Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  I had seen and enjoyed the best of Congolese soukous, arguably the most enthusiastic celebration of the female rear end anywhere in Africa, but the show Fela and his dancer-wives put on that night reached a whole new level. It was burlesque meets gymnastics, all set to a driving, unrelenting rhythm, and it was as raw and powerful a display of sensuality as I had ever seen.

  Sweating profusely, Fela stripped down to his red underpants and began working his saxophone furiously, clearly influenced by both James Brown and Pharaoh Sanders. He was fifty-seven, but appeared to have the stamina of a man in his twenties as he blew his way through the chord changes, riffing against the insistent beat. Many minutes later, when he finally paused, Fela introduced the dancers one by one, and as he did so, each of these tall, powerful women performed a solo of her own, writhing under the spotlight like dancing yogis.

  In the midst of this exhibition, though, the area boys behind us interrupted our reverie. They had noticed Purnell’s tape recorder and were making an issue of it. One of them insisted that he was a member of Fela’s security force and demanded that we hand it over to them. We stood our ground, encouraged by Friday’s calm, but the area boys were now passing word through the crowd that the Americans had snuck a tape recorder into the concert and were stealing Fela’s music.

  As the crowd drew tightly around us I pleaded our case to all those who would listen, invoking Morgan’s name and recounting our visit to Fela’s commune. The threats continued to multiply, though, and it was obvious there was no way we could fight our way out of there. Eventually, the crowd began jostling us, and things started to look desperate. I urged one of the people confronting us to summon Fela’s security people. Agreeing, he threatened, “If you’re not telling the truth, you will be sorry.”

  A few moments later, a huge security man walked up, parting the crowd by his mere presence. I had to crane my head to meet his gaze. I began to explain our story, but he showed no interest in hearing it, simply gesturing for the tape recorder and ordering us to follow him.

  It was close to 4 a.m., and for most of the hall the concert continued undisturbed, as loud and frenzied as ever. But as we approached the exit, with the rowdiest elements of the crowd taunting us from behind, I saw one of Fela’s dancers and immediately recognized her from the courtyard. It was the woman who had been grilling chicken over hot coals that afternoon. “Don’t you remember me?” I asked desperately. Her face was as noncommittal as it was beautiful as she scrutinized me impassively. “You saw me this afternoon at Fela’s house. I asked you where I could find him.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember you now,” she said, and then turned to the giant security man. “These people are journalists. Fela invited them to the concert. He told them to bring their equipment.” At that, there was an audible sigh from the crowd and the pressure quickly dissipated. The huge security man handed Purnell his tape recorder, and we walked to Friday’s car and drove off, skipping our chance for a backstage interview with Fela. The sun would be coming up soon, and Abacha’s speech was due in a few hours.

  I was exhausted and dispirited from the confrontation, and asked Friday to drop me off at the Sheraton, where I decided to watch Abacha on television. Robert continued on to Kudirat Abiola’s house as planned, to take her picture, and promised to bring me back some comments on the speech from her. As it happened, Abacha’s big news was the commutation of the bogus death sentences against Obasanjo and Yar’Adua, which he reduced to twenty-five years. For the first time, he explicitly denied the legitimacy of Abiola’s presidential mandate, though, and said a pardon for him “would be wrong and a poor precedent for the democratic system for which we are laying a foundation.”

  Kudirat Abiola was murdered the following year, on June 4, 1996, in what New York or Chicago police would call a gangland-style slaying, when her car came under heavy gunfire in Lagos traffic. The government denied any responsibility, but after the dictator’s death, two years later, Sani Abacha’s son, Mohammed, was charged with ordering the hit. Fela died of AIDS in 1997. He was only fifty-eight years old.

  With the disappointment of Independence Day behind them, Nigerians sensed one more chance for Abacha to change direction. But the special tribunal organized to try Saro-Wiwa delivered its guilty verdict barely a month after Abacha’s big speech. The dictator was the only person who could prevent the executions from taking place, and a parade of African leaders, including Nelson Mandela, had been urging lenience. On the morning of November 10, the very day that a Commonwealth heads-of-state summit was to open in Auckland, New Zealand, however, Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni defendants were marched to the gallows at the Port Harcourt jailhouse and hanged.

  In eloquent defiance, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s powerful last words recalled Mandela’s statement from the dock before his life imprisonment in 1964, but in a final insult to justice—one that not even Mandela under apartheid had suffered—Saro-Wiwa was not allowed to speak before the court.

  “I am a man of peace, of ideas,” Saro-Wiwa wrote. “Appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalization and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization, I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated. I have no doubt at all about the ultimate success of my cause, no matter the trials and tribulations which I and those who believe with me may encounter on our journey. Neither imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory.

  “I repeat that we all stand before history. I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial and it is as well that it is represented by counsel said to be holding a watching brief [or friend-of-the-court status]. The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come and the lessons learnt here may prove useful to it for there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the company has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Plague

  Brazzaville is one of those African capitals that manages to remain still and sleepy throughout the day, save for rush hours that are as brief as cloudbursts. The airports and borders are the only places where one can count on round-the-clock business and the vigilance that comes with it. When I arrived, the Congo Republic was not being infiltrated or facing attack, but for the men born into poverty who filled the ranks of the army, customs and immigration services, guarding the country’s entrances and exits was the surest chance they would ever have to make a quick buck.

  It was three in the morning when I landed, having taken a six-hour flight from Abidjan, on the west coast, to Brazzaville, in the continent’s center, but it took only a few minutes for my photographer and me to run into trouble. The immigration agents spotted us from afar amid the crowds of yawning Congolese passengers who were carting home shiny new boom boxes and monstrous battered suitcases from their overseas voyages. Speaking with a deadly straight face, an immigration officer told us that the transit visas we had been issued at the Congolese consulate in Abidjan—at an “expedited” price of nearly $200 a person—were invalid. We would have to wait until morning, under police custody in an airport office, when we would be taken to the Ministry of the Interior to request new papers. Alternatively, we could pay something on the spot—perhaps another $200 would do, one of the green-uniformed soldiers suggested with a smile that mocked helpfulness.

  Reaching difficult destinations and surviving with one’s money and other possessions intact were life’s daily challenge in Central Africa, an
d it was both a point of pride and principle with me never to surrender any of my belongings voluntarily. The customs agent seemed to have us over a barrel, but I had one trick left: a fancy-looking presidential press pass I had taken pains to procure after a previous hassle-filled stay in Brazzaville. I flashed it, and after a few minutes of consultation, to my mild surprise, the soldiers let us through.

  Brazzaville had once been among the most orderly of Central African cities, making it and Kinshasa, a mere two miles away and the Dodge City of the region, an oddball pair of twins. This was always the place that one looked forward to visiting, with a small pinch of guilt, on the way into or out of the bedlam of Zaire. With its beautifully shaded streets, its solid, French-backed currency and a French-run café or bistro never far away, Brazzaville was capable of transporting me back in time, removing me from the region’s misery and grime, and dropping me into my own little Casablanca, a charming and settled French provincial city peopled by colonial Africans.

  The city had been changing a lot recently, though, and law and order were fast breaking down. The subtle north-south ethnic divide that had always driven this forgotten little African oil emirate’s politics had devolved into a raw contest involving a proliferation of militias and fierce street battles. I would be lying if I said that I had already imagined then, back in 1995, that Brazzaville would be joining its fraternal twin across the Congo River in utter chaos just two years hence, which is how long it would take to go from gang warfare to spectacularly murderous artillery duels in the middle of the city. But if an accredited consul could no longer issue a visa for his own country, it was already clear to me that there was trouble in store.

  On this night, though, my concerns lay elsewhere. I had been dispatched to Zaire, and planned to make my way by ferry across the oily expanse of the Congo River at dawn. My assignment was to report on the outbreak of the Ebola virus in that country, and making a bad situation worse, I was late. I had been on a special assignment when the epidemic struck, and the Ebola outbreak had been huge news around the world for days. Reporters had come from everywhere, many of them getting their first taste of Africa in what was possibly the most dilapidated and confusing country on the continent. In the process, more than a few of them were busying themselves overworking clichés drawn from Heart of Darkness.

  Within moments of thanking the customs agents who had waved Robert and me on, we were driving through the sandy, pitch-dark streets of Brazzaville, on our way to the Sofitel, a French-run hotel kept so bracingly cold that the huge glass windows looking out over the river toward Zaire next door steadily threw off sheets of condensation. Our plan was to take the first ferry, at 6:30—barely two hours away. So we napped sprawled on the stuffed leather sofas in the Sofitel lobby and waited for the breakfast buffet. Getting into Zaire unscathed would be a lot harder than getting into the Congo, and not knowing when we might eat again, it seemed smart to fill our stomachs.

  By now, living in Africa was not only required for my job but had also come to involve an intensely personal quest. The continent I had known in the early 1980s, poor and politically backward to be sure, had now settled into a spiral of bloody traumas and chronic disorder. I needed to understand why, and over and over again this question drew me back to Central Africa, a region that, together with a small cluster of West African states, with Liberia at its epicenter, rested atop the continental hit parade of mayhem and decay.

  Because of the scale of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda was the site of the one African tragedy people in the farthest reaches of the world knew of. But in political terms, Rwanda’s nearly bipolar society of Hutu and Tutsi made it more of an anomaly than a paradigm for the rest of the continent. More than any other place, Zaire—a country as vast as the United States east of the Mississippi, which shares land borders with eight other countries and is separated by a lake from a ninth, Tanzania—seemed like the country where I might find answers. By African standards, its contact with Europe had been extraordinary both for its duration, going back to the time of Columbus, and its destructiveness. From the earliest days of independence, in 1960, with the destabilization and overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first prime minister and only democratically elected leader, Western meddling had been persistent and profoundly destabilizing. And like most African countries, only even more spectacularly, Zaire had been misruled for decades ever since—in this case by Mobutu Sese Seko.

  Our ferry ride would last only twenty minutes or so, and yet to me, the river crossing loomed like a passage into another world, making it impossible to sleep in the chill of the hotel lobby. Brazzaville, even with all of its recent problems, still seemed comfortingly like Africa Lite. If worst came to worst, one always knew that the French were never too far behind the scenes, usually guaranteeing some kind of order or due process—at least for a Westerner. Zaire, by contrast, had never represented order of any kind, unless it was an order of the Cold War type, which dignified despots by dressing them up as indispensable allies. These were the waning days of the biggest despot of them all, Mobutu, and by now there was no longer any Cold War order, only disease and rot.

  The presence of hundreds of foreign journalists chasing the Ebola story with their expensive equipment and wads of cash had made things only worse, sparking a feeding frenzy among Zaire’s chronically unpaid soldiers. The Kinshasa airport was already renowned for body searches that left their victims dispossessed of whatever valuables they had brought with them. Too vigorous a protest could land one back on the next airplane stripped of everything but a pair of shorts and a tee shirt; the less fortunate wound up in jail.

  Slipping into Zaire by the back door—steaming across the river from Brazzaville—seemed like a far better idea, and had worked wonderfully during an earlier trip, when I was watching what had seemed to be the first death throes of the Mobutu regime. That trip had gone beautifully until Robert and I were arrested at a ramshackle tuberculosis sanitarium on the edge of the city, where the patients had been abandoned by the government but where undercover police agents lurked nonetheless. It was a patient-run facility in the most abject sense of the term. People lay coughing and moaning in unlit rooms. There were no medicines, there was no food, and there were no doctors, either, unless a family could scrape together the means to keep paying one to come see their dying relatives.

  Just as we were ending our time there, still reeling from the desperate pleas of patients wasting away on beds with no mattresses or sheets, we were encircled by a handful of heavily built men who began shouting, “What do you think you are doing in here? Do you think you have the right to come and take pictures in a place like this and ridicule our country?” Before we knew it, we and our timorous driver, Tony, had been bundled into our own battered little Toyota, where four of the policemen were brandishing pistols and threatening to kill us as they stripped away our watches, cameras, wallets and passports. The harvest of only a few hundred dollars had disappointed them, and their threats continued as we all rode stuffed together in the little blue sub-compact through the potholed streets of Kinshasa, until finally we stopped at the gates of the city jail. There we were told that if we could not come up with more cash, they would have us locked up.

  It was the oldest racket in Zaire, and one I would face countless times in the future. Policemen, like soldiers, went unpaid, so they took their guns and badges as licenses to steal. Mobutu himself had openly sanctioned behavior like this, once telling his unpaid army to “live off the land,” an instruction that set off the first of two stem-to-stern looting rampages in Kinshasa in the early 1990s. The two free-for-alls were known starkly as les pillages, and by now they were akin to the B.C. and A.D. of the modern calendar, scarring the psyches of Kinshasa’s inhabitants so deeply that people spoke of their lives in terms of the before and after.

  Theft had become the modus operandi for the entire country. Struggling to survive amid the country’s organized chaos, many Zairians shrugged off their degeneration, saying that things had
been pretty much this way since the time of the country’s colonization by Belgium, and in fact, this little bit of folk wisdom wasn’t far off the mark.

  King Leopold II of Belgium had appropriated this huge colony at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, the official kickoff for the European scramble for Africa, cynically claiming his motives were humanitarian. “Had Leopold been a different kind of man,” writes Pagan Kennedy, “he might have been content to languish in his greenhouses and pleasure gardens, and to cavort with his parade of prostitutes, some of them as young as ten years old. But he considered such treats to be only appetizers. He wanted to become one of the most powerful men in the world. In order to do that, he had to get his hands on a colony.”

  In his more candid moments, Leopold fondly described his newly acquired territory, which he ran brutally as his personal domain, as a “magnificent African cake,” and for Leopold and subsequently for Belgium and others, the Congo, as it was known then, became synonymous with a succession of cruel and shameless get-rich-quick schemes. For ivory, tropical hardwoods, rubber, and finally copper, cobalt and uranium, the country saw one European rush after another.

  Leopold’s African adventure is both stranger-than-fiction history and tragic fable, one whose legacy of theft and fraud has haunted the Congo ever since. Through stealth and extraordinary deceit, the king of Belgium, one of Europe’s smallest and least consequential nations, persuaded his mighty neighbors to allow him to control more land than any other individual in the world, a territory as vast as all of Western Europe. In an era of rapacious global imperialism, Leopold somehow managed to convince his European peers that he intended to create a “confederation of free Negro republics.”

  “His political insignificance made him invisible, and so he could do whatever he wanted without attracting notice. If he flattered enough politicians, if he started enough rumors, if he spoke stirringly about the evils of the Arab slave trade, if he kept a stable of spies, then perhaps he could win his colony,” writes Kennedy. Better yet, excelling at the Big Lie, the Belgian king told his fellow sovereigns that his work in the Congo would be driven strictly by Christian benevolence. “I do not wish to have one franc back of all the money I have expended,” Leopold pledged.