by David Lamb
* Askari means “guard” or “watchman” in Swahili. Armed with clubs, stones, whistles and sometimes spears, they guard private residences of anyone wealthy enough to own, say, a television set, as well as banks, hotels and most commercial enterprises with an inventory worth stealing. The majority are employed by large African-owned security companies that charge a client $180 a month for an askari’s services. An askari works twelve-hour shifts, usually seven days a week, and earns about $40 a month.
THE MEN AT THE TOP
We spoke and acted as if, given the opportunity for self-government, we would quickly create utopias. Instead injustice, even tyranny, is rampant.
—PRESIDENT JULIUS NYERERE OF TANZANIA
THE TELEVISION SCREEN fills with an image of heavenly clouds. A choir of voices swells in the background. The music grows louder, and as the clouds drift apart there emerges the face of a man, dark and handsome, a leopard-skin cap perched jauntily on his head. His gaze is steady and the faintest trace of a smile crosses his lips. The camera zooms in and holds for what seems like a very long time on the face. It speaks of strength, compassion, wisdom, though no words are uttered. What the viewer knows immediately is that this is no mere mortal. No indeed. It is Mobutu Sese Seko, a political survivor whose name translates roughly as “the all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from contest to contest, leaving fire in his wake.” And this is the start of the eight o’clock TV news in Kinshasa.
Mobutu became president of Zaire in 1965, and though lurching from crisis to crisis, has managed to hold together his huge country with its 200 tribes and bloody history of instability. Like most African presidents, he rules as half-god, half-chieftain, combining the techniques of twentieth-century communication with ancient tribal symbolism. By his own decree he has become the embodiment of a homespun philosophy and a national symbol above criticism. He has caused his people great suffering, but at his command they turn out by the tens of thousands to line the parade routes and fill the stadiums and sing his praises. In short, Mobutu is more than a president. He is a cult.
His teachings—called Mobutism—have, by his order, become the national philosophy. His portrait is the only picture allowed in public places; it even hangs in hotel elevators. His people wear Mobutu badges, pinned over their hearts, and T-shirts bearing his likeness, and Mao-style attire known as a Mobutu shirt. They sing his name in popular songs and recite his sayings (“It is better to die of hunger than to be rich and a slave to colonialism”) in schools and factories. None of this, though, means that Mobutu’s 26 million people have any great fondness for him. They are only doing what they are told to do and paying homage to their chief as they are expected to do. One day, when Mobutu is overthrown, they will tear down his statues, burn his pictures, curse his name and pay allegiance to a new chief.
Although Mobutu’s excesses are extravagant even by African standards, the man himself is not an aberration among his presidential peers. He is but one in a fraternity whose members command respect by words, not deeds. These men represent a curious mixture of European influence and African tradition, and their power is absolute. Their overseas bank accounts are stuffed with pilfered funds, and their loyalties and concerns are distinctly self-centered, often having little to do with national advancement.
Mobutu is, in fact, more a creation of Western capitalism than he is of African custom. Like Africa’s other second-generation presidents, he is the symbol of his country’s sickness, not the sole cause of it. After independence the inherited European systems soon ceased to work and the substitute African systems broke down. Men like Mobutu were left to rule by experiment. They became, in effect, neocolonial governors, operating and living much in the style of their former white masters. The welfare of the African people is generally not much more important to them than it was to the colonial governors.
When Mobutu came to power, Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo) was a country on the move. Rich copper mines stood ready for exploring, fertile fields for tilling. By the early 1970s, with copper bringing record prices on the world market, Mobutu, a former journalist and one-time army sergeant, found himself presiding over an unprecedented economic boom. His response was to go on a spending orgy that made economists’ heads whirl. But his priorities were sadly confused; what he sought was not national development, but personal prestige and national grandeur.
He built palaces, eleven in all, and linked some of them to the capital with four-lane highways. He dedicated monuments to himself and constructed stadiums in which to address his people. He visited New York, admired the World Trade Center and had a small-scale duplication of the buildings constructed in Kinshasa. He bought off his enemies and turned his friends—most of them from his own Gbande tribe—into overnight millionaires. He redesigned the main street of Kinshasa and cut down the lovely old trees in the center divider so the boulevard could accommodate more military vehicles for a parade. He spent $15 million sponsoring the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman world championship fight in 1974. Said Ali: “Zaire’s gotta be great. I never seen so many Mercedes.” And as for himself—well, Mobutu was hardly the penniless army sergeant of a decade ago. He was now one of the world’s wealthiest men, with assets conservatively estimated by Western intelligence sources at more than $3 billion. Mobutu, incidentally, did not have enough faith in his country’s economic future to invest at home; like other African presidents, his fortune was in European banks and European real estate.
Of every dollar coming into Zaire, whether it was in the form of a foreign aid grant or a business contract, Zairian officials took twenty cents off the top for their personal cut. In 1977 Zaire’s coffee crop was valued at $400 million. Because of smuggling and underinvoicing, only $120 million was returned to Zaire’s treasury. The rest ended up in foreign bank accounts held by Mobutu and his Gbande colleagues. Everyone was on the take, and in Zaire you needed to know only two things to survive or prosper: Whom do I see and how much will it cost?
Not surprisingly, from the very beginning Mobutu and his pals were about the only ones excited over the course of developments in Zaire. So, trying to drum up some national spirit, Mobutu launched what he called an African “authenticity” program. “We are resorting to this authenticity,” he said, “in order to rediscover our soul, which colonization had almost erased from our memories and which we are seeking in the tradition of our ancestors.”
He ordered all Zairians to replace their Christian names with African ones, and set the example himself by dropping his first and middle names (Joseph Desiré) in favor of Sese Seko. He changed the Congo’s name to Zaire (meaning “river”), forbade the wearing of Western attire, designed a national uniform that looks like a Mao suit, canceled Christmas and put up his portrait in the churches.
Carrying his zeal a step further, he expropriated $500 million in foreign enterprises and expelled the Asian merchants who had kept the economy running. Most of the Belgian plantation owners, technicians and businessmen were forced out, too. Mobutu awarded the confiscated businesses to his friends. In many cases the new operators merely sold the merchandise still in stock and closed up shop.
The Zairian people whispered about Mobutu’s misdeeds, but only quietly because his secret police had permeated every level of society. In the U.S. Congress there were debates about Washington’s cozy alliance with the Kinshasa government, but the official line was that Zaire was economically and strategically important, that it was a counterbalance to growing Soviet influence in central Africa and that Mobutu, a staunch anti-Communist, should be supported regardless of his shortcomings. As a result, Zaire in the late 1970s was receiving nearly half of all the aid money the Carter Administration allocated for black Africa. But Washington wasn’t helping a country develop; it was merely buying the loyalty of a chieftain, much in the same way Europe did during the colonial era. It was encouraging the very conditions that could lead to revolution and expanded Soviet influence.
Zaire paid a heavy price for M
obutu’s short-sightedness. Copper prices plunged and the boom of the seventies quickly became the bust of the eighties. Zaire became an economic cripple and a social misfit, and by 1980 Mobutu was experiencing the ultimate humiliation for a black African leader: he turned the running of his country over to foreigners. He invited back the Belgian businessmen whose firms he had expropriated in the 1970s. He brought in Moroccan guards to provide his security. The International Monetary Fund was running the central bank, and Belgian specialists were operating the customs department. Other Europeans were moving into the finance ministry, the taxation office and the transportation system. Mobutu called this new experiment for economic recovery the Mobutu Plan. It was well named because it was an attempt to save Mobutu, not Zaire.
By the time I made my last visit to Zaire—the country V. S. Naipaul described so vividly in A Bend in the River—it seemed to be rapidly disintegrating in spite of the Mobutu Plan. At Mama Yemo General Hospital (named for Mobutu’s mother) unattended patients were dying because there were no bandages, no sterilization equipment, no oxygen, no film for x-ray machines. The dead often remained for hours in the intensive care unit before being removed because there was no room for extra bodies in the morgue.
The health clinics at the university campuses in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi had shut down because the medicines intended for use there had been diverted to the black market. The university cafeterias were closed for the simple reason that there was no food. With inflation running at over 100 percent, a bag of cornmeal needed to feed a family of six for a month cost $130, twice a laborer’s monthly salary. In the rural areas people were reverting from cash-crop to subsistence farming because the transportation system had broken down and the food they had intended to sell at market lay rotting on the ground. (Zaire had 31,000 miles of main roads at independence in 1960; twenty years later only 3,700 miles of usable roads remained.)
Zaire’s debt to foreign banks and governments soared to $4 billion in 1980, and shortages of food and spare parts became critical. The government’s news agency closed down for lack of paper, 360 abandoned buses stood rusting near the airport, and the national airline, Air Zaire, could afford only enough fuel to operate one of every four domestic flights each day. Its Boeing 747 and Douglas DC-10 were repossessed. Through it all, Mobutu kept insisting that Zaire and its people were doing fine; the problems Western journalists wrote about, he said, were illusionary ones that merely underscored the media’s bias against Africa.
President cultism is hardly unique to Africa. In the United States, after all, John F. Kennedy became a cult figure, in death perhaps more than in life. But what African leaders have managed to do is mold cultism into a fine art. They have bestowed upon themselves godlike qualities and the unquestioned authority of the most powerful chieftain. Most, however, are not leaders in the true sense; they are images, the creations of a sort of African-style public relations campaign. As peculiar as the phenomenon may seem to a Westerner, it makes sense in Africa, where the uneducated masses respond to strong central authority. They do not want to be bullied by their governments but they do expect their presidents to exercise the same kind of authoritarian control that tribal chiefs and colonial governors used. Anything less is considered a sign of weakness.
Mobutu may have carried cultism to the extreme, but almost every black African president is, in varying degrees, a cult figure who has adopted a nickname to convey a desired image. Mobutu and President Etienne Eyadéma of Togo both like to be referred to as “the Guide.” Jomo Kenyatta, the late Kenyan president, was known as Mzee, the Swahili word for “Wise Old Man.” Julius Nyerere of Tanzania is known as “the Teacher”; Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi as “the Chief of Chiefs”; Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast as “the No. 1 Peasant”; and the late Macias Nguema Biyogo of Equatorial Guinea as “the National Miracle.” Uganda’s former president Idi Amin Dada used to refer to himself, only half in jest, as “the Conquerer of the British Empire.”
Togo’s Eyadéma has a presidential cheering section consisting of a thousand women and he wouldn’t think of making a public appearance without it. The women’s prime responsibility is to perform traditional dances and lavish their president with songs of praise—a ritual that Eyadéma says helps build a national spirit and identity. For $20, Togolese can buy wristwatches on whose face the illuminated portrait of Eyadéma fades and reappears every fifteen seconds. Eyadéma also has built a huge bronze statue of himself in the downtown square of Lomé, and commissioned an Eyadéma comic book in which he plays a Superman-type character.
In Malawi, everything from university dormitories to highways is named for President Banda, and women wear dresses embroidered with Banda’s portrait. The mildest criticism of Banda guarantees a stretch in jail. “They say my people love me,” observes President-for-Life Banda, “and I would be naïve to deny it.”
The lead item on most radio newscasts in black Africa seldom covers the major news story of the day; instead it deals with what the country’s president said or did that day, however routine or mundane. “President Daniel arap Moi said today that Kenya is a friend to all people of the world,” reports the Voice of Kenya. Or: “President Daniel arap Moi has called on leaders in the country to refrain from spreading malicious rumors among wananchi [the masses].” In Jomo Kenyatta’s final days, when he was a senile and largely incapacitated man of eighty-six years withering away in State House, the Voice of Kenya reported daily that he was on “a busy working tour of the coast provinces.” The two daily newspapers were required to run the usual page-one photograph of Kenyatta conducting that day’s affairs of state—even though they had to dig old pictures out of their files. The premise was that the people wouldn’t know the difference. But they did, of course, and no one was surprised when the Voice of Kenya suddenly started playing funeral music without any announcement one day in August 1978. Kenyatta had gone on his last “busy working tour.”
Moi, Kenyatta’s vice president, allowed only a respectful period before he started taking down Kenyatta’s pictures and putting up his own. Moi’s words soon became the headline item on each newscast and the wananchi were soon urged to turn out and cheer their president each time he left State House. One cult—a legitimate one, given Kenyatta’s great charisma and early influence in the anticolonialist movements—had ended and another one of questionable authenticity had begun. (Quite deservedly, Kenyatta remains a legendary figure in Africa.)
The honeymoon for Moi did not last long. In short order he turned Kenya into a one-party state and started arresting dissidents and journalists. As Kenya’s economy deteriorated in the world-wide recession, Moi, a former schoolteacher, and his band of ruling elite grew richer by the day through various business deals. The inevitable happened early one morning in August 1982: a group of air force men seized the radio station and announced that they had overthrown the government. Before forces loyal to Moi could put down the attempted coup, more than 120 people had died and soldiers had gone on a rampage in Nairobi, looting, raping and shooting. The attempted coup coincided with a rash of worsening social problems in Kenya: widespread official corruption, rampant urban crime that included the murder of an occasional tourist, a stagnant economy and a government that would brook no criticism. Moi had a rare opportunity at that moment to exert his leadership and address himself to the root causes of the unrest. Instead he went for the jugular. He closed down the university for nine months and disbanded the air force. He turned Kenya into a one-party state, bought an independent daily newspaper and made it a mouthpiece of the party, ordered the arrest of several leading journalists and critics and went on a witch hunt for “traitors” in his cabinet. It was a distressingly familiar scenario in Africa, and it would solve nothing. The cancer had already started to spread, and Moi, a small man in the shadow of Jomo Kenyatta, was now fighting a delaying action.
Like Moi, few African presidents would consider taking a trip without summoning the full diplomatic corps to the airport or ord
ering the masses to line the route from State House to the terminal. I always found it a rather sad spectacle to watch thousands of Africans waving banners that they could not read and obediently applauding some man who demanded—but had not necessarily earned—their allegiance, respect and love. True, they didn’t have many other opportunities to show they really did belong to a nation, but the prime purpose of the exercise was designed to pamper the egos of insecure men needing acceptance and authenticity.
Let’s go to the banks of the Bangui River, deep in the heart of Africa, to see how one man dealt with that insecurity.
To an outsider, Jean-Bédel Bokassa seemed to have everything: a huge fortune and immense power, so many decorations that he needed a specially made jacket to display them all, and a fine family numbering nine wives and thirty legitimate children.
Since independence in 1960 he had been honoring himself with monuments and palaces and countless titles, including that of president-for-life of the Central African Republic. He was entertained abroad—for the trip to Peking he took his Rumanian wife as first lady—and even if he was considered a bit unorthodox, ambassadors listened to him, journalists quoted him and his countrymen paid him homage.
But what the former army sergeant didn’t have—and what he craved—was respect, a sense of legitimacy. Except for the fear he engendered, people just didn’t take him very seriously. His occasional savagery and frequent eccentricities did receive a lot of attention in the foreign press, but in the long run he was one of Africa’s most forgettable presidents, a tragicomical figure who was never able to come to grips with the problems facing his hapless country. He fretted over his inadequacies a great deal and lost himself for hours at a time reading about the one man he idolized, Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in a moment of supreme arrogance, snatched his crown from the Pope’s hands and crowned himself emperor in Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral in 1804.