Eternal Optimism

The Following Article from today's NYTimes reflects my own experiences with people across Africa. It is a wonderful paradox.

Why So Starry-Eyed?

Misery Loves Optimism in Africa

By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: March 5, 2006

Nowhere to Look but Up A Gallup poll found Africans to be the most optimistic people in the world despite the dire conditions in countries like Chad.

AMOUNA MUHAMMAD sat quietly in the shade of her canvas tent, imagining the future of her 3-month-old son, Haider, bundled in her lap. "My son will go to school," she declared, absentmindedly waving away the flies that clustered around his unfocused brown eyes. "He will have doctors and plenty of meat to eat. He will live in peace."

Ms. Muhammad has seen little of those things in her 20 years. I met her here, at a refugee camp deep in eastern Chad, just a few days after she arrived from the western Sudanese region of Darfur. There, war has killed at least 200,000 people in the last three years and sent millions like her fleeing their homes.

And this was the second time she had been sent packing in those three years. The first time, she fled attacks by Arab militias who thundered through on camels and horseback, guns blazing as they stole cattle, slaughtered men and raped women. She went to a camp just inside Sudan, the land of her birth, which ranks 141st of 177 nations on the United Nations index of human development. Now, with the war spreading and spilling over the border, she has run again — to a camp some 60 miles inside the even more desolate, barren land of Chad, which ranks 173 on that scale.

Yet in all this chaos, here was Ms. Muhammad, planning a future of unimaginable goodness for her child. "There are so many bad things in the world," she said. "But I know good things will come for Haider."

Where does such relentless optimism in the face of unyielding misery come from? One glance at the statistical profile of the continent's 900 million people will tell you that Africans can expect to live the shortest lives, earn the lowest incomes and suffer some of the worst misrule on the planet. They are more likely than anyone on earth to bury their children before the age of 5, to become infected with H.I.V., to die from malaria and tuberculosis, to require food aid.
Yet a recent survey by Gallup International Association of 50,000 people across the world found that Africans are the most optimistic people. Asked whether 2006 would be better than 2005, 57 percent said yes. Asked if they would be more prosperous this year than last, 55 percent said yes.

These data bear out what I see all the time as I travel across sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent: that every single day lived here, each birth, wedding, graduation, sunrise and sunset is, in ways large and small, a daily triumph of hope over experience.
Hope, it seems, is Africa's most abundant harvest.

"If I put on my academic hat, I would have nothing to tell you to explain this," said Kayode Fayemi, a political scientist in Nigeria and a leading pro-democracy activist there, a man who has every reason to be pessimistic as chaos threatens to engulf his country. "The only thing keeping people going is hope and optimism about the future that is unknown. The hope is the evidence of things not seen. I think that is the only way to explain optimism, because you can't base it on any analysis of our current condition."

Experts at Gallup International have grappled with the meaning of the data, which seem counterintuitive, but turn out to be consistent over time and in many places that have suffered through catastrophe. Places like Kosovo and Bosnia, for example, which have emerged from bloody wars to face an uncertain future, score high on the optimism scale.
Africa has topped that scale for years, a ranking indifferent to the continent's repeated cycles of hope and despair.

Meril James, secretary general of Gallup International, said that Africa's optimism might reflect a reality so grim that nothing could really be worse. "There is a sense that when things can't get worse you've reached rock bottom, so things must improve," Ms. James said. Religion doubtless plays a role. Other Gallup International surveys have found that Africa is the most religious continent. The only region that rivals it on that score is the United States, which is also a very optimistic place.

"We have our faith, if nothing else," said the Rev. Joseph Ezeugo, pastor of Immaculate Heart Parish in Onitsha, Nigeria. Not far from the church where he spoke were dozens of charred bodies, the victims of sectarian violence. "We can find hope in faith," he said, "even if there is darkness all around us." But the survey also reveals that Africa's optimism is not simply the optimism of faith. Africans, the data reveal, are painfully aware of the inadequacy of their leaders: 8 out of 10 said "political leaders are dishonest"; three-quarters "deemed them to have too much power and responsibility"; while 7 out of 10 "think politicians behave unethically."

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