Where the elite use air conditioners, the poor sweat, and no one has a ceiling fan

AFRICANS tend to have a proverb to cover all eventualities. Back when the US and the USSR were conducting the Cold War by proxy in various African countries, the inhabitants recalled that "when two elephants fight, the grass gets trampled".

Now that the relations between the US and Russia are improved. Africans are heard to remark that "when two elephants make love, the grass still gets trampled".

But as Africa suffers, so it also adapts. Once the elephants move on, the grass grows again.

Europeans frequently forget that the world's poorest continent is also its most resilient. Nomads in the Sahel scratch a living from the most arid soils, where Westerners would barely last a week.

Everywhere in Africa, extended families soak up extra members like a sponge when crises erupt. Rwanda, one of the world's poorest countries, has taken back 1.5 million people, or 21 per cent of its population, over the past three months, with hardly a whisper of complaint.

Enterprising Senegalese traders are found hawking their wares in cities throughout West Africa and Europe. Last week, they were banned from going on the Haj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, after the Saudi authorities complained they were more interested in commerce than Allah.

The bleak statistics and bad news which emanate from the continent fail to convey the whole story of Africa. No one here can understand why old people in Europe are carted off to nursing homes instead of being respected elders in the family home, or why our religion seems to be more about guilt than joy.

The pleasure of hearing music in Zaire, or watching football in Nigeria, is unrivalled - and not to be read in any news agency dispatch.

Relations between Africa and the West are too often marked by mutual incomprehension. The developed world views the continent as a catalogue of obscure misery and reacts, intermittently, with pity rather than compassion.

For its part, Africa reacts like a hurt child. Its angry, defiant voice was to be heard in Kigali last week, at the same women's conference which was addressed by the President. Mrs Robinson Barely a half-hour after the President had delivered her polite plea for mutual understanding. A speaker from the Pan-African Congress was rounding on the "latter-day missionaries" who come from the West to aid Africa.

To enthusiastic applause, he jeered: "Often when there is any crisis the first refugees are not Africans but Western expatriates, NGO workers, consultants and experts who are hurriedly evacuated, leaving behind their defenceless so-called local partners who have nowhere to be evacuated to."`Soon after the conflict they return like vultures with all kinds of wishy-washy programmes, Landcruisers, Pajeros and bagfuls of dollars to dictate to us what to do," cried the organisation's general secretary, Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem.

Many Africans would find these sentiments extreme, but Dr Abdul-Raheem was articulating a viewpoint that expatriates often sense but seldom hear overtly in Africa.

Frustrated at the failures of many aid interventions, and at the widening gap between their impoverished circumstances and the rest of the world, Africans show a tendency to bite the hand that feeds them.

And their anger is frequently concentrated on the well-meaning aid worker, rather than those who really determine their circumstances, the bankers and trade ministers sitting in comfortable offices in European capitals, or their own, home-grown despots and kleptocrats.

Exactly a month before President Robinson paid her third visit to Rwanda, Sastra Chim Chan was going about his work on a lonely dirt track in the south-west of the country. Chan had survived the horrors of his native Cambodia to devote his life's work to the cause of human rights.

With four colleagues in the UN's human rights field operation he was on his way to a remote commune to hear reports of killings and attacks on civilians. A mile from the main road, their two cars were ambushed. Chan tried to reverse his car but was stopped by two attackers from behind.

The five died in a hail of bullets but the attackers, presumably Hutu extremists who were active in the area, had not finished with Chan. They dragged his body from the car and chopped his head off with a clean stroke of a machete, before making off into the forest.

The sad tale tells us several things: that no one, not even Dr Abdul-Raheem, should doubt the commitment of those involved in humanitarian organisations; that foreign aid workers are increasingly being targeted by armed groups; that violence in Africa can be at once unpredictable and extremely brutal.

Five years ago, of course, aid workers were already being targeted by some of the clans fighting in Somalia. Western aid workers paid for their humanitarianism with their lives, the UN pulled out, and the US army, when it tried to intervene, was humiliated.

Yet last week, a group of Somali women gathered in London to call for a resumption of international aid to their country, or what remains of it. A number of relief organisations, among them Concern, are considering re-entering the country, not least because a new famine is threatening.

But even as the women were making their appeal, fighting broke out again in several parts of Somalia, leaving 80 dead. Understandably, the agencies put their plans on hold.

As far as aid goes, it seems Africa can't live with it, yet neither can it live without it. In spite of endless reports, commissions investigations and inquiries, Westerners don't seem to have got to grips with Africa. And Africans can be excused for failing to understand the motives of the West, when the same aircraft that bring in aid workers and missionaries also carry arms traders and sex tourists.

Africa is certainly a patient in need of a cure. Per-capita income in most countries is lower than it was three decades ago. Seventy per cent of the world's poorest countries are in Africa. Some countries made gains in health and education in the 1960s but these are now slipping away.

Africa is a world leader in areas it would rather not be. It produces more babies than anywhere else. It mortality, illiteracy, inequality are all higher than anywhere else.

The Sahara creeps south and the Kalahari north as desertification and erosion bring the two 100 miles closer each year. West Africa's rain forests of ebony and mahogany are being chopped down to decorate Western drawing-rooms. Except in southern Africa, wildlife is being decimated, thereby destroying perhaps the only tourist ace the continent possesses. About 1,000 elephants are shot each week. The rhino is virtually extinct in east Africa.

And as Africa ceases to matter economically, so it drifts out of the headlines and deeper into debt. The foreign debt burden is the highest in the world. One out of every three dollars earned goes in interest payments. More than 20 countries have introduced World Bank-inspired structural adjustment programmes, which have kept the economists happy but resulted in drastic cuts in health and education spending.

Massive population growth places even the best governments on a nightmarish treadmill, so even increases in crop production or industrial output fail to keep pace with the number of mouths to feed or pockets to fill. Before visiting Tanzania last January, I consulted my 1970s edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It gave the population then as 12 million; today it stands at 29 million.

War and local conflicts make long-term planning, either by aid agencies or national government, difficult or even impossible. The UN and the aid agencies are "one bullet away" from total withdrawal from Rwanda, in the words of one Irish agency director.

But there are signs of improvement, though they may be false dawns. One is the introduction of multi-party democracy in a continent formerly blighted by military coups and one-party regimes. But many of these have merely strengthened the hold of existing rulers, or ushered in new autocrats.

Press freedoms have increased, new parties has been registered and human rights have been respected. But wily leaders have proved adept at bending the rules. In Tanzania, for example, the elections in Zanzibar were rigged. In Kenya, President Daniel arap Moi is already seeing that the dice are loaded in his favour in this year's election, by disenfranchising eight million citizens in tribes hostile to him.

As Dr Abdul-Raheem pointed out in his call for "African solutions to African problems" "there is no alternative to self-reliance in the pursuit of liberty, freedom and national redemption. External support may be available or even desirable at critical times but it is not sufficient to guarantee victory."

Countries such as Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea are currently showing the way in this regard. All have come through bitter periods of civil war, but are still imbued with immense pride and a sense of destiny. These countries seem to have learned from previous mistakes in other states. Gone is the reliance on the White Man to fix everything, the acceptance of corrruption in the higher echelons, the creation of gigantic white elephant projects, and the development of a bloated public sector.

Instead, these countries have put their faith in the (relatively) free market. Policies have been drawn up which respect the family orientation of their societies and draw on the ingenuity of rural farmers.

Like everything in Africa, this progress is fragile.

Drought throughout East Africa is exhausting the food stocks of even the best-prepared states, and the instability in Sudan and Zaire is spilling over into neighbouring states. But at least a role model has been provided.

South Africa's truth and peace commission has shown a new way of dealing with the hatred engendered in internal conflicts, one which could possibly be applied to Rwanda and Burundi. And in Zimbabwe, the skills of the old white elite could be successfully harnessed in the new independent state.

But Africa must also rid itself of what the American writer Blaine Harden calls the Big Man disease - the corrupt, vainglorious, evil dictators who have bled their countries dry. Big Men preside over vast disparities of wealth in their countries; the top 20 per cent in Africa consume 60 per cent of national income. Harden calculated in the mid-1980s that sub-Saharan Africa, with half the population of China, imported six times as many cars and 390 times as much wine.

"Africa suffers, more than any region in the world, from a crisis of the `missing middle'. The elite have air conditioners. The poor sweat. No one has a ceiling fan. Africa's elite howl down the four-lane highway in private automobiles as peasants shuffle along in the dirt," he writes.

The Organisation of African Unity has done little to oppose this situation, pointing to its charter which prohibits interference in the internal affairs of member-states. According to Dr Abdul-Raheem, "We cannot expect dictators to act against one of them."

The West can encourage change by ceasing to back corrupt leaders for strategic reasons, as the French do in the case of Mobutu, and the US with President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya. It can also help by promoting aid programmes which help develop civil society, protect human rights and encourage local people to arrive at their own solutions democratically.

Many agencies are already heading down this path, but governments are slow to follow.

The population of Africa has increased fourfold in 50 years. Kenya's population, for example, doubles every 20 years. Much of this growth is bred of insecurity and poverty. It will continue unchecked, with possibly disastrous consequences for everyone, unless we act to alleviate these conditions.

It is time to shift the elephants and let the grass grow.