The Foreign Service Journal, May 2004

past decade and a half. Unless you’re looking for them, they are hard to see. Yet they are crucial for understand- ing the pace of progress in Africa, and the sources of pres- sure for change. Here’s one example: Not so long ago when he was vis- iting Washington, I had occasion to meet Paramount Chief Mukuni of the Mukuni community located about 10 kilo- meters fromVictoria Falls in Zambia—an area heavily vis- ited by tourists. The 57-year-old chief’s full name is Munokalya Solika Mukuni III, and he is the 19th chief with Mukuni blood to head the Mukuni tribe. They are a poor community and weren’t getting much from the tourist traffic; they still are not getting a huge amount. “Before, we just posed for pictures and let the tourists go,” the chief told me. “Then we said, ‘Wait a minute! We are getting very little benefit from tourism activities.’” So three years ago, Chief Mukuni’s community estab- lished the Mukuni Development Trust, which draws membership from each of the villages of theMukuni chief- dom. Two people — a man and a woman — represent each village. The aimof theMDT, according to a brochure the chief gave me, is to place the Mukuni community “in a more favorable position … to promote the long-term con- servation of biodiversity through active community resource management [and] to venture into commercial partnerships on behalf of the community.” Chief Mukuni is not talking about turning his people into exotic performing icons for incoming tourists. They’ve been trying to develop a type of tourism for the visitor who wants to catch a glimpse of ordinary life in an African com- munity. Some new structures specifically aimed at tourists are in the works, however. They include a half-dozen lodges—“guest palaces,” says the chief — that “let tourists come in and be chiefs for a while.” According to Chief Mukuni, the MDT now generates the equivalent of about $3,000 monthly from tourism. Among other things, that money helps pay school fees for the community’s poorest children and is used to compen- sate local farmers for the crop damage caused “when ele- phants come from [Botswana President Festus] Mogae’s country” just next door. For many nations in Africa, tourism forms a critical part of national income, and Chief Mukuni’s attitude that tourism must be linked with development and must be respectful of local communities resonates across the conti- nent. In Tanzania, tourism is the number-one foreign exchange earner. Around the same time I met Chief Mukuni, I met Tanzania’s tourism minister, Zakia Hamdani Meghji. Known as “Mama Utali” — Swahili for “Mother Tourism” — Minister Meghji told me that her government recognized that if the animals of Tanzania’s famed game parks disappear, so does tourism; and so does a significant income flow. It is the local population who will determine that, she said. “If the animals are benefiting [people], then they are going to be protective of them.” I am old enough to remember “big man government” — the one-man or single-party authoritarian regimes of the 1960s and 70s when local communities were expected to do as ordered — and its disastrous effects on both national and local economies. Today, in many places I am hearing something different with regard to how govern- ment should respond to local voices: that it is important to pay attention to grass-roots voices. And this raises the odds of success for the broader plans for political and economic development under way across the continent. The Backdrop to Success There is a backdrop to the emerging recognition by African government leadership that people have to be involved in the decision-making that affects their lives. Africa today is filled with small experiments in locally con- trolled economic development. This is a breakthrough. For most of the 40 or so years during which these former European colonies have become independent, the “nation-building” process has been largely autocratic, even brutally dictatorial in some states. In 1989, however, a bright signal that this would no longer be acceptable sud- denly flashed across the continent when the idea that peo- ple-power was a human right exploded from the most unexpected of places — Benin. This West African nation, once known as Dahomey, was groaning under a repressive dictatorship installed by its president, Mathieu Kerékou, who had seized the govern- ment in a military coup d’etat 17 years before. University students and professors took to the streets in January 1989, and were soon joined by elementary and secondary school- teachers and students. The state-run system had failed to F O C U S 36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 4 Charles Cobb Jr. is senior writer and diplomatic corre- spondent for allAfrica.com, the leading online source of news from and about Africa. He is the co-author, with civil rights organizer and educator Robert P. Moses, of Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Beacon Press, 2001).