To help European peoples begin to recognize the tremendous consequences of centuries of slavery and colonization for the world today, I offer this brief exercise. If Africans had colonized Europeans, what would be different?

As the decade of the 1970’s drew to a close, Africa’s leaders were becoming concerned over the economic stagnation visibly creeping across the Continent. The dramatic escalation in energy prices, combined with the general world inflation, had palpably shifted the terms of trade against the African petroleum importers, effectively neutralizing the higher commodity prices which African exports had enjoyed in the earlier years of the decade. Per capita GDP figures, which in most of Africa had been rising since independence, had begun to slip. In some countries the physical and social infrastructure was clearly detriorating.

Since the middle of the 1970s Sub-Saharan African states have focused increasingly on their severe economic and fiscal crises. These involve wrestling with the burdens of debt service and the rigors of rescheduling, conducting difficult negotiations with bilateral and private creditors, bargaining over conditionality packages with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or fending them off, distributing the painful costs of adjustment, coping with import strangulation and devising new development policies and strategies. Already highly dependent on the outside world, the intensity, stakes and levels of conditionality of these relations with external actors have increased substantially.

Recent reports of famine again devastating Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique have focused world-wide attention once more on Africa’s precarious plight. The pictures of emaciated bodies crowded into emergency feeding centers, documenting the grim statistics of declining production, are now painfully familiar. It was only three years ago that high media coverage and an active international fundraising campaign for the victims of drought brought the crisis to nightly news. However, despite the unprecedented success of efforts such as BANDAID, U.S.A. for Africa and others in raising public consciousness and contributions, the fundamental problems plaguing Africa remain unchanged and unsolved.

Few phenomena in recent years have sparked as much fervent support and militant opposition as “privatization.” Narrowly defined, privatization means selling state owned assets to private buyers. Its proponents insist that privatization improves micro-economic efficiency and enhances macro-economic growth. Its opponents counter that privatization is a non-starter politically and impractical economically. One side tends to see privatization as a private sector panacea; the other an imperialist curse.

The United Nations Special Session on the Critical Ecnomic Situation in Africa concluded in June 1986 with the Adoption of a Programme of Action which included an explicit recognition of African policy failures and the need for reform:

The African food crisis of 1983-85 galvanized political commitment both among African governments and in industrialized states to alleviate the chronic problem of hunger in Africa. One result is the 13th General Assembly Special Session on the economic crisis of Africa in May-June, 1986. This step, following considerable preparation, paralleled steps by African states to allocate greater resources to agriculture and food production and by the World Bank and other donors to help increase their assistance targeted toward the relief of hunger and the establishment of food security. After years of lip service about priorities to agriculture or the pursuit of agriculture development through investments that were biased toward both large-scale and production-oriented projects, African governments, in preparing for the 1986 Special Session of the UN that focused on Africa’s economic crisis, exhibited genuine shifts in their policies toward agriculture.

An underlying assumption that ocurs in both conventional wisdom and in many academic analyses of political behavior is the notion that a critical linkage exists between political change and economic performance. The assumption is that economic growth is either a precondition or a correlate of democracy and political stability. Little empirical research has been done to test the validity of this widely held assumption as it applies to multicultural societies. Moreover, in the African environment, the assumption seems to operate only in selected cases or in ways that defy categorization. Jerry Rawlings, for example, said he led his first coup d’etat in Ghana because the government was going to devalue the currency; he led his second coup, in part, because the next government was going to devalue; and, during his own tenure in office, he has presided over a 1000 percent devaluation.