The Africans Read Online Free PDF Page B

tribal language.
    The language barrier is one of the biggest obstacles preventing Kenya and other countries from developing a true sense of national unity. How can Kenyans think of themselves as a national people if they don’t even have a single language unifying them? Language is one of the most important instruments of nation-building, a potentially powerful unifying force.
    Demographically, Africa is a young continent: half the population is no more than fifteen years old. And the babies keep coming—onecity hospital alone, Mama Yemo in Kinshasa, Zaire, delivers more than 50,000 babies a year. Kenya has the highest population growth rate in the world (4 percent), and Rwanda is one of the world’s most densely populated countries (444 people per square mile). The rugged, spectacularly beautiful hills and mountains of Rwanda are tiered like giant staircases. On each level, hundreds of feet above the valley floors, a family clan lives and farms. The dirt roads that wind through the valleys and across the hills are as busy as the sidewalks of New York’s Fifth Avenue during lunch hour, a shoulder-to-shoulder procession of pedestrians—most of them barefoot and many of them drunk on homemade banana beer—in constant, seemingly undirected motion.
    But Africa’s problem isn’t that it’s densely populated; the problem is that it’s unevenly populated. Zambia, twice as big as California, has only 5.3 million people; Rwanda, the size of Maryland, has 4.5 million. There are 30 persons per square mile in Africa, about the same as in the Soviet Union and North America, and far less than the 170 per square mile squeezed into Europe and Asia. The comparison is deceptive, though. About one third of Africa—or an area twice the size of India—is virtually uninhabitable, and some countries (like Kenya) are already using every inch of cultivatable land. No government except South Africa’s has the resources to feed and provide adequate services for its people.
    Population control remains a sensitive issue in black Africa, and few sensible politicians dare speak firmly in its favor. To do so would be to challenge the growth of an individual’s tribe, to deprive parents of the hands needed to till the fields today and care for the elderly tomorrow, to denounce religious and traditional beliefs that have belonged to Africa for generations. Some governments consider birth control morally decadent. Others view it as an imperialistic plot to depopulate the Third World. But every argument ignores the unsettling fact that Africa’s growth rate is more rapid than any continent’s and represents the gravest threat facing Africa today.
    If you look ahead and double Africa’s population—which the United Nations predicts will happen by the year 2000—while halving the governmental services, a frightening scenario becomes quite plausible: governments grow weaker and crumble under waves of civil unrest; populations shift across borders as people migrate in search of food, land, goods and jobs; conflict and chaos erupt withtoo many people competing for too few commodities; foreign powers step into the vacuum, creating conditions of confrontation that pit the continent against itself, one bloc favoring the West, the other the East. *
    Many demographers argue that Africans will not have fewer children until they perceive that to do so is in their economic interest and until they are assured that the children they do have will reach adulthood. This will happen, the argument goes, only after the family’s standard of living improves, along with its security and health. In the developed world it has been well established that population control follows—rather than leads to—improved economic conditions.
    Africa as yet shows no signs of following that trend. Kenya, for example, has made as much economic progress as any non-oil-producing black nation since independence. But its population growth rate is four times that of the United