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13
In the time of AIDS
as the twenty-first century began, the african continent
was experiencing both crisis and renewal. Economic decline during the 1970s
had obliged governments to accept structural adjustment programmes that
exposed their peoples to two decades of acute hardship before signs of recovery
appeared. As impoverished governments had reduced their services, individ-
uals and groups had drawn upon their own ingenuity to survive. One-party
states had collapsed throughout tropical Africa, leaving behind both violence
and greater freedom, while in the north, Islamic fundamentalism threatened
surviving freedoms while giving purpose to many young lives. The rapid popu-
lation growth of the late twentieth century was slowing, facilitating stabilisation
and economic recovery. In its place, the AIDS epidemic had brought suffering
and new forms of social dislocation, but as the new century began, even this
most terrible of disasters showed the first signs of hope.
structural adjustment
During the late 1970s, as postwar growth gave way to global recession, indebted
African governments seeking loans from the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) invited the World Bank to examine their economic situation. The Bank’s
response, Accelerated development in sub-Saharan Africa (1981), reversed the
economic strategy of a generation. Written in the newly fashionable language of
monetary economics, the report condemned state-centred development poli-
cies that had exploited farmers and destroyed agricultural exports in the inter-
ests of inefficient, corrupt, and urban-based government enterprises. The state,
it proclaimed, was the obstacle rather than the agent of progress. Its role in the
economy must be reduced by privatising public enterprises, removing govern-
ment controls, abolishing subsidies and punitive taxes, charging realistic fees
for services, and allowing currencies to float freely, thereby enabling markets
to ‘get prices right’ so that economies could operate at maximum efficiency.

Domestic Product rose from 1.4 percent in 1965–80 to 3.0 percent in 1980–90,
4.2 percent in 1990–2001, and 4.8 percent in 2000–4.
1
These were modest figures
and not everything was successful. In 1998 real GDP per capita was still lower
than it had been in 1970. Ghana’s old and unproductive cocoa trees struggled
to compete with plantations outside Africa. Manufacturing employment fell
by nearly two-thirds between 1987 and 1993 as protection against imported
goods was withdrawn. The restoration of elections from 1992 led to ‘demo-
cratic demand inflation’ as governments expanded the money supply to win
votes, the currency depreciated, and debt rose by 1998 to three times its level
in 1981.The short, sharp shock became a seemingly permanent condition, but
economic decline was at least reversed.
Uganda’s experience was similar. General Amin’s regime and the subsequent
civil war had reduced per capita GDP by 42 percent between 1971 and 1986,
when President Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) took power.
Afterabrief experiment with radical policies had brought the economy close to
collapse, the NRM adopted a structural adjustment programme, which vested
interests were too weakened to resist. The currency was devalued by 76percent,
the heavy taxation on coffee exports that had financed previous regimes was
abolished, export volume grew at 15 percent per year during the 1990s, producer
prices multiplied three or four times, the civil service was halved, the share of tax
revenueinGDP doubled, and the annual increase in real GDP between 1986
and 1999 averaged 6.3 percent. In 1996 the IMF declared Uganda’s economy
the most open in Africa. As in Ghana, the price was dependence. During the
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In the time of AIDS 291
1990s, Uganda received nearly $5 billion in foreign aid, which financed between
one-third and two-thirds of public expenditure. Privatisation fostered rampant

and prosperous black owners of productive property.’
4
The chief beneficia-
ries of the new regime were indeed middle-class Africans, whose numbers
rose at an estimated 21 percent per year between 1993 and 2003.Thechief
losers were the unskilled, for although GEAR promised to create 600,000 jobs
over five years, South Africa actually lost 500,000 during that period, chiefly in
government, agriculture, and goldmining. The Confederation of South African
Trade Unions mounted three general strikes against the GEAR programme
during 2000–2. Only in the mid-2000s did unemployment show the first
signs of decline. By then, moreover, GDP growth at about 4 percentper
year was outrunning a nearly stable population, partly owing to a new surge
in gold prices. ANC leaders tacitly abandoned GEAR, shelved privatisation,
planned to expand public investment, and resumed their redistributive ambi-
tions, spending heavily on old-age pensions and child-support grants and
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292 africans: the history of a continent
requiring that one-quarter of mining and industrial assets and 30 percent of
agricultural land should pass into African hands within a decade. While rad-
ical observers complained that the ANC had ‘squandered an opportunity of
world-historic proportions’, its leaders replied that ‘carefully measured actions
and studied moderation’ had ‘helped reassure skittish investors and interna-
tional markets’, ensuring ‘a decade of social peace underpinned by political
stability.’
5
Elsewhere in the continent, structural adjustment provoked varied responses
and effects. In North Africa, economic liberalisation from above tended to
strengthen political authoritarianism, notably in Tunisia, which implemented
its own successful programme and enjoyed steady if unspectacular growth. In

‘like telling the people to rise against us’, as President Stevens of Sierra Leone
complained. Some, like Senghor in Senegal and Nyerere in Tanzania, refused
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In the time of AIDS 293
to implement adjustment programmes. Others obstructed them, as in Kenya,
or reduced them to cosmetic gestures, as in Cameroun. Everywhere certain
liberalising measures, such as floating the currency, were easier to implement
than others, notably privatisation, which not only threatened vested interests
but often meant either transfering national assets to political favourites at bar-
gain prices or selling them to foreign investors, notably the South African
conglomerates that took the opportunity to buy most of sub-Saharan Africa’s
mining enterprises and many banking, brewing, retailing, electricity, and air-
line companies. One study of IMF programmes found that only about half were
completed during the loan period,
7
but once the international institutions had
committed funds, they could do little but continue lending in the hope of
eventual success, for their own reputations were tied to the policy. Controversy
surrounding it gradually obliged them to shift their ground. Whereas Acceler-
ated development had insisted in 1981 on reducing the role of the state, by 1997 –
in the face of state collapse in countries like Somalia and Sierra Leone – the
World Bank detected ‘a crisis of statehood’ in Africa and stressed the need to
extend state capacity,
8
recognising that effective response to liberalising stimuli
often needed state backing and even state entrepreneurship. Two years later,
the international institutions replaced structural adjustment programmes by
PovertyReduction Strategy Papers, which were three-year plans to be drawn
up by recipient governments in consultation with local business interests, trade

education systems faltered as the ever-expanding child population pressed on
diminishing resources. University education, although often expensive and
declining inquality,wasstill coveted as a qualification for employment. Between
1994 and 2000,Makerere University in Uganda expanded its enrolment from
seven thousand to twenty-two thousand students. Secondary school enrolment
also continued to rise. Primary schooling, by contrast, gave little advantage in
employment unless it led on to the secondary level. When primary education
was made free, as in Uganda in 1997 and Kenya in 2003, there was a massive
increase in enrolment, but in Tanzania, where in 1991 only 5 percent of primary
school leavers gained entry to public secondary schools, primary enrolment
fell between 1981 and 1997 from 94 to 67 percent of the age group.
12
Yet many
parents, convinced that education was the chief means of advancement open to
their families, responded by providing their own schools, especially at the sec-
ondary level. By 1995 those in Tanzania outnumbered state secondary schools.
Many were runbychurches, but some Islamic regions organised similar private
systems, even in Egypt. Kenya was one of many countries where profit-making
schools proliferated.
Health care followed a similar pattern. Between the 1960s and the mid-1980s,
the increase in medical personnel, together with cheap drugs, immunisation
procedures, and general development, had reduced infant mortality by nearly
one-third and spared Africa any major epidemic. These medical interventions
were so powerful that their impact continued, less dramatically, through the
1980sonacontinental scale, but the impact waned in areas of violence, famine,
and extreme economic decay. Ghana’s real per capita public expenditure on
health fell by 60 percent between 1974 and 1984;eight years later the country
had some fifty thousand cases of yaws, a disease of poverty supposedly eradi-
cated before independence, and its child mortality rate had risen. Tuberculosis,
cholera, and yellow fever became more prevalent, while at the end of the century

ally showed them as 8 to 15 percent of the potential urban labour force, but
the proportion grew thereafter, reaching some 25 percent in Kenyan cities and
40 percent in South Africa in 1996, the latter figure inflated by the lack of viable
peasant agriculture. Yet even these figures were misleading because many of the
poor could not afford to be unemployed and instead undertook ‘occupations’
with minute earnings. The totally unemployed were mostly young people still
relying on family support. Over half of Algerians in their early twenties were
unemployed in the late 1980saspopulation growth and education outstripped
jobs. Street gangs like the Ninjas of Lusaka and Talibans of Nairobi flourished.
In 1988 one of every five Nigerian prisoners was a teenager. An anthropologist
studying the Zambian Copperbelt at that time found ‘an overwhelming sense of
decline and despair’ as expectations of working lives in a modern environment
were dashed.
14
Survival in decaying cities depended heavily on informal occupations, which
employed some 72 percent of Nigeria’s urban labour force in 1978, including its
innumerable women traders and youthful apprentices. Even in South Africa,
where the authorities had long repressed informal enterprise, it had expanded
by 2000 to generate an estimated 28 percent of GDP. Self-employed earnings
could be relatively high, but employees in the sector were severely exploited
and many young men began their working careers in unpaid jobs. Informal
occupations merged into the ‘second economy’ of black-marketeering, smug-
gling, corruption, and crime, which expanded as state power contracted. These
activities commonly relied on ethnic and family ties. Private schools, informal
enterprises, illicit trading diasporas, vigilante forces in place of nonexistent
police, and urban welfare associations in lieuofineffective trade unions all
mobilised ethnic solidarities, as did the continental passion for football. Within
the family, elite women had generally enhanced their status since political
independence, except in North Africa where fundamentalism reversed earlier
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employment intensified. Yet Christian numbers nevertheless outran pastoral
capacity, fostering a peasant Christianity in the Ethiopian manner with strong
village congregations, sparsely trained evangelists, little superstructure or influ-
ence on family life, much partly Africanised ritual, and much eclectic survival
of indigenous practices.
The expanding independent churches – thought to number up to ten thou-
sand in the late 1980s–often had similar structures. A few had become major
hierarchical institutions, notably the Kimbanguist Church in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo and the Zion Christian Church in South Africa, but
most were very small, providing supportive communities, spiritual protec-
tion and healing, and personal empowerment amidst economic austerity and
state contraction. Some of the newest churches also held strongly millenar-
ian beliefs, especially perhaps in western Uganda where the AIDS epidemic
was acute. ‘This chastisement He released ...the world calls it AIDS dis-
ease...butfromtheLorditisapunishment’, leaders of the Movement for
the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God told their followers before
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In the time of AIDS 297
killing over a thousand of them in March 2000 as they awaited their promised
‘new generation’.
16
The need for certainty amidst the malaise and intellectual confusion sur-
rounding late twentieth-century Africans may explain the most remarkable
Christian phenomenon of the time: the explosive growth of pentecostal
churches, which had first reached South Africa early in the century but spread
throughout sub-Saharan Africa from the 1970s. By 2000,some24 percent of
all Ghanaians claimed to be pentecostalists. These churches characteristically
stressed personal salvation through repentance and the empowering baptism of
the Holy Spirit. Unlike earlier independent churches, they rejected the African

attempts to comprehend the forces that Africans felt acted upon them. One
feature of the late twentieth century was the intense concern with which both
the powerful and the powerless regarded witchcraft. Nervous authorities in
many regions prosecuted suspected witches, relying upon diviners for ‘expert’
testimony. Villagers were more likely to kill their suspects by mob action.
Similarly, Islam not only shared Christianity’s numerical growth but displayed
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298 africans: the history of a continent
acomparable dualism, most strikingly in fundamentalism – as will be seen
later – but also in millenarian protest such as that launched by the hetero-
dox teacher, Muhammadu Marwa, who created a ‘private republic’ of young
rural immigrants in Kano, ‘preaching that anyone wearing a watch, or riding
abicycle, or driving a car, or sending his child to the normal State Schools was
an infidel.’
19
Its dispersal by the military in 1981 cost some four thousand lives.
That was the most violent protest in a postcolonial city. In normal circum-
stances, the urban poor, while resenting corruption and the gulf between ‘us’
and ‘them’, were too vulnerable, divided, dependent on patronage, committed
to ruralvalues, and aware of recent social mobility to challenge their rulers
openly. Religious zealots might bring them into the streets. So occasionally
might organised trade unionists, as in the Three Glorious Days that destroyed
Brazzaville’s government in 1963.Somight the breakdown of order during a
coup d’
´
etat, as in the orgy of looting in Nairobi in 1982.Themost common
urban disturbance was the ‘IMF riot’ against increased food prices, often due to
the removal of subsidies decreed by a structural adjustment programme. Such
riots brought down regimes in Liberia, Sudan, and Zambia and threatened