"It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which 70 years ago has put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State today. It is as if the moral clock had been put back . . ." - Joseph Conrad to Roger Casement, December 1903.
No region has better reason to rejoice at the passing of the 20th century than Africa, world capital of misery, corruption and the extinguishment of hope.
At the time of writing, wars are continuing in at least seven African states. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region worst-hit by AIDS, with 70 per cent of all new infections and 80 per cent of deaths. The United Nations says 20 million of the 34 million people most urgently in need of humanitarian help are in Africa.
But before looking at the prospects for Africa in the new millennium, it is crucial not to neglect Europe's contribution to this dismal state of affairs. More than 20 million Africans were exported for the slave trade between 1650 and 1850. All African states, with the exception of Liberia, were at some point colonised by a European power in the period 1500 to 1950. When the Europeans left, they did so hastily and messily. Some 53 new countries were formed, often with artificial boundaries. With no democratic history, middle-class or administrative caste, and risible infrastructures, Africans from about 3,000 ethnic groups, speaking 1,800 languages, were expected to make a go of it.
As the late Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere, angrily told the World Bank some years ago: "We took over a country with 85 per cent of its population illiterate. The British ruled us for 43 years. When they left, there were two trained engineers and 12 doctors. This is the country we inherited."
It is only 100 years since the publication of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its depiction of the dark secret of Belgian King Leopold's personal empire in the Congo. Conrad summarised the attitude of the brutal colonists in the final words of Kurtz: "Exterminate all the brutes".
It took years for these dark secrets to leak out of the Congo. In 1895, for example, the Swedish missionary Edward Sjoblom was giving a sermon at his church in the Congo. A soldier arrived and seized an old man whom he accused of not collecting enough rubber. Sjoblom asked him to wait but the soldier put a gun to the man's temple and fired.
"A small boy of about nine is ordered by the soldier to cut off the dead man's hand, which, with some other hands taken previously in a similar way, are then the following day handed over to the commissioner as signs of the victory of civilisation," the missionary wrote.
At about the same time the British were inventing the internment camp to house Boer soldiers during their war in southern Africa, Winston Churchill was witnessing the massacre of the Dervish army at the Battle of Omdurman, "the most signal triumph gained by the arms of science over barbarians". And the Germans were about to exterminate the Herero tribe in south-west Africa by driving men, women and children out into the desert. All this only 100 years ago.
The colonists created divisions, ideologies and borders that lived on after their departure to disastrous effect. Gerard Prunier, in The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, shows how the Belgians "modernised, simplified and ossified" an ancient, rich and complex society.
"Administrators, government anthropologists and missionaries, all contributed, at times unwittingly, to an intellectually brilliant ideological reconstruction of Rwanda's past and, from that artificial past, of the present." The Tutsi were defined as a "superior race" while the Hutu, deprived of all power and exploited by both the whites and the Tutsi, were told they were inferior.
We all know where this led. "The time-bomb had been set and it was now only a question of when it would go off," says Prunier. But he adds: "Although Rwanda was definitely not a land of peace and bucolic harmony before the arrival of the Europeans, there is no trace in its pre-colonial history of systematic violence between Tutsi and Hutu as such."
Today, Africa is of no great strategic interest to the great powers. An economic interest remains, largely because of the continent's huge mineral deposits, but this is more effectively policed by multinational corporations, acting in tandem with powerful and often corrupt local elites.
It seems to make little difference to the West just who runs a country like DR Congo (formerly Zaire), even when, as today, the country is riven by civil war and invasion from outside. The war in the Congo region has sucked in eight African states but the flow of minerals to the West continues undisturbed. Once again, as Conrad noted, the conscience of Europe "tolerates" the Congo.
To Africans, too, the borders made by the colonists often seem to have little relevance. Cattle-herders bring their animals to water, regardless of national frontiers. Refugees flee war, crossing borders in massive numbers. Armed bands operate in many parts of central and east Africa, moving from country to country with impunity.
So many other African phenomena refuse to be hemmed in by the straight lines drawn by the European powers. AIDS spread along the main trucking routes across the continent, and is now widespread throughout southern and eastern Africa. The Sahara eats away at arable land at an alarming rate, again without regard to borders.
It's not surprising then that Africans today are questioning the status of the frontiers they have inherited. Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are showing the way by trying to create an African version of the Common Market, and other nations are expected to follow suit.
Perhaps Africa will find its way out of the current morass by developing its strength regionally. By acting cohesively, African producers of minerals could more effectively control raw material prices on world markets, as OPEC did since the 1970s. If the Organisation for African Unity were to cure itself of inefficiency and corruption, Africa's voice might be listened to more closely on the world stage. Real political pressure might come to be exerted on issues such as debt and AIDS.
Come the new year, the colonial legacy will have been consigned to a previous century. The time will have come for Africans to seize their own destiny, with the help of others. If the 21st century is to achieve anything, it should have as an aim the deliverance of Africa from poverty and conflict.