The Family: Africa's Blessing and Curse

The Family: Africa's Blessing and Curse


Too often Africa is seen through a prism of war and famine, but this masks its essential energy
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Swazi royal maidens, some of the 50,000 young Swazi women, gather at the Royal Palace to present their freshly cut reeds to King Mswati III as part of the annual reed dance, Mbabane, Swaziland

Part of the 50,000 Swazi Royal maidens of King Mswati III's domain presenting their freshly cut reeds during the annual reed dance

I was delighted to see my friend Siphiwe Hlophe, founder of Swaziland for Positive Living (Swapol), giving Swaziland's king hell last week. On Wednesday she led a 1,000-strong demonstration in the capital Mbabane to protest that eight of his 13 wives, plus their children and an entourage of bodyguards, maids and hangers-on, had chartered a plane to Dubai for a shopping spree.

Swaziland is a disaster zone by any definition. It has the worst HIV infection rate in the world; 31% for women. It is also pathetically poor, with nearly 70% of its people living on less than 50 US cents (about 27p) a day.

King Mswati III, whose personal take of the national budget is half the health budget, is estimated to have spent £2.2 million on the trip and is planning a huge 40th birthday bash this week. Meanwhile Siphiwe's marchers claimed that the supply of antiretroviral drugs to people living with AIDS has been halved by the royal government.

I met the formidable Siphiwe during a visit to Swaziland in 2002. Three years earlier she was thrilled when she won a national scholarship to study agriculture in Britain. One of the conditions of the scholarship was an Aids test, which she took, unaware there was a problem. She was HIV-positive.

As a result she lost the scholarship, and her husband, who had probably infected her, walked out.

She thought she was going to die and went into deep depression. Then she decided that before she died she would make a difference. She joined up with other women living with HIV and formed Swapol. I went with her and her friends, singing and dancing and laughing as they strode up a steep hill to bring food and comfort to orphaned children, a swaggering triumphant gang of very angry women.

The ridiculous, English public-school- educated monarch is not typical of Africa these days, but he escapes censure because, in a twisted, debased way, he represents something from the past. Having a big family remains important in Africa and its population is doubling in every generation. Like the Swazi king, many men who can afford it -- and some that cannot -- have several wives and lots of children.

The aim in Africa was always to add more people to the family group. In contrast, European families shed people. Traditionally, in Europe, when a daughter married and left her family, she was given a dowry, a pay-off to settle her elsewhere. In Africa the money goes the other way. A suitor must pay bride price -- compensation for the loss of a family member. He is not just ensuring, since she is valuable, that she will be respected and treated well, he is also binding their families together, adding more people to his own household.

Perhaps this is because European societies had too many people and not enough land, whereas in Africa there was always plenty of land but not enough people to control it. In crowded, bloody Europe people stood and fought for land. In Africa wars were fought for pillage, for slaves, for cattle, for control of trade. Very rarely did people fight for land. It was not necessary. There was always plenty of space. And when there were wars, the defeated were not usually slaughtered or driven away, they were absorbed into the victor's group.

Family is central to life in Africa, but the African family is nothing like the neat nuclear family of Europe. Africans find the European family a paltry, cold affair. In Africa -- the whole of Africa -- the family extends to relations Europeans would no longer have any knowledge of. A man without a family is no one. He is nothing.

When I first arrived in Africa as a teacher I was continually confused by the way people referred to their families. One of my students told me he lived in a house with three fathers and two mothers. "But you have only one father and one mother," I told him. "No, I have three fathers and two mothers at our house," he replied.

People often introduced me to three or four people they called their mother or father. In Africa any relative of your parents' age who looks after you as a child is a mother or a father. Even cousins several times removed are called brothers and sisters. And Africa is a good place to grow old. Grey hairs are respected and obeyed. The elderly are not pushed aside as they are in western countries.

However, there are downsides to family ties and respect for age. The downside of the family is that distant relatives can claim from richer members. Any money that one member earns is expected to be distributed throughout the rest of the extended family. It is hard to build a family business under such conditions. And age has its drawbacks too. One reason

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has found it hard to dictate to Robert Mugabe is because he is from a younger generation. Dynamic leaders of 50 are told they are too young to rule. They need to have some grey hairs. The old retain power over their families -- and their countries -- until they die. Young upstarts are soon seen off by their elders and betters.

The only young African leaders to come to power in Africa seized it by force.

Swaziland also has a lesson for those who believe Africa's problems are all about "tribe" -- the ultimate extended family. It is one of only four of the continent's countries that are based on a single ethnic group.

Of the others, one is Botswana, Africa's most stable and best run country. Another is Somalia, the ultimate failed state. So no pattern there. In Swaziland the king and the ruling elite refer to the Swazi nation but pretend that Swazis are a traditional tribe, utterly obedient to the king and his chiefs. The king misuses tradition to appropriate the country's meagre resources, prevent development and keep the people subservient.

What is the difference between a tribe and a nation anyway? Tribalism describes a frame of mind all human beings suffer from: a pig-headed "my group, right or wrong" attitude. In Africa people are always referred to as members of tribes, but how can 25m Yoruba or 33m Hausa people be called tribes? If they are, then surely the English, Welsh and Scots must be British tribes. As a journalist, I refuse to use the word tribe in Africa until the media refer to former Yugoslavia as tribal or the Israel-Palestine conflict as a land dispute between two semitic tribes. That's how it would be described if they lived in Africa.

Africa's problem is not tribalism as such, but the utterly incoherent nation states cohabited by different ethnic groups bequeathed to Africans half a century ago. Africans had no part in the creation of their nation states. At the end of the 19th century, Europeans drew lines on maps of places they had never been to. Fifty years ago the filled-in spaces became Ghana, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, countries that had never existed before. Suddenly pitched into independence, they had no sense of common nationhood. By contrast the ruling Europeans had always emphasised ethnic differences and suppressed any sense of nationalism.

Today Ghanaians are proudly Ghanaian and Kenyans fiercely Kenyan, but they lack a common sense of what that means. Beneath the surface of Africa's weak nation states lie old cultures, old communities, very different societies with their own laws and languages. Nigeria contains some 400 different ethnic groups. Uganda has more than 40. They lack what we take for granted: a common conception of nationhood and national citizenship.

The unification of Africa remains a distant dream, and separatism is frowned on because it could lead to bloody disintegration. There is no alternative to the long, tricky and sometimes bloody process of establishing political systems that contain and manage these historic differences.

Richard Dowden's book Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles is published by Portobello Books next month

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s. e. anderson is author of "The Black Holocaust for Beginners"
Social Activism is not a hobby: it's a Lifestyle lasting a Lifetime
http://www.blackedu cator.org
http://blackeducato r.blogspot.com

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