Imagine: at the end of the Second World War, America and the Soviet Union decide they are tired of tribal warfare in Europe. The century is only halfway through and already some 90 million people have been slaughtered. The solution is a single European country imposed from above. So the Slovene President is trying to broker a provincial border dispute between France and Germany. Under France is a vast pool of oil but some of it is also under Germany — the Germans are all Muslim by the way. Meanwhile, the ancient tribal hatreds still cause frequent massacres among Greeks and Turks, Basques and Spanish and in Highbury and Tottenham. Tribalism is not an exclusively African disease.

Imagining a ‘tribal’ Europe gives you some idea of what African citizenship is like. The EU has only 23 languages; Africa has at least 2,000. Kenya alone has 40. Like an imagined Europe unified by force by outsiders, Africans played no part in the creation of their nation states. Their boundaries were drawn on maps in Europe by Europeans who had never even been to Africa and with no regard for existing political systems and boundaries. Half a century later, Africans were given flags and national anthems, airlines and armies and told they were now independent; Kenyans, Nigerians or Chadians.

Anyone who expressed shock at the recent violence in such a ‘stable’ country clearly knows nothing about Kenya. The British government was caught completely by surprise, but immediately deployed the language of a former colonial power. Gordon Brown said: “What I want to see is...” His advice was wise but his tone set teeth on edge. Would he have used that language when another former British colony, the USA, had a hung election in 2000? And Britain does not speak with credibility in Kenya. In every previous election in Kenya, British diplomats turned a blind eye to fraud, intimidation and rigging with bland words such as “the result broadly reflected the will of the Kenyan people”. They claimed the margin of victory was so great that the cheating did not affect the result. Maybe, but this time the margin was close and the cheating did matter.

Britain did little between elections to push for a fully independent electoral commission. Instead, it poured aid into Kenya, even after members of the Moi and Kibaki governments were seen stealing hundreds of millions of pounds in broad daylight. Ever since it bought into the aid agency view of Africa — ‘all Africa needs is aid’ — the British government has carefully reduced its capacity for understanding the continent.

You do not, it seems, need to understand the poor in order to save them. In 2005, the ‘Year of Africa’, the British government closed three embassies in Africa and abolished Foreign Office country desk officers who built the institutional memory of specific countries. Unless you understand Africa and how it works, you cannot help it.

This ignorance and lack of respect not only led to Britain’s disastrous isolation over Zimbabwe — what Britain sees as a moral crusade is perceived in Africa and elsewhere as a spat between Mugabe and British Prime Ministers. And instead of Britain or Europe sending an envoy to explore the possibilities for peacemaking, it is America’s Jendayi Fraser, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, who has flown into Nairobi. — The Guardian