist government adapted to the spirit claims of traditional chiefs and healers. Taking issue with the widespread pessimistic view of "coming anarchy," he notes that a country like Sierra Leone has had democratic elections rather than descending into chaos. Yet Maier's sobering portrait of Rwanda acknowledges only a slim hope for peace and justice, and he laments the unrealized potential of behemoth Nigeria. This book is not comprehensive but anecdotal; France's enduring influence or Western policies toward Africa are hardly broached. But even if Maier seems Pollyannish at times, this is a reasonable counterpart to accounts that focus only on conflict.

Library Journal

Maier, a foreign correspondent in Africa for over 10 years and author of Angola: Promises and Lies, has produced a remarkable book dealing with the spirit of a changing sub-Saharan Africa. It is no easy task to articulate an intangible undercurrent in an area so geographically large and culturally diverse, but Maier has succeeded admirably in revealing how African peoples today are "summoning their tremendous inner vitality...to adapt to a rapidly changing world around them." In clearly written journalistic prose, Maier illustrates his thesis with individuals, places, and events from all over the sub-Saharan continent; there is, unquestionably, a movement to return to the pre-colonial, pre-Christian, pre-Muslim African spiritual beliefs, and the reassertion of the African spirit can be seen in politics, medicine, education, religion, even the military. African peoples face huge hurdles (AIDS, civil wars, famine) as they enter the 21st century, but Maier gives us hope that they can rebound and even thrive. -- Ruth K. Baacke, Whatcom County Library System, Bellingham, Washington

Library Journal

Maier, a foreign correspondent in Africa for over 10 years and author of Angola: Promises and Lies, has produced a remarkable book dealing with the spirit of a changing sub-Saharan Africa. It is no easy task to articulate an intangible undercurrent in an area so geographically large and culturally diverse, but Maier has succeeded admirably in revealing how African peoples today are "summoning their tremendous inner vitality...to adapt to a rapidly changing world around them." In clearly written journalistic prose, Maier illustrates his thesis with individuals, places, and events from all over the sub-Saharan continent; there is, unquestionably, a movement to return to the pre-colonial, pre-Christian, pre-Muslim African spiritual beliefs, and the reassertion of the African spirit can be seen in politics, medicine, education, religion, even the military. African peoples face huge hurdles (AIDS, civil wars, famine) as they enter the 21st century, but Maier gives us hope that they can rebound and even thrive. -- Ruth K. Baacke, Whatcom County Library System, Bellingham, Washington

Howard W. French

He introduces the reader to his subject through a rich variety of Africans, from computer scientists and doctors to guerrilla fighters and traditional healers. -- The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

CHAPTER ONE

Glorious Light

The air tingled with excitement as the first crimson rays of sunlight announced the dawn over the rolling hills outside the South African city of Durban on the shores of the Indian Ocean. A motorcade escorted by dozens of armed soldiers and police officers roared up a knoll overlooking a tightly packed township to deliver Nelson Mandela to the Ohlange High School and his long-awaited appointment with history. The day was April 27, 1994, and Mandela had chosen to cast his vote in South Africa's first all-race elections at the site of the tomb of the founding president of the African National Congress, John Dube.

As Mandela ambled in his long, slow strides toward the cemetery, he paused to shake the hand of a young white soldier armed with an R-4 automatic rifle. "It's an honor for me to meet you," he said. "You must have had to get up very early. I'm very sorry." The trooper, who just a few years before would have been under orders to regard Mandela as the most dangerous man alive, stood there dumbfounded. "Thank you, sir," he stammered, "but it's my job." Mandela held his hand for a moment and said it did not matter, he was very grateful anyway.

After laying a wreath at the tomb, Mandela walked down toward the school where a phalanx of three hundred photographers and television crews were jostling with each other for the ideal position to capture the most famous vote in African history. As the ruckus was going on, Mandela went around shaking the hand of every police officer and soldier he could find, asking warmly how they were and saying how nice it was to meet them. "Thank you very much for your good work," he told the commanding officer, a white police colonel, who responded, "You take care of yourself." Mandela thanked him for the advice.

From there, Mandela strode up the steps into the schoolhouse, cast his vote in secrecy, and reappeared outside to do it again for the cameras. "An unforgettable occasion," he said with his wide, disarming smile. "We are moving from an era of resistance, division, oppression, turmoil and conflict and starting a new era of hope, reconciliation and nation-building." When asked who he had voted for, Mandela said with a mischievous laugh, "I have been agonizing over that decision for a long time." For twenty-seven years, Mandela had been a prisoner in the jails of South Africa's apartheid rulers because he believed that the African majority should enjoy their full democratic rights. During that time he emerged as the premier symbol of the struggle for freedom and equality of Africans on the continent and throughout the diaspora, in distant places like the United States and Brazil, where his likeness is painted on the walls of homes in cities such as Salvador and Rio de Janeiro.

If he harbored any bitterness at his long incarceration, his years of working in the lime mines outside the cold, windswept prison on Robben Island, he never showed it. Long shunned by the West as a Communist--former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once described him as the leader of "a typical terrorist organization"--Mandela walked out of jail in February 1990 and said, let bygones be bygones. His vote four years later marked the final stage of Africa's emergence from the shadow of colonial occupation. It was as if Mandela were the human manifestation of the inscription written on John Dube's tombstone: "Out of the darkness into the glorious light."

No one who witnessed that scene, or indeed Mandela's rise from being the world's most famous prisoner to becoming head of state of Africa's most powerful country, could forget the incredible dignity and humility that enveloped him. The uncanny ability of "the old man," the madiba, as he is commonly known, to make those around him feel better about themselves was often described as "Mandela magic." Much has been written about the iron will and sacrifice to free his people from subjugation; but his genius, and one of the many reasons he evokes such admiration around the world, is his ability to bring African values to bear on the problems of the late twentieth century--values such as the preeminence of the interests of the community over those of the individual, respect for traditional culture, and an at times unbelievable capacity for forgiveness.

Four years before South Africa's elections, another elderly man, like Mandela a tall, dignified septuagenarian, explained why the people in the neighboring country of Zimbabwe felt so little bitterness toward the whites living there. The whites had arrived a century before under the command of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, stole the people's land, their cattle and their minerals, and ruled over them in the racially segregated country called Rhodesia until finally capitulating after a horrific liberation war in which tens of thousands died. Mike Hove, a former diplomat and author, sat one afternoon in the living room of his home in the city of Bulawayo and described how his father was among many who had extended hospitality to those white pioneers, provided them with shelter, and crouched with them around the campfires sharing their evening meals of caterpillar stew and beer. Only later, when the whites launched their campaign of theft and forced their erstwhile African hosts into "native reserves," did they resist. It was not surprising, he said, that one hundred years later, the Ndebele and Shona people could live together with the whites in relative tranquility in the modern nation of Zimbabwe. The concept of forgiveness was central to the African character, Hove said. "In African religion, your relationship with the creator is only as good as your relationship with your foe. So if two brothers fight, they would have to go and appease the spirits. In this part of the country, the ceremony is very simple. You take some ash from a container. One brother takes part of the ash, and the other brother does the same, and they eat it. Once they have gone through that cleansing ceremony, they would be reconciled to God through our ancestors. The idea of forgiveness is part of life. One who refuses to forgive the person who has offended him becomes an outcast; he is not human anymore."

As the millennium approaches, Africa is in dire need of a renewed injection of the values outlined by Hove and symbolized by "Mandela magic" if the continent is to pull itself out of its political and economic crisis. Professor Ali Mazrui has suggested that the rampant instability, corruption, and dictatorial government which have turned the dreams of freedom and independence into a nightmare are the result of a curse pronounced by the ancestors on the living for ignoring Africa's past and the cultural values bred over the centuries. "It is the compact between Africa and the twentieth century and its terms are all wrong," he has written. "They involve turning Africa's back on previous centuries--an attempt to `modernize' without consulting cultural continuities, an attempt to start the process of `dis-Africanizing' Africa." To lift the curse, Africa must take the good from its past to meet the demands of the future. Africans must reclaim the sense of history and purpose of which colonialism dispossessed them. Simply aping the Americans and Europeans, promoting "dis-Africanization" and Westernization, is doomed to fail.

The European carve-up of Africa at the Berlin Conference--a massive exercise in international piracy whose goal was to create moneymaking colonies--bequeathed to the founding fathers of modern Africa a deformed heritage. When Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, and the Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor led their countries to independence, they inherited a haphazard patchwork of often unworkable nation-states still dependent on the capitals of the former occupiers. The charismatic Nkrumah, who guided Ghana to independence in 1957, once proclaimed, "Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else will follow." But all else did not follow. The struggle of Africa's people to reclaim their birthright, to pursue their lives in relative security and with a reasonable hope of delivering a better future to their children, was just beginning, and it was to experience many reverses.

Uhuru--freedom--remains a mirage on the horizon, dancing away disconcertingly into the distance just as it appears within reach. Africa's infant mortality rate remains alarmingly high, at seventy-five per thousand, and even in Uganda, the economic success story of the 1990s, one in five children die before their fifth birthday. Africa's contribution to total world trade is declining rapidly, to about 1 percent, millions of people have fled their homes to escape famine and war, and hundreds of thousands more have migrated to Europe and the United States to avoid oppressive governments and the lack of economic opportunity. Of the world's severely indebted poor countries, twenty-five are in Africa. By the year 2000, half of Africa's people, 300 million people, will live in abject poverty, with little or no access to basic health care, sanitation, and clean water.

Such statistics find apparent confirmation in the horrific pictures of African war and pestilence carried daily on global television networks. International aid agencies escalate their propaganda campaigns, flashing ever more graphic scenes of tearful children living in squalid refugee camps or polluted urban shanty towns, and urging the public to respond with credit card donations. The message is, Save a life by sending money to poor dependent Africa. This portrait is a distortion. Actually, Africa often sends more money to the West than the other way around. All the assistance Africa receives from the international aid agencies, the United Nations, and the big industrial nation governments, some $10 billion a year, just about covers the payments African countries owe on their foreign debts, mainly to the West. If just one of every four or five dollars Africa pays to the banks and creditors was destined instead for primary education, every African child could find a place in school. The same thing could be accomplished by cutting by one-third the region's annual $8 million military bill, much of which again is paid to the West.

Yet blaming Africa's myriad problems on the outside world will simply not do any more, and it is very rare to hear Africans living in Africa offering such excuses. Even without the constraints of the unbalanced economic relationship with the West, African countries have their own very urgent problems to sort out, and only they can do it. Just as Mandela was casting his ballot and leading his country out of the darkness of apartheid, a blanket of horror was falling on the tiny central African nation of Rwanda. The government, led by extremists of the Hutu people, organized the genocide of between one-half to a million of its citizens, members of the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates. A few months later, the military rulers of Nigeria jailed the winner of that country's first elections in a decade, apparently setting Africa's most populous and potentially most promising nation on the road toward violent confrontation.

While civil wars rage today in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda's neighbor, Burundi, and claim thousands of lives, a tenuous peace is hanging literally by a thread in Angola, the scene of a twenty-year conflict. One can count on one hand the number of countries that have witnessed since independence a peaceful handover of power from one government to the next. Even rarer are the leaders who own up to their mistakes in office, such as Nyerere who, when he bowed out gracefully as president of Tanzania in 1985, declared in his farewell speech, "I failed. Let's admit it."

Decades after the end of colonial occupation, Africa still casts about for answers to the question of which way ahead, of how the continent can harness its vast natural resources and the undying energy and ingenuity of its people to reverse its breathtaking decline. The wreckage of foreign models imported largely from Europe litters the landscape like a line of rusting hulks. The nation-states left by the colonial powers have proved to be alien structures, unwieldy at best and in some cases outright unworkable. Multiparty systems too often have unleashed debilitating contests between politicians who are prepared to stoke the fires of ethnic rivalry, no matter what the cost, to win power. The socialist one-party states, so popular in the years immediately following independence, ended up as overbearing monoliths, hanging like millstones around Africa's neck, stifling initiative and fostering corruption.

Now, at the urging of western institutions such as the World Bank, the model of the rapidly industrializing so-called Asian "tigers," countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, has become the latest fad, but that too is likely to fare little better than its predecessors unless it is built on solid local foundations. Professor Mazrui has a point when he attributes the demise of Africa to a curse of the ancestors. Since independence, Africa has jettisoned its past. When the Europeans withdrew, power was not returned to the traditional chiefs and kings from whom it was taken by force, but to rulers who believed almost exclusively in the superiority of western institutions. Too many of these modern leaders are not interested in seeking lessons from their precolonial forefathers. Incredibly, not one professes a public belief in indigenous African religions, for example. The vast majority are Christians, Muslims, or Marxists. They accepted the nation-states and in large part the political and economic institutions created by the European colonizers, as well as the notion that Africa's history before the slave trade and full-scale foreign occupation had little to teach the present and future generations. If Africa was to modernize, it world have to embrace "civilization" in a distinctly alien form. As Basil Davidson put it in his critique of the nation-state, The Black Man's Burden, "Africa would be free: except, of course, that in terms of political and literate culture, Africa would cease to be Africa."

An African political order did exist before the slave trade carried off millions of Africa's sons and daughters to the Americas and the Arab world and the subsequent occupation by the imperial powers. Whether in the stateless nomadic groups that herded their livestock across the vast savannahs of the continent or in more complex centralized systems, such as the Ashante state in Ghana or the Shona kingdoms in what is today Zimbabwe, in the eyes of their citizens, these regimes were legitimate. There was a moral order to life, a belief by most of the peoples that they had a stake in it. It was certainly not the case that European civilization at the time was fundamentally more advanced than that of Africa, except of course in the technology of firearms. As Ronald Segal has argued in his pioneering work, The Black Diaspora, there is something to be said for the notion that any society which pillages another for its people might be considered the more backward one, at least morally. "In fact, since even the more conventional criteria of cultural advance encompass standards of personal security and civil justice as well as material wealth and the extent of territory under centralized administration, the difference may well have been in favor of Black Africa."

Millions of ordinary Africans are looking for a new path. They have beat a hasty retreat from the morass of onerous strictures and regulations dictated by governments that enforce them when it is convenient, and they have sought solace in their own cultures, their clans, and their families. The rich mosaic of indigenous religions remains a vibrant force, not only in Africa but also in the Caribbean and in Brazil. In every village and urban neighborhood, the work of traditional healers and spiritual leaders continues. Even Islam and Christianity have to a large extent been Africanized. To millions, the nation-states and the governments that represent them are burdensome foreign impositions, some of their more notorious leaders, such as Mobutu and Nigeria's General Sani Abacha, merely taking up where the foreign rules left off.

Today, Africa's national frontiers are violated every day by men, women, and children who circumvent the formal borders to carry on with their business activities and family responsibilities as best they can. The lack of a secure environment in which to work, crumbling infrastructures and educational institutions, and the dearth of confidence that investments today will bring rewards tomorrow have pushed the bulk of Africa's economic activity underground into the so-called informal market. It is perhaps not registered in the annual calculations of gross national product but it is the true engine of day-to-day life all the same. There is perhaps no greater testament to the continent-wide vote of no-confidence in the formal institutions of state and government than the propensity to turn to the informal market.

Claude Ake pointed out that 60 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's people are still rural, and they define their values and interests not in terms of individuality but of communality:

... freedom is embedded in the realities of communal life; people worry less about their rights and how to secure them than finding their station and its duties and they see no freedom in mere individualism. Their sense of freedom is not framed by tensions between the individual and the collectivity or the prospects of securing immunities against the collectivity. Nor is it defined in terms of autonomy or opposition but rather in terms of co-operation and in the embeddedness of the individual in an organic whole ... Participation rests not on the assumption of individuality but on the social nature of being and the organic character of society. Always, it is as much a matter of taking part as of sharing, sharing the burdens and rewards of community membership. It does not simply enjoin rights, it secures concrete benefits. It is not simply an occasional opportunity to signify approval or disapproval of people who exercise power on our behalf; it entails the exercise of power, however small or symbolic.

It would be unrealistic to argue that the nations of Africa attempt to turn back the clock to some past idyll to seek their salvation. After all, if the precolonial order was so healthy, it should have stood up more effectively against foreign interference. If all traditional chiefs were so concerned about the fate of their people, why did so many willingly participate in the slave trade? And yet, it is just as unrealistic to maintain that Africa's future generations have nothing to learn from their forefathers. When Africa finally begins its march toward prosperity and security, as it almost certainly will one day, the key ingredients will come not from Washington, London, or Tokyo; they will be homegrown. In any society, representative government and economic development must sprout from deep roots in the soil of local culture because only in that way will its people feel that they are part of it, that they have contributed to it, and that they have a reasonable chance of benefitting from it.

However disadvantaged at independence, however deep the spiritual wounds of the slave trade, however illogical the colonial borders, and however tight a grip the former imperial powers maintain over the economies, postindependent Africa should be in much better shape. The political leaders who took over from the colonial authorities were not forced to pursue policies of extravagant self-enrichment at the expense of their people and ultimately their countries. There were and are other choices to be made, other paths to be followed.

The momentum for change is building. A new generation of leaders, including Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and the madiba himself, Mandela, is pushing aside the old discredited and often corrupt postcolonial leadership. They are laying the groundwork for the emergence of an arc of good government and prosperity stretching from Eritrea in the northeast down through Central Africa and linking up with South Africa.

The elder statesman Nyerere now sees hope on the horizon. "A new leadership is developing in Africa ... the military phase is out. I think the single-party phase is out," Nyerere said in August 1996. The reasons for such optimism are many. The end of the cold war has freed Africa from a distracting and often painful involvement in the ideological battles between East and West; a majority of African countries have initiated reform programs to open up their economies to the outside world; and the twisted apartheid system of racial domination in South Africa has given way to a multiracial democracy that enjoys widespread legitimacy. The challenges of massive unemployment, poor education for the majority, and worsening levels of crime are daunting, but the change in South Africa gives new hope for southern Africa, with a potential market of 130 million people and a treasure trove of essential resources--from coal to diamonds, gold, hydroelectric power, oil, and vast tracts of arable land.

The eighteen-year civil war in Mozambique, surely one of Africa's most destructive conflicts in the continent's poorest country, came to an end with United Nations-monitored elections taking place in an atmosphere of remarkable calm. Millions of civilians have been able to return to their homes in relative peace while the former armed adversaries, the Frelimo government and the Renamo rebels, face each other in parliament rather than on the battlefield.

Likewise, decades-old dictatorships have fallen in a number of countries, from Mali in West Africa to Malawi in the east, and tiny Benin has witnessed a peaceful transition from one elected government to another. Uganda has risen swiftly from the ashes left by the cruel dictatorship of Idi Amin and the ravages of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which were decimated in the 1980s by civil war and famine, there is relative peace.

The collapse of Mobutu sese Seko's kleptocracy in Zaire has removed a painful, embarrassing wound from Africa's collective consciousness. His ruinous administration, his support from the major Western powers, his sponsorship of a motley array of movements dedicated to undermining his neighbors, and his close involvement with those who led the genocide in Rwanda finally caught up with him. The lightning quick rebellion led by Laurent Desire Kabila which drove out Mobutu in May 1997 and renamed Zaire the Democratic Republic of Congo is part of a political revolution sweeping across the face of Africa. The ease with which Kabila's army sliced through the Congo was due to two factors: popular revulsion at Mobutu's rule and pan-African support for the rebel cause. An unprecedented coalition of a dozen African countries, from Angola and Eritrea to South Africa and Zimbabwe, galvanized by Museveni and Rwanda's vice president and defense minister, Paul Kagame, decided it was time that Africa took its destiny in its own hands. They armed and trained Kabila's fighters and provided officers and troops to support them, and in six months they brought down the old tyrant. As Museveni commented after Mobutu's ouster, "The big hole in the middle of Africa has been filled up and now we can build roads from east to west. We want a common market from east to west and from South Africa to the west."

A dream, perhaps, but there is the sense that the end of Mobutu's Zaire heralds a second chance for Africa. Within weeks of Mobutu's downfall, democracy activists in Kenya reignited their campaign against the authoritarian government of President Daniel Arap Moi, whom they immediately dubbed "Moi-butu."

Mandela put the new feeling of optimism this way. "I am convinced that our region and our continent have set out along the new road of lasting peace, democracy and social and economic development. The time has come for Africa to take full responsibility for her woes and use the immense collective wisdom it possesses to make a reality of the ideal of the African renaissance, whose time has come."