Africa: From Independence to Tomorrow
By David Hapgood. Atheneum Publishers. 221 pp. $5.

I have spent a good deal of the past five years reading reams about Africa, some of it informing, some of it nonsense. David Hapgood’s book has more sense than all the rest. This is not unexpected. Those of us who have met Hapgood, or have read his newsletters and magazine articles, have long known that he leaves all the academicians and other journalists far behind. Few Americans understand Africa the way he does.

The university professors who trek through Africa tend to see it through the prism of their own pet theories. The embassy men tend to see it as a giant continent cracked by the cold war into one part that adulates John F. Kennedy and another that cheers Chou En-lai. The newsmen tend to see it through the whispers of the elegant elite, sipping brandy and ginger in the hotel lobbies of the capitals.

Hapgood, a former New York Times writer who spent two years in Africa as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, looks at Africa with a cold eye and tough mind. He enjoys Africa, he feels it, even loves it, but he is not taken in. He sees its crushing problems, and he sees its leaders rushing away from them. His affection for Africa does not stop him from putting down in a relentless way all that is wrong with Africa and, by indirection, all that is wrong with a Western policy that encourages these ills.

Hapgood approaches the continent in three steps. First, he believes that Africa’s economic development depends on its ability to change the attitudes of the peasants and transform agriculture. Second, he believes that the ruling elite is so alienated from the masses that it obstructs the agricultural transformation. Third, he believes that this alienated elite has been created in part by an imported educational system that has no relation at all to African society.

“To achieve a better material life,” Hapgood says, “African farmers must adopt a whole set of new techniques, and for this to happen, millions of people living in isolation from the urban centers must decide they want to make revolutionary changes in their lives. Agricultural progress does not begin and end with a new tool or a different crop. ...Change in how a man farms his land means change in how he views the world and himself in relation to other men.”

The author shows how most Western agricultural experiments in Africa, with their foreign experts and heavy machinery, have failed. At the most they have created, at high cost, little pockets of privileged farmers. Their demonstration value has been nil. Most Africans look at the results, are duly impressed, but regard the foreign techniques as a special province of a foreign culture.

Hapgood, following the lead of the French agronomist Rene Dumont, suggests that the transformation of African agriculture must come through small changes: donkeys to turn water wheels and carry food to market, new hand tools that can be produced by village smiths, bins and insecticides to save the corn crop, production of peanut flour for protein, small sugar mills costing $4,000, cheap windmills, trained dogs to herd cattle.

Such changes will be difficult, and Hapgood says their success depends on agents of change who know viIlage life and care about it. "It is likely that the lack of imagination and real concern on the part of both European and educated Africans lies behind most fiascos on the farm," Hapgood writes. “ . . . The African technician, like his European predecessor, typically calls the villagers together and tells them what he, their superior, wants them to do. . . . For the elite African, concerned with showing how different he is from rural Africans, to listen to 'primitive’ peasants without patronizing them may be damaging to his own self-esteem.”

Hapgood’s conviction is that Africa's ruling elite, despite all their Socialist slogans, do not believe in change, for it might destroy their privileges. "When the Europeans surrendered the keys of the palace," he writes, "they put the elite in their own shoes. . . . Nothing could be more natural than for the African elite to continue a system in which they were so highly privileged; social change would inevitably reduce their power, their income, their sense of superiority." African capitals brim with what Hapgood calls the unproductive but plainly visible "monuments to the elite's quest for prestige": palaces, sports stadiums, armies, air lines, traffic lights, television stations. The elite would rather spend their energy and the country's money on these than on the peasant in the bush.

"The tragedy of the elite today," Hapgood continues, "is that it has adopted European ways of consumption without European productivity. ... What Europe displayed [to the colonial Africans] was not the hardworking society of Europe but the somnolent feudalism of Europe-in-Africa. . . .Combined with its European salaries, low productivity makes the elite expensive indeed to the African nations."

The colonial attitudes are perpetuated in the elite by the colonial school systems still used in independent Africa. These schools teach Africans as if they were little Frenchmen or little Englishmen. “The alienation of the educated African was Europe's legacy," Hapgood writes, "and the school is still teaching the same message . . . the superiority of all that is European-urban over what is African-rural. Contempt for village culture and its values, and above all contempt for farming and manual labor, is the lesson instilled in the students."

Hapgood notes that "the method of teaching is still rigid memorization, the purpose of schooling is to pass an examination that gets you into the elite." This kind of schooling creates in the elite "the concern with status rather than production, the rigid application of rules without concern for their purpose and, worst of all, fear and dislike of anything new and risky.”

Although it is hard to generalize about an entire continent, Hapgood's thesis is relevant to almost all of the ten Black African countries I have visited. I have a little trouble, though, in applying it to Nigeria, the largest and best known of the new nations in Africa.

This is not because Nigeria has escaped the three problems of agricultural stagnation, an unproductive elite and an irrelevant school system. Nigeria suffers from these just as do the other countries. But Nigeria has another side. Foreign aid and trade are pouring into the country, the pet of Britain and America. All this money has created a heady, get-rich atmosphere, and Nigerians are rushing about trying to get their fingers on the cash. Despite stagnant agriculture, elitism and Western education, can Nigeria develop on the force of greed alone? My guess is that the answer is no, that this country will falter just like the others. But I wish Hapgood had spent some time analyzing the special case of Nigeria.

I also have some trouble with Hapgood’s final assessment. The import of his critique of Africa would seem to indicate a coming social and political revolution. How long can society withstand the pressures of a system that makes the elite richer and does nothing for the masses? But the author talks vaguely about the distant future when a new culture may come to Africa, combining both European and traditional African values. It sounds a little lame.

But these are quibbles or suggestions of new topics for another book. I don’t want to suggest any serious deficiencies in this tight little work. It’s the best one around on Africa.

Stanley Meisler, a frequent Nation contributor, spent a year in Africa on a foundation grant.