AFRICA FOUNDERS - Can anything be done?

The violence that President Robert Mugabe has provoked in Zimbabwe-the former Rhodesia-in an evident attempt to prolong his personal power but undermines one of the few African societies still in possession of the structures of constitutional order and laying claim to democratic credentials. Since Mugabe's defeat in a February referendum on self- serving constitutional changes, he has played the race card against his opponents in the parliamentary elections set for next month.

His followers have been encouraged to occupy white-held farmlands-basic to the national economy-and, on April 1, they attacked white participants in a multiracial "march for peace" of some ten thousand people in the capital city of Harare. There is real danger of a new exodus of whites accompanied by repression and struggle, as Mugabe and his followers attempt to maintain what has become a corrupt regime.

This follows in a depressing modern African tradition. A large part of Zimbabwe's army is committed to the war in the Congo, ruled by Laurent- Desire Kabila, supporting him and his allies against Congolese groups in rebellion and intruders from Rwanda and Uganda. Ethnic rivalry drives many of them, but mostly it is a competition to pillage the Congo's immense mineral resources.

Worse is the social and moral destruction that has occurred in parts of Africa, the result of colonialism and of the slave trade's overthrow of the political and social structures that existed before Africa was "opened" by the Europeans. The colonial program that followed, caricatured today as simple exploitation, combined imperial and economic interest with an effort by churches and "progressive" reform forces to Europeanize Africans-for their own good. This greatly contributed to cultural dislocation and alienation.

It was still going on forty years ago. If you asked an "old Africa hand" in the colonies of the 1950s what immediate African independence would mean, you would have been told political and economic disorder or collapse, the return of the forest and its secret forces, "the return of the Crocodile men, the Leopard men, the walking dead." They were, of course, right. Most Europeans, under international pressure, left Africa during the late 1950s and 1960s-"leaving no forwarding address," as someone said at the time. The Portuguese refused to leave for another decade, and were sorry. The French invented a version of neocolonialism to protect French economic interests by maintaining order. They have since given that up.

The oil and mineral companies bought their fiefs. The Soviet Union, Cuba, and the United States fought cold-war skirmishes at the expense of African clients. South Africa liberated itself, under international pressures. "Democracy movements" were launched elsewhere but repeatedly foundered. The African economy declined, its part in world trade falling from 6 percent in 1960 to 2 percent in 1995, and still less today. Africa now receives a mere 1.5 percent of world investment.

In Rwanda (and Burundi), democratic elections exacerbated ethnic tensions, overturning established hierarchies. Genocide ensued. The effort to invent a modern politics for Africa privileged ethnic representation-a revived, or sometimes even invented, tribalism. The old religions returned, but there were also new ones that were apocalyptic amalgams of old beliefs and a half-grasped Christian message. The recent murder of close to a thousand cult members in Uganda was a phenomenon of social distress with precedents elsewhere.

British scholar Christopher Clapham wrote in London's Times Literary Supplement [March 17] that the sources of Africa's problems "lie not only in the legacy...of colonialism and exploitation, important though this is." He described the perceived connection between temporal and spiritual realms found among people in the West African forest belt, where terrible wars of child-soldiers, with deliberate mutilation of thousands of innocents, have recently taken place. "The omnipresent but invisible forces through which life is ultimately controlled" are associated with political power, and may be accessed through the death of others. "The human sacrifice and cannibalism [in Liberia were] means by which young soldiers, escaping from the constraints placed on their exercise of spiritual power in prewar society, sought to garner this power in their own right."

Africa needs to be rescued from its demons, to put it bluntly. No one wants to try. The former European colonial powers, principal destination of African refugees and migrants, have a direct interest in African stability, and still know the region, but they have neither the authority nor the wish to intervene. That, in any case, would defy the conventional shibboleths about racism, colonialism, and neocolonialism.

The Clinton administration's minor trade concessions and market nostrums are irrelevant to the fundamental problems. Debt relief, even new money from the international lending agencies, desirable as they might be, are not the solution. What most of Africa needs is years, even generations, of political and social development, in conditions of order. Its countries need to develop civil societies, indispensable to responsible self-government.

How can they be provided this development time, and these conditions of order? The problems are terrifying, beginning with the problem of sovereignty. An international effort to establish a cooperative or voluntary version of mandated international rule in failed and failing states seems barely imaginable. But what else is there?

(c) 2000, Los Angeles Times Syndicate.