I was catching up with my Zulu teacher today–I haven’t seen him in 9 months. Like many native Zimbabweans in exile in the U.S., he is waiting anxiously for Mugabe to announce the results of the election that took place on March 29. One thing led to another and we started chatting about Zimbabwe in general and he laughed and started telling me a story about the economy. He had gone on leave for a year and the university had forwarded him 8 months salary. He deposited it in the bank and didn’t touch it. He said at one point the money was so much, it was 300,000 Zimbabwe dollars. He took some money out when he was visiting Zimbabwe but not much–enough for a dinner out, perhaps. Anyway, he left the rest of the money there and finally got a letter from the bank saying that not only had that money become totally worthless but he owed the bank money, it was that worthless! He said that most of his friends and family now use only black market money, either the dollar, the rand (South Africa), or the pula (Botswana).

My teacher’s brother is a U.N. official who works in Somalia. He commented one time on the irony that at the time that Zimbabwe’s currency was rapidly devaluating, Somalia’s currency was gaining strengh, even though Somalia doesn’t have a central government. But at least the banks in Somalia weren’t printing more money.

Okay, so by now, we were onto discussing Somalia. My teacher mentioned that email works faster in Somalia than here, not because they have high speed internet but because nobody is keeping a record of every email sent, so it moves faster–one of the advantages, he guessed, of not having a government. “If I transfer money from here to Somalia, the person in Somalia can get it within an hour of the transfer,” he said.

Since I’m surrounded by academics who have very theoretical ideas about what has gone wrong in Africa, and why independence and democracy has failed in Africa, I asked my teacher what he thinks. I mentioned how the scholar Stephen Ellis has suggested that part of the problem is how we look at societies as a continuum, with all nations progressing along this continuum, all to reach this desired end goal of democracy. When you look at the story of African nations through this prism, it naturally looks like a failure. At independence, most African nations seemed like they were headed on the bright and glorious path of western democracy. So what’s happened? Ellis theorizes that instead of failing, African nations are groping towards alternative systems of power, perhaps even connecting and reconnecting with precolonial systems of leadership and ways of organizing power.

So, is all that bullshit? I asked my teacher. Or do you think he’s onto something?

My teacher didn’t know. He certainly saw problems with the way Africa was divided up by European powers during the Scramble for Africa, how boundaries were drawn without regard to language, culture, or ethnic loyalties. European nations are frequently small, and unilingual, unicultural. “All the problems in Africa are ethnic problems,” he said. “And the other problem with African countries–they don’t learn from each other.”

Well, what about Botswana? I asked. It’s done all-right.

“Yes,” he said. “Botswana has always been the pride of Africa. But it doesn’t have the ethnic variety and also in terms of numbers, there are very few people in Botswana.”

Then he suggested that maybe South Africa is doing all-right, better than people think, even though Zuma may ascend to power. “Zuma might not be a good person,” he said. “But the fact that Mbeki can step down from power–that is very important.”