Miami Herald - Thursday, September 12, 2002
Llewellyn King

Even as the World Summit on Sustainable Development lumbered on in Johannesburg, many delegates must have wondered whether Africa has a sustainable future. A continent of once kind and hospitable people has lost its head.

In Nigeria, a woman faces death by stoning for adultery; in Zambia, people die of starvation because the government will not distribute U.S. grain, having bought the pernicious view of European environmentalists that it is a health hazard; and in South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki has convinced himself that HIV is not the precursor to AIDS.

SHORT ON LAW, NOT ARMS

Africa is short on law; short on coherence; still clinging to dictatorial socialism, as in Zimbabwe; and awash in weapons. The situation is so bad that Max Hastings, a British journalist, has called for the world essentially to abandon Africa -- no more to have its treasures stolen and its humanity wasted.

Even the most aggressive critics of what is seen as the West's parsimonious aid to Africa wonder whether it has ever done any good or whether the continent can be helped; whether AIDS and tropical disease simply will depopulate the continent, its people dying of the most terrible privation.

Well, there is some hope in Africa. It rests with the continent's indomitable women, who bear the brunt of its failure and the hope that there will be morning there.

Although African societies treat women appallingly through general polygamy, female circumcision in the North and the West, and now routine rape, particularly in South Africa, women are the ones who hold together what is left to hold together.

Women do much of the labor, hoard the precious food, suffer their children's hunger, preserve the cultures and keep tribal heritage and language intact. The women stand between possibility and hopelessness.

And yet, because of the dominance of men, the world has had little to do with the women of Africa; its contacts always are with men. In Zimbabwe, in the 1950s and '60s, white and black idealists planned for the future of that now-troubled place without ever considering its women.

Today, in the cities of Africa, women keep things running: Men have the titles, and women do the work. Old Africa hands know that if you have a problem and you have to deal with a governmental agency or a commercial establishment, you should try to find a woman in charge.

Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, has proposed a $50 billion Marshall Plan for Africa. Unfortunately, were it to come about, it would fail. The nature of the Marshall Plan was that it returned Europe to the status quo ante.

In Europe, there was a base and a memory. But in Africa, there is no base and no memory, save for the hated colonialism. So Brown's plan cannot but repeat the mistakes of the past -- massive corruption, misallocation and theft.

A whole new scheme is needed for Africa: a scheme that circumvents the nominal leaders and their culture of Mercedes-Benzes, AK-47s and Swiss bank accounts, a scheme that delivers aid directly into the hands of the people who hold African society together as best they can: the women.

If ever there was a great cause for the feminists of the world, it is Africa -- and it is the delivery of noneconomic aid to the women of the villages. This aid needs to be simple education about hygiene, reproduction and the tools of survival -- hoes, water jars, household medicines and home economics.

You cannot till the soil without an implement, store water without a receptacle, or save the life of a child who has trod on a thorn without disinfectant. And you cannot save Africa without its women.

Llewellyn King is the publisher of White House Weekly and the chairman and CEO of King Publishing (www.kingpublishing.com).

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