The famous deep-water harbour is very fine, with every bolt on its straddling cranes carefully vaselined against rust, but there are few ships and no one about, the quays so neat that I notice some spilt peanuts as the only evidence of cargo. Perhaps it’s because it’s Sunday; the figures show that Tema handles more traffic than the old harbour of Takoradi. As for the aluminium smelter, the government would like the American consortium to finance the exploitation of local, if low-grade, bauxite deposits at Kibi, instead of using raw material brought in by Kaiser from Jamaica and Australia. That’s the present situation – a variation of but hardly emancipation from the colonial role in which Africa produced the raw materials and the processing into profitable finished products was the preserve of others.
On the way back to Accra, I drive down to the promontory where Christiansborg Castle has stood for three centuries. Blinding white, looking through palm trees at the sea, it appears Arab rather than Danish. If what one can see is the castle at all; it has been much built around and to various purposes through various occupancies. Now it is nobody’s castle, an administrative block. You cannot enter, but you can walk round part of the thick white walls with stopped-up cannon in their embrasures. Nkrumah, whose palace this became, passed through this gateway in state one day and did not dream he would not come back. Following the walls towards the sea, I suddenly find a grave. Dr W.E.B. DuBois, American Negro, father of Pan-Africanism, came home from his race’s long exile from Africa to die, and he lies here for ever.
Peace to the huts; war on the palaces.
The pennant that is hoisted over every revolution and every coup. Nkrumah spent £8 million to build State House for an eight-day OAU conference. When he left for Peking and Hanoi on his last journey as President of Ghana, he took £45,000 of the £51,000 left in the state treasury. The present regime, avowed as well as forced to economy by Ghana’s national debt – estimated at $850 million – has been able to build no road or bridge since 1967. While I was in Accra there was a strike of sanitary workers because they had not been issued with gloves and protective clothing, and when some formality took me to a local police station, I saw that the policemen did not have complete uniforms, either. One of the issues taken up by a fiery little Accra newssheet, the Spokesman, was the elaborate house being built by President Kofi Busia in his home village. While lack of foreign exchange means that all sorts of essential imports must be forgone, thousands of cedis worth of luxury fittings and material for Dr Busia’s house are being imported. It is no State House or Christiansborg, yet certainly it will be a palace in comparison with the yards of Accra, where children, chickens and rubble seem awash on open drains, and people are paying 20 pesewas (100 pesewas to the cedi; the cedi worth roughly a dollar) for two plantain bananas.
Although the government has just published a pamphlet on the subject of President Busia’s willingness to open a dialogue with South Africa, stressing that the Ghanaian stand differed from that of the other main supporter of dialogue, the Ivory Coast, in that Ghana intended to continue to support the Liberation Movements at the same time, most people seemed more embarrassed than anything else by the idea of the first of the independent black states talking to one of the last strongholds of white power. The issue that was preoccupying the press in general and the members of the Opposition party was the government’s proposal to change the chairmanship of the Regional Councils from an elected to a government-appointed position. Nkrumah abolished the Regional Councils; they have been reinstated and are the most important move, outside free elections, away from wholly centralised power and back to genuine contact with the needs and wishes of ordinary people.
Of course, the very fact that there is an Opposition to walk out of the House in protest over such matters, and a Spokesman exists to attack the nature of the asceticism of Dr Busia’s regime, says something for that regime. As another visiting foreigner remarked to me – ‘At least no one’s in jail.’ There are no political prisoners.
The faces in public office, like the façades of the buildings stripped of their original designation, carry still the Nkrumah image, in reverse. They are almost all men whom he denounced and discarded; the pedigree for high position is exile or imprisonment under Nkrumah. But the faces of the junta which ruled the country from 1966 to the first post-coup elections in 1969 are strikingly absent. Members of both the government and Opposition are vague about the present activities of these army (and police-) men, and meet stiffly the reasonable question: why has none of them come forward to serve, in politics, as a civilian?
So far as I could gather, all have relinquished their army careers. Ex-Colonel Afrifa is running that old West African money-maker, a transport business; nobody seemed to know what General Ankrah himself was doing these days, and at least one dignitary said with asperity that he didn’t care, either. ‘They promised to hand over to civilian government after a specified time, and they had to keep that promise.’ Only Afrifa, under forty, had gone so far as to remark that the provision that the new president of Ghana must be over forty was an insult to the youth of the country; interpret that as frustrated political ambition of the highest order, if you like.
Everyone has heard of the mammy wagons of Ghana, a chaotic unscheduled bus service that gets people dangerously where they want to go without the dreary queueing and frustration inseparable from ordinary bus services. Everyone knows that these trucks bear sayings or slogans. There is something evangelistic about even the most hedonistic of them, something exhortatory and moral, that suggests their original inspiration must have been missionary: those texts on love or sin chalked on boards outside churches. What I didn’t know before I went there was that Ghana taxis have their statements, too, in the form of stickers on the dashboards. One gets into the habit of looking for omens – a private text-for-the-day, a warning? – as one moves around in Accra. Perhaps there will be a message to be interpreted only by oneself (like letting a hotel Gideon Bible fall open where it will), in the next taxi one climbs into. One afternoon there was. Just two words that were the last word on everything I had seen and heard and done. ‘It changes.’
Ivory Coast from the Accra–Abidjan plane had a brocade texture, the crowns of thousands of palms in plantation pattern.
Abidjan: like all cities built on water it has the extraordinary quality of perpetually looking at itself. Even the stream of evening traffic, seen twice over from across one of the lagoons – once on the road, once reflected in the water – is hypnotic, narcissistic, silenced and calmed into a flow of liquid darkness and floating flares. Why haven’t I read it was like this? I decide it is one of those places you have to go to, that perhaps really don’t exist at all unless you are in them. It certainly doesn’t exist in any comparison I might try.
Abidjan is full of flowers you cannot and have no wish to identify – not merely that apoplectic bougainvillea and coarse hibiscus trumpeting ‘tropical paradise’, but huge trees pollened with yellow and pink, and verges knee-deep in delicate lilies like just-struck match flames. There are unexpected scents; not only the whiff of ‘Femme’ or ‘Je Reviens’ from one of the passing white French ladies, but the delicious sweat of warm flowers. The high-rise architecture is outstandingly imaginative, anyway, slender buildings standing on stork legs that emphasise the relation of the city to water, but the real reason why these blocks are so much more successfully rooted in their environment than is usual, is because for once the scale of natural growth within it matches them. There are trees, here, that are not dwarfed by a skyscraper. They look as if they had been waiting through centuries for men to learn how to build in the proportions of the tropical forest.
The hotel I live in, across the water from the city in the ‘diplomatic’ suburb of Cocody, has a swimming pool where wives of French businessmen spend the day watching their children; occasionally, in the outdoor bar overlooking the lagoon, a white couple entertain a rich or distinguished black man and his lady, in the way of business or diplomacy, with an air of exagger
ated ease. Opposite the craftsmen’s market in town, a coffee-shop-cum-bar-restaurant is filled with Frenchmen eating a businessman’s lunch and reading the Paris papers, while pestering Senegalese traders, quick to recognise a tourist face among them, parade snakeskin sandals and indigo-dyed caftans along the terrace. In arcades and side-streets, Lebanese sit entombed by the rolls of wax-print cloth whose market they traditionally corner. Outside boutiques showing the current fantaisie of the Boulevard St Germain, black boys have their home-made stalls selling cigarettes and gum. Down in their big market Africans congregate endlessly round small purchases from the numerous petty traders, seated before a pyramid of a few tomatoes or eggs, dried fish or cola nuts, who all seem to make a living, in Africa.
In a bar where I go to escape the midday heat, the blonde patronne in hot pants and boots is making up her eyes before a mirror and the indifference of a very tall Latin wearing a handbag, while a black barman plays a worn Georges Moustaki record over and over. The tall man shoulders his handbag and leaves, and the patronne at once turns prettily: ‘What can you do, Madame? – I love him. He’s Italian, he has to go back to Rome. But when you fall in love – eh?’
Yes, Abidjan is a beautiful city. A beautiful colonial city, despite its ten-year independence. With all the colonial preoccupations, comforts and diversions. There are twice as many French here as there were before independence. In Accra you – the visitor – can’t get a decent bottle of wine or find a taxi whose window handles aren’t missing so that you can close up against the rain. But dirty Accra on a Saturday – the dinner-bells of traders ringing, the vast chatter and surge of the streets, the sense not of people on their way through the streets but of life being lived there; the bars and hotels of Accra, the female tycoons of trade and transport with flesh and finery piled up splendidly, ringed hands round glasses, voices holding forth to men puny by contrast, the dancers sauntering to the lazy pluck and thump of highlife music, the little velvety-faced tarts with narrow hands, assuming bored solitude on a bar stool or taking over the ladies’ room to adjust already exquisitely arranged turbans or hitch the angle of a breast under cloth – the Ghanaians are living their own life and all quarters of their shabby capital are theirs. Accra belongs to them in a way that Abidjan doesn’t seem to belong to the Ivoiriens.
This remains valid although in the days that follow I go to Treichville and Adjamé, the African quarters, and see for myself that the Ivoiriens are materially better off than Ghanaians. Everywhere new housing schemes have been realised, and the houses, though basic as sub-economic habitations must be, are decent and imaginative. There are schools with lacy brick walls to let in the air; and market-places covered against the sun and provided with facilities to keep them clean. These are the things that the people need; it is something of a surprise to find them here, instead of the black slums which, in Africa, usually lie behind the white men’s air-conditioned shops and bars.
Ghana and the Ivory Coast started off similarly endowed with natural resources – Ghana is the biggest cocoa producer in the world, Ivory Coast the third biggest producer of coffee – and geared economically to the provision of raw materials for the industrial powers of the developed world. For the rest, the neighbours could hardly have been more different: Ghana under Nkrumah one of the most radical, the Ivory Coast under Félix Houphouët-Boigny the most conservative of new African states. While Nkrumah has had his stool kicked from under him, Houphouët-Boigny, who has put down whatever discontents may have shivered from time to time across the lagoons of Abidjan, still lives in the tall pagoda-shaped residence among the palms and flowers of Cocody whose lack of any suggestion of a fortress surely reflects confidence. Ghana, the richer country to begin with, is hobbled by debt; Ivory Coast had a trade balance of 32 million Central African francs in 1969. She is the enfant chéri of France, showered with loans and French capital that have helped her diversify her economy, in return for President Houphouët-Boigny’s loyal promotion of French influence and interests within such important groups as his Conseil d’Entente (Ivory Coast, Dahomey, Niger, Upper Volta) and OCAM (Afro-Malagasy Common Organisation) all the way up to the OAU, where he leads the call for dialogue with apartheid Pretoria, while French arms sales to South Africa are difficult to explain away to African states.
Those African states dedicated to radical change in the life of the masses rather than broadening the base of a black elite have so far achieved less for the masses than conservative states who have been content to foster a black elite, perpetuate foreign private enterprise and foreign investment, and finance social uplift out of the fringe benefits of capitalism, so to speak. It seems ironic. But it is not conclusive. It’s a blessing to be given decent sub-economic housing, schools, hospitals and markets. But will the people, particularly the people in the interior – always so different from the capital, in African countries – get any further than that, under Africanised but colonial-style capitalism? In West Africa more than 80 per cent of the people still live on the land. Will they ever be more than the beneficiaries of the charity of the elite?
There is no impudent Spokesman published in Abidjan; in fact, French journalists must take care, when reporting local issues to Paris, not to annoy the French government by criticising the Houphouët-Boigny regime. Apart from Houphouët-Boigny’s there is a palace there, though of a curious kind – indeed, a whole 100,000-acre Versailles is under construction. The part-state, part-American-owned Hotel Ivoire, with its thousand rooms, casino, theatre and ice-skating rink, was just along the lagoon shore from my modest hotel. I wandered there one day by way of a path made by servants’ and fishermen’s feet, following the shore. Someone’s little patch of maize was being cultivated; high grass touched my cheeks on either side. Once inside the movie-labyrinth of the hotel, I was still wandering – along soaring, carpet-muffled corridors, glass galleries, through lounges that reduce the human figure to a small stroke, past bars buried like Chinese boxes. There was a model of the total plan of which this place is only part: an ‘international tourist area’, ‘garden city environment’ for 120,000 people, that will encompass whole existing African villages for the diversion of those tourists for whom the attraction of golf clubs, convention halls and an Olympic sports centre palls. To ‘see’ Africa, natives and all, it will not be necessary to stir from this environment of grotesque home comforts created by the Californian architect and urban planner William Pereira and Mr Moshe Mayer, an Israeli millionaire whose family-portrait face is displayed along with a letter from President Houphouët-Boigny, welcoming the project and referring to Mr Mayer as ‘my dear friend’. This part of Africa was once known as the White Man’s Grave; now he sees it as his pleasure-ground. A shift in the angle of a timeless subjectivity? Hardly more, and little enough.
There are not many mammy wagons in Abidjan. Those that exist generally have no identification except their registration plates. But when I went to the bus station in Adjamé with a professor of philosophy who had sat marking baccalauréat papers in the open-air bar of our hotel, there was a message for me. While we talked, a mammy wagon was being loaded with passengers and bundles. It had a worn text, decorated with painted flowers, half-legible; I could just make out the words, ‘Merci Dieu’. Since I am a white South African and the professor was a black Ivoirien, it was natural that we should be discussing the idea of dialogue between our two countries. What was perhaps a little less predictable was that I was arguing against dialogue, because – as I was quick to illustrate my point – the kind of contact between two enfranchised individuals he and I were having was what was needed within my country, rather than talk between the white establishment of that country and black statesmen from other countries – and he, on the basis of how well we got on, if nothing else, was prepared to give dialogue a trial. Well, yes – thank heaven for small mercies, not everything is predictable in Africa these days – whatever else has happened, the old equations, the defined roles, national and personal, good and bad, are all in question.
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br /> 1971
Pack Up, Black Man
Americans who are repelled by a colour bar, but are at least prepared to consider that the South African ‘separate development’ political philosophy of apartheid may be something other than Jim Crow legislation under another name, have told me that they did not know what to think of the South African government’s resettlement schemes for blacks. Living so far away, ignorant of local conditions, is one qualified to judge?
There are many white South Africans, living right in the country but at a distance from the conditions of the blacks no less palpable than the many thousand miles that separate New York and Johannesburg, who express similar reservations. Isn’t decentralisation vital, anyway, for industrialised countries? Isn’t it a good idea to clear rural slums? Politics aside – and in South Africa, separate development purports to aim at the eventual partition of the country, along lines laid down exclusively by the whites, between black and white – don’t the industrial planners and community development experts know best?
I would say to Americans what I have said to my fellow white South Africans. You know well enough to eat when hungry, don’t you? To turn on the heat when you’re cold? To choose a place to live at the rent you can afford, on a transport route convenient to your work, your children’s schools, and the pursuit of your interests?
Telling Times Page 22