The Africans

by David Lamb

  The code was tested when Tanzania invaded Uganda in 1979. Nigeria and the Sudan protested the action at the OAU summit meeting, not because they had sympathy for Idi Amin, but because Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere had set a dangerous precedent. If he had assumed the right to decide who was qualified to govern next door, what would stop other presidents from making similar decisions? There were two stern speeches condemning the invasion, then the summit moved quickly on to other business. Interestingly, no one challenged Libya’s Muammar Qaddafy, who also had intervened, sending combat troops to bolster the crumbling Ugandan army. The lesson was clear: Intervening to keep a president in power is acceptable; meddling to unseat him is not.

  To understand precisely how chancy the career of an African president is, consider the fate of the original OAU signatories. Thirty heads of state signed the charter in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1963; by 1980, only seven were still in office. Of the others, two were murdered by their own soldiers, seventeen were overthrown in military coups but survived, two died natural deaths.

  One of the reasons the presidents greet one another so warmly at each OAU summit is that it’s always a mystery who will be around from one year to the next. When President William Tolbert hosted the OAU summit in Liberia in 1979, billboard-sized photographs of Africa’s rulers lined the route to the conference hall. Half a dozen signs bore only the country’s name but no picture because events had moved too fast for the summit organizers. Since the meeting a year earlier, Uganda had gone through three presidents, Ghana had publicly executed three former heads of state; the Congo had placed its ruler under house arrest, charged with, among other things, stealing $1 million to buy a solid-gold bed; Chad had seen its president sneak out of the capital at night and flee into exile; Mauritania’s prime minister had been killed in a plane crash, Equatorial Guinea’s life-president had narrowly escaped a coup attempt (but was overthrown and killed three weeks later), and two presidents, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Houari Boumédienne of Algeria, had died of natural causes.

  People had tittered at the summit in Khartoum a year earlier when the chubby President Tolbert, then sixty-five years old, was seen jogging around the Hilton Hotel pool, dressed in a white tropical suit and matching hat. Three feet in front of him and three feet behind were his security agents, moving at a sprightly pace, their walkie-talkies crackling. His entourage of seven brought up the rear, panting. Worries for his safety were well founded. Twenty months later he was murdered and disemboweled in his bedroom by a group of army enlisted men. Tolbert at the time of his death was chairman of the OAU, the most prestigious position on the continent, and as such represented the voice of black Africa.

  The summit is held in a different capital each year with the host government shelling out huge sums it doesn’t have (Gabon spent $1 billion in 1977, Sierra Leone $200 million in 1980) to build a conference hall, chalets for the heads of state, hotels and new roads from the airport to the downtown area, and to buy limousines for the presidents, buses to shuttle the press, and BMW motorcycles for the policemen. (Liberia bought thirty-six motorcycles for the 1979 summit. Within three days, the unsteady escort officers had wrecked twenty of them.) When a summit ends, the conference hall is usually boarded up, the hotels are closed or subsidized by the government to operate with a minuscule occupancy rate, the chalets are abandoned. Guinea turned down a chance to host the 1981 summit on the sensible grounds that the expenditures outweighed the benefits, for the time being at least. Most governments, though, justify the investment because it gives them an excuse to spruce up their capitals, and more important, because it offers many small insignificant countries and their presidents a brief moment in the limelight.

  President El Hadj Omar Bongo—who also serves as Gabon’s minister for defense, information, telecommunications, planning and national guidance, popular education, civil service, specialized party organs and women’s advancement—celebrated the hosting of the 1977 summit in his country by putting the finishing touches on a $800 million palace right out of Star Trek. From his elevated thronelike marble chair behind a long marble-topped desk, the tiny statesman (Bongo is four feet eleven) has a panel of buttons that can make walls recede, doors open, rooms turn and lights dim. Although Gabon produces excellent marble of its own, Bongo imported the marble for his palace, and for the $23 million OAU conference hall from Italy, because the local quarry could not guarantee a delivery date.

  Bongo’s palace also has a night club, a banquet hall for 3,000 persons (which represents about 1 percent of Gabon’s population) and a bathtub big enough to swim several strokes in. For good measure, there are two theaters, separated by a central viewing room which Bongo can rotate at the push of a button to make his choice of presentations.

  Borrowing heavily against his country’s modest oil revenues, Bongo turned his summit into as flashy and chaotic an event as Africa is likely to see for a while. Presidents roared through Libreville, the somnolent capital on the Atlantic coast, in Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs with sirens wailing, each jammed into the back seat between his bodyguards. (Bongo, like President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, used Moroccan bodyguards, not wishing to trust his safety to local soldiers; Idi Amin used Palestinians.) The Gabonese honor guard, wearing red velvet capes and holding gold swords, lined the entrance to the conference hall. Gabonese soldiers in full combat gear patrolled the corridors, carefully checking each reporter’s tape recorder to make sure it wasn’t some kind of secret device for sending coded messages.

  There was no laundry service in Libreville that week because the city’s women had been recruited to perform traditional dances in honor of the arriving presidents. Nor were there any working prostitutes because Bongo had swept the streets clean with the warning to the nation’s ladies of the night: “Open your hearts during the summit, but not your bodies.” As a sign of African solidarity against the white South African government, Bongo also ordered the temporary suspension of flights between Libreville and Johannesburg and passed the word that the Rhodesian beef the restaurants were serving really came from Botswana.

  When a journalist arrived at the airport and said he was from Salisbury, he was promptly deported. It was not until two days later that someone discovered he meant Salisbury, England, not Salisbury, Rhodesia. Two diplomats from the Asian nation of Bangladesh on the same flight asked for observer credentials to the summit. The welcoming committee, thinking Bangladesh was the name of a new African liberation group, assigned them delegates credentials instead. On the other hand, when the delegation from the little-known African island republic of Sāo Tomé and Príncipe (population 90,000) arrived, no one on the committee could quite place the country. “Are you sure that’s in Africa?” one official asked. The Sāo Tomé group had to endure other indignities as well. In the OAU handbook the purported picture of the country’s president was actually that of the former health minister, a political dissident who had fled to Europe. Public relations officers scurried around and pasted into the booklet a proper portrait of President Manuel Pinto da Costa.

  For the seventy or so journalists who converge on every OAU summit—only five or six are Africans, the others are Westerners—the three-day spectacle is an exercise in patience and an ordeal of frustration. All but the opening and closing sessions of the OAU are conducted in secrecy; OAU officials operate on the premise that if you don’t give the reporters any information, perhaps they won’t write anything at all; and accommodations are, well, dicey. In Gabon some journalists arrived at their assigned hotels and found buildings still under construction; the hotel had no employees, doors, water or electricity, and the guests’ $50-a-night “rooms” were nothing more than open space in uncarpeted corridors, to be shared with bags of cement. In Sierra Leone, members of the press were relegated to cots in the “visiting” locker room of the national soccer stadium. Liberia tried to solve its accommodation problem by bringing in a forty-year-old cruise ship, the former S.S. America, and turning it into a hotel for journalists and low-ranking
delegates. The public was allowed aboard to drink, gamble and sightsee, and on the summit’s final night so many people from Monrovia showed up that the Italian captain ordered the decks cleared, for fear that the ship might sink. But everyone was having too good a time to leave. The Liberian police were called, and the helmeted officers waded aboard in riot gear with billy clubs flailing. Within an hour the liner had been abandoned by all but the crew.

  When journalists have problems during a summit, they are free to try to locate an OAU representative euphemistically referred to as the press spokesman. But the man filling that job during the three summits I covered, Peter Onu of Nigeria, seldom showed up for even his own briefings. At one point he disappeared for thirty-six hours, and when he finally did appear at the podium, he had only one announcement: “No questions, I’ll take them at the evening briefing.” Later, the evening briefing was canceled. When an Agence France-Presse reporter filed a story that displeased him, Onu announced that the entire four-man AFP bureau would be expelled from Gabon, an edict that Bongo overruled. All right, then, Onu said, delegates would no longer be allowed to talk with journalists.

  One of the best sources for finding out what is going on behind the closed conference doors comes from the West, not from Africa. The United States, Britain and Australia all send young diplomats specializing in “OAU-watching” to the summit. They manage to obtain press credentials and to keep several key African delegates on their payroll. During nighttime meetings in parking lots and bathrooms, the diplomats receive copies of the classified documents under debate from their African agents. The issues might involve proposed recognition for the liberation-group fighting in the western Sahara or Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda or formation of a human rights policy. There is little conclusive action, but the documents enable the diplomats to cable their governments in Washington, London and Sydney with an accurate assessment of the OAU’s thinking.

  Inside the conference hall the façade of unity crumbles as soon as the doors are locked, and each year there is usually at least one memorable fistfight on the floor between warring delegations. While presidents boo and hiss one another and translators work feverishly inside four glassed-in booths* and the chairman shouts “Order, order!,” Africa breaks into the various factions that divide a continent: there are the so-called moderate countries, friendly to the West, and the so-called progressives, aligned with the East; there are the Moslem countries and the Christian countries; the Arabs and the blacks; the wealthy oil producers such as Nigeria and Libya, and the impoverished international beggars such as Rwanda and Tanzania; the French- and English-speaking countries (as well as five Portuguese-speaking countries and one nation, Equatorial Guinea, that speaks Spanish); the countries that harbor their neighbors’ dissident groups and the lucky few that have formed alliances of friendship across their borders. The Hilton Hotel in Khartoum once made the mistake of checking the delegations from Zaire and Angola into rooms on the same floor. The countries weren’t getting along at the time and heavily armed security men from each nation patrolled the corridor in their undershirts, glaring at one another so fiercely that the hotel manager (a German) moved the Angolans to another floor to avoid a shoot-out.

  What quickly becomes apparent at a summit is that there is more that divides Africa than binds it. In 1982 Africa was so divided over the fate of the Western Sahara and Muammar Qaddafy’s pending chairmanship of the OAU that most heads of state boycotted the annual summit. The presidents who did show up hung around Tripoli for a day, then went home because the quorum necessary to take any action never materialized. They tried to hold another summit in Tripoli a few months later, but this one, too, was aborted, this time over which of the two delegations from Chad was the legal one. It wasn’t until 1983, in Ethiopia, that they managed to finally convene. Qaddafy was so infuriated at being denied the chairmanship that he stormed out of the conference, flew home to Libya with his entourage of female bodyguards and launched an attack on Chad to overthrow the government. The spectacle led more than a few pundits to suggest that the OAU should be renamed the Organization of African Disunity. Its members share the humiliation of their history and the bewilderment of their future, but beyond that, their unity is, in any continental sense, largely an imaginary concept, an idea whose time has come and gone. The Marxist Mozambicans and the capitalistic Senegalese, for example, live in two worlds 4,200 miles apart. The nomadic Tuareg of West Africa and the Kikuyu farmers of East Africa are as different as are Indians and Eskimos of North America. Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the scholarly, disciplined prime minister of Zimbabwe, wouldn’t have much to talk about with Chad’s semiliterate former head of state, Goukouni Oueddei, even if they could speak the same language. The Ethiopians and Somalis have been shooting at one another for a millennium. Individual countries have tried to overcome the diversity within their borders and found that nationalism cannot be created. For a continent of fifty-one countries (including South Africa) to do what a single nation cannot is an improbable assignment, given the depth of the linguistic, ethnic, cultural, philosophical and religious schisms in Africa.

  If Africa’s quest for unity has failed so far, if Africa’s presidents get along no better than the European powers did with one another during the colonial period, no one, least of all the historians, should be surprised. Let’s step back a century to the time when Africa was Balkanized and brought under European domination. It happened in Germany at a conference that not a single African attended.

  The European powers, wanting trade routes, new markets and natural resources, were scrambling for influence in Africa. The competition was stiff and they often used chicanery and deceit to achieve their ambitions. France was pushing toward Timbuktu (now part of Mali), attempting to surround all British possessions in West Africa with a continuous band of French territory; Germany was secretly preparing to take possession of regions more than three times the size of Alaska; Britain was promising that its occupation of Egypt was only temporary (it would later become permanent); Italy was quarreling with France over Tunis; King Leopold II of Belgium was financing expeditions by the explorer H. M. Stanley, who secured treaties with African chiefs that would enable the king to personally control a million square miles.* Leopold soon instituted a system of monopolies in the Congo Free State that prevented international competition, and his rule was as tyrannical and corrupt as any African president’s in the 1980s.

  The acrimonious disputes, though all were solved peacefully, caused much apprehension in Europe, and it was finally decided that the world’s powers had better sit down to determine some game rules for Africa. Delegates from fourteen countries assembled for the Conference of Great Powers in Berlin in October 1884.† Four months later, on February 26, 1885, they signed the General Act of the Berlin Conference, which provided that any power that effectively occupied African territory and duly notified the other powers could thereby establish possession of it. The Berlin treaty, along with other accords signed during the next fifteen years, defined “spheres of influence,” which partitioned the continent among European governments and reduced their rivalry for domination. After a flurry of public debate, anticolonialist protests subsided in France and Italy. Conservative governments ruled in England and Germany. Policies of mercantilism were prevalent from Rome to London. Europe was assertive and nationalistic. Its mood favored colonialism.

  The effect of the Berlin Conference was to divide, not unify. The colonial boundaries were artificial and illogical. They ignored the cultural cohesion of tribal Africa and separated the peoples of ethnic mini-nations held together for centuries by their common heritage and language. No sensible grouping of people remained.

  The Masai, a proud, nomadic, warlike tribe, was split between German-ruled Tanganyika and British-ruled Kenya. And on the other coast, right through the middle of French-speaking Senegal, a narrow strip was inserted that followed the Gambia River from the Atlantic Ocean into the interior; that wormlike intrusion is The Gambia, an English-speaking
country smaller than Connecticut. The Portuguese sold trade rights to the river to English merchants, and England later formalized its presence in a treaty with France. The accord divided the Mandingo and Wolof peoples into two colonies with different languages and different European masters.

  In 1900, Africans living in Europe convened the First Pan-African Conference in London. The move was mainly aimed at providing a sense of community for Africans abroad, but more important, it represented the first step in Africa’s search for African unity. The two world wars—in which 700,000 Africans fought on the side of their colonial masters—brought Africa more into the world’s mainstream, and by the late 1940s the continent’s leaders were turning their attention from the concept of Pan-Africanism to independence. A few leaders still hoped that the continent could merge into a United States of Africa, or at least into regional groups of English- and French-speaking nations. But Africa’s new nations opted at independence to recognize the colonial boundaries rather than try to redefine new national entities. The result was a hodgepodge of countries, and today no one talks anymore about combining sovereignties.

  Most African leaders will admit privately today that the OAU does not work in its present format and needs to be overhauled if it is to be anything more than a symbolic reminder of Africa’s dim dreams of finding an identity and a unity. First, the charter needs to be amended to allow the OAU the authority to influence and even control African events. Second, the power of the heads of state (who are the OAU’s “supreme organs” and the only decision-making body in the organization) should be diminished and partly transferred to the secretary-general, giving him the strength to act independently on urgent matters. And third, member states must stop hiding behind the mask of unity that dictates that any criticism of an African or an African country is detrimental to the well-being of Africa.