Dark Hearts: Exploiting Africa, for guilt and electoral gain

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by Anthony Daniels

Tony Blair, who not long ago discovered what he called a "passion for Africa," attended the recent conference on sustainable development in Johannesburg -- and came upon one of that continent's somber realities: Zimbabwe's president-for-life, Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe did not mince his words. Referring to the British government's posturing over his corrupt and economically disastrous expropriation of half of the commercial farms in Zimbabwe still in white hands -- and also to Britain's colonial past -- he told him: "Blair, keep your England, and let us keep our Zimbabwe." What must have been particularly galling for Blair -- who has striven to present himself as the friend, if not the savior, of Africa -- was that Mugabe's outburst was greeted by spontaneous applause. Indeed, Sam Nujoma, the president of Namibia, proceeded to weigh in with a suggestion that Zimbabwe's land problem was all Britain's fault anyway. Poor Mr. Blair: to have so carefully nurtured a reputation for political correctness with regard to Africa, only to find himself branded a colonialist and a racist! It was a bien-pensant's worst nightmare come to life.

In some ways, though, Mugabe and Blair have more in common than might at first appear. Both appeal to emotion rather than reason. In the case of Mugabe, the appeal is to the visceral bitterness against whites that many of his supporters still harbor -- a feeling understandably born not only of the slights they endured for so long, but of envy and a nagging sense of inferiority. It is emotionally satisfying for his supporters to believe that the white man's prosperity was, and is, based solely upon exploitation -- with no contribution whatever from technical prowess and organizational ability -- and that that exploitation simultaneously explains their own poverty. Needless to say, economic policy grounded on such assumptions (Idi Amin's expulsion of the Asians from Uganda and Julius Nyerere's destruction of commercial farming in Tanzania come to mind), while emotionally gratifying in the short run, inevitably leads to disaster.

And Blair's passion for Africa is at least as politically expedient as Mugabe's expropriation of the land. Bill Clinton, who was Blair's mentor and exemplar, was in the habit of reestablishing his reputation as a decent man by feeling his nation's pain -- usually in inverse proportion to his culpability for it. Clinton turned his "concern" to Africa when threatened by scandal at home; similarly Blair hopes -- by expressing his "passion for Africa" -- to deflect public attention from the fact that his government has rapidly proved itself the most corrupt in recent British history, with a succession of businessmen mysteriously receiving large contracts and other favors shortly after having contributed generously to Labour-party coffers. Today's corruption is making the previous government's efforts in this direction look positively amateurish. But how could anyone suspect a man who is so deeply moved by poverty in Africa of anything as sordid as self-interest?

Of course, this particular trick depends upon the acceptance by a large proportion of the electorate of the assumption that virtue consists not of uprightness, self-abnegation, and self-sacrifice, but rather of the expression of the right -- that is to say, the politically correct -- sentiments. A good person is not one who behaves well, especially when it is inconvenient to do so, but merely one who is sincere; and a better person is one who reiterates his sincerity more often, more insistently, and more publicly.

Blair may not be a good man, but even his enemies would not deny that he is a good politician: That is to say, he knows his electorate as well as a good salesman knows his market. Like Clinton before him, he understands that the shallow view of virtue is the one that now prevails, especially among the young, and that a single politically correct sentiment -- one crocodile tear shed for Africans or any other group supposedly at a disadvantage -- outweighs a score of sordid and unscrupulous dealings.

Why should this be so? The shallow view of virtue is highly convenient to libertines and egotists: It implies that opinions are more morally significant than deeds, and thus that any misbehavior can be retrieved, forgiven, or forgotten after the enunciation of the right words. What, after all, is the award of a government contract in return for a political contribution, when set against sympathy for the plight of 700 million Africans? It would be petty to set such minor personal failings against generous principles held with all the appearance, or at any rate the gestures, of conviction.

A "passion for Africa," a la Blair, has the added advantage of conferring a providential role in African history upon the person who says he feels it. Much as Mugabe considers himself the founder of his nation and restorer of Zimbabwean (and African) pride and dignity, so too does Blair consider himself the person whose duty and mission it is to bring prosperity, or at least potable water, to the whole of the Dark Continent. They are united by a sense of self-importance; and their respective performances in Johannesburg reminded me of the occasion when I had, at the same time, two Jamaican patients in a hospital ward who both believed they were Haile Selassie. Each was able to see the absurdity of the other's claim -- just not the absurdity of his own.