The Africans

by David Lamb

  Unfortunately, though, Africa, like the Third World as a whole, expresses itself mainly in clichés and slogans. Most African leaders believe that if they talk long enough and loud enough, someone will listen and take them seriously. But words have lost their meaning. What is said publicly has nothing to do with what is thought privately. People talk at each other, not to each other.

  President France Albert René of the Seychelles drew a warm response at the OAU summit in 1979 when he condemned the new constitution and called for penalties against African countries doing business with South Africa. The logic of such statements defies understanding. At the time, 60 percent of the Seychelles’ trade was with South Africa, and René had suspended his own constitution after coming to power in a coup that overthrew a man who had twice defeated him in free elections.

  In OAU summit after OAU summit, the delegates quite rightly condemn the injustices of apartheid in South Africa. Yet how much credence can those words have on a continent where more than a million people have died at the hands of their own governments in the first two decades of independence? How credible can the voice of the OAU be if it expresses outrage at the death of activist Steve Biko in South Africa and utters not a word of protest while President Idi Amin slaughters Ugandans like cattle during an eight-year rule of terror?

  “The OAU’s silence has encouraged and indirectly contributed to the bloodshed in Africa,” a Ugandan Anglican bishop, Festo Kivengere, told me. “I mean, the OAU even went so far as to go to Kampala for its summit [in 1975] and make Amin its chairman. And at the very moment the heads of state were meeting in the conference hall, talking about the lack of human rights in southern Africa, three blocks away, in Amin’s torture chambers, my countrymen’s heads were being smashed with sledge hammers and their legs were being chopped off with axes.”

  One of Amin’s successors, President Godfrey Binaisa, made the same point in the 1979 summit in Liberia. “There’s no use criticizing others’ human rights records when we are doing the same things,” he said. Binaisa went on to condemn the Central African Empire, where Emperor Bokassa I had recently beaten to death eighty disrespectful schoolchildren, and Equatorial Guinea, where Life-President Macias Nguema Biyogo had murdered one eighth of his country’s population.*

  The conference fell silent as Binaisa delivered his address in soft, reasoned tones. Nodding heads bobbed awake. Empty seats filled. Delegates fidgeted uncomfortably. Never before had an African head of state actually condemned by name another African country for violating its people’s human rights. The delegates were shocked and none too pleased. There was no applause when Binaisa returned to his seat ten minutes later. “He is either a drunk or a traitor; I do not know which,” a delegate from Benin later muttered in the corridors. Binaisa was neither, but the speech was to be his last at an OAU summit. Ten months later he was overthrown.

  Perhaps one day the OAU will feel secure enough to admit that more divides its members than unites them, that candor and criticism can be as healthy as they can be disruptive, that countries with differences can still act as one when the common good is threatened. Perhaps Africa and the outside world simply expected too much too soon from the OAU.

  As Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia said in his opening remarks at the OAU’s founding in 1963, twelve years before he, too, was overthrown, “The Union which we seek can only come gradually …” No one today would contest the wisdom of that comment.

  * In 1982 the OAU admitted as the fifty-first member the Polisario, a guerrilla movement fighting for the independence of the Western Sahara (known by the Polisario as the Democratic Arab Republic of the Sahara).

  * European, not African, languages are spoken by delegates during the official sessions. The ones translated are English, French, Portuguese and sometimes Spanish and Arabic.

  * Leopold’s will, published in 1889, bequeathed his Congo estate to Belgium. After much criticism, Leopold transferred the Congo to Belgium while he was still alive, in 1907.

  † The countries represented at the Berlin Conference were Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Norway (Norway was then part of Sweden), Turkey and the United States. The only important European state that did not attend was Switzerland. All fourteen countries signed the Berlin Act, but only the United States failed to ratify it.

  * Macias ruled Equatorial Guinea from independence in 1968 until he was ousted by his cousin in 1979 and executed. Western human rights organizations estimated that 50,000 Guineans were murdered during that time. Another 100,000 Guineans escaped into exile. Macias, a member of the majority Fang tribe, directed most of his brutality against the Bibis, the best-educated and wealthiest of the country’s ethnic groups. A Catholic-turned-atheist, he celebrated Christmas Eve in 1975 by ordering the shooting and hanging of 150 prisoners in the national soccer stadium. During the spectacle, loudspeakers blared a recording of “Those Were the Days.”

  COUPS AND COUNTERCOUPS

  I am your god and teacher. I am the divine way, the torch that lights the dark. There is no god but Ali Solih.

  ALI SOLIH, the late president of the Comoros, speaking to his people

  THE MOST REMARKABLE ASPECT of Africa’s coups d’état is not how many there are, but how small their impact is on the average citizen’s life. They are usually staged in the name of economic reform and social justice, yet they seldom accomplish either. And when the African awakes, turns on his radio and hears the voice of an unknown general saying that the government has just been taken over, he treats the matter casually. Chances are he has heard it all before. He accepts the change in leadership without debate, hopes for the best and does as he is told.

  True, countries may undergo a radical shift in political orientation, as happened in Ethiopia when Haile Selassie’s feudal, pro-Western government was toppled by a clique of soldiers who were both Marxist and murderous. But except for the land-reform policies the sergeants instituted, the Ethiopian peasantry would hardly have known there was a new government in Addis Ababa. Even in Uganda, the leadership exchange between Milton Obote and Idi Amin did not greatly affect life in the rural areas, where about 80 percent of the population lives. This separation between city rulers and rural subjects helps explain why Africa does not have revolutions in the sense of popular uprisings. It has coups in which power is merely transferred within an inner circle of cousins, friends and soldiers. The procedure is so routine that the coup d’état has become to Africa what a presidential or parliamentary election is to the West—except that the loser often ends up dead or in prison instead of in comfortable retirement.

  In Sierra Leone, army generals brought down the civilian government in 1967; within a matter of months they were overthrown by other senior officers, who in turn were driven from office by a sergeants’ revolt. Benin (formerly Dahomey) endured five military coups d’état, ten attempted coups, twelve governments and six constitutions between 1963 and 1972.* Junior military officers staged a “coup of conscience” in Ghana in 1979 and executed three former heads of state for corruption in the space of a few days, and never managed to bring about a single lasting reform. No sooner had the firing squads laid down their rifles than the black market reopened, government officials began taking bribes again and smuggling of cocoa to neighboring countries resumed. Fifteen countries in Africa have had one coup since independence, thirteen others have had two or more. By 1983, no fewer than fifty governments had been overthrown in independent Africa, and twenty-eight of Africa’s countries had experienced coups d’état. Most coups were politely welcomed by the African citizenry whose lives were already so difficult that any change was viewed as an agreeable alternative.

  It is worth noting that sub-Sahara Africa did enjoy political stability for the first six years of the independence era (1957–1962). But in 1963 the founding president of Togo, Sylvanus Olympio—whom President John F. Kennedy called “one of Africa’s most distinguished leaders”—
was assassinated at the gate of the United States embassy in Lome while seeking refuge. Olympio was a political moderate and fiscal conservative. He had managed to invigorate his fledgling country’s agricultural sector, balance its budget and end its French subsidy. But he paid with his life for refusing to increase the size or salaries of his 250-man army. The soldiers were amazed—and so was the rest of Africa—how easily they had gotten their way. A few shots and they were in business. The precedent was set. With Olympio’s death began a period of continental instability unmatched in the modern world.

  Africa has no tradition of government such as, say, China has had, so as often as not the coups lead to a complete breakdown in effective administration. Why, then, does Africa keep having coups when the results are so seldom positive? Part of the reason is historical, entwined in the same forces that stymied nationalistic causes: tribalism, linguistic diversity, colonial boundaries, unsteady economic foundations. And part is contemporary, reflecting the character of the men at the top:

  In their insecurity, African presidents closed the safety valve of public expression. Dissidents and creative thinkers were killed, jailed or exiled. Newspapers and radio stations were brought under government control. People who did not pay homage to their president, no matter how misguided his ways, were considered traitors. Discontent built, tension rose. Each country became a sort of pressure cooker. There was no escape for the steam. And when the pressure became too great to contain, there was an inevitable explosion.

  Colonialism ensured stability. It was the symbol of continuity, of law and order. When that era ended, there was a void with no strong central authority, except perhaps the military. Uneducated, ambitious men stepped into the vacuum, and the only power base they could immediately establish was built on the strength of the gun. In civilian countries the army became, in effect, the opposition party, waiting in the wings for an opportunity to test its theories on how to run a government.

  The European powers, as I mentioned earlier, imposed on Africa a political system that did not work. Parliamentary democracy was a luxury for Africa’s young, uncertain governments. When the inherited systems broke down, neophyte presidents disposed of the Old Guard, but they had not thought out any sensible substitute. They tried to write new rules without understanding the old ones. The first coup usually settled nothing; it only led to another.

  A man who gains power in Africa does not surrender it voluntarily. In the West a president can be impeached or voted out of office, a prime minister can be brought down by a vote of no confidence. Although some countries such as Kenya do have “no confidence” provisions in their constitutions, no such tradition of succession exists in Africa. Presidents become life-presidents (one even became emperor). However overdue their departure, they stay until they are killed or driven from office, believing that, as with a village chief, their right to rule is inalienable.

  There are three specific coups d’état, each representing a different dimension of how and why governments are overthrown, that deserve a closer look. Two of the coups symbolize the extremes: in the Comoros the horrors preceded the coup; in Liberia they followed it. The third coup, in the Seychelles, comes closer to the norm, for it was a harmless, foolish affair that need not have happened at all.

  The Comoros islands are only a speck in the Indian Ocean, four volcanic islets that, from the window of an airplane, look no bigger than icebergs, lost and adrift in the choppy seas. The islands are very beautiful and very poor and are known primarily, if at all, for their ilang-ilang, an exotic flower whose extract is widely used in French perfumes. But except for the ilang-ilang, the fine sandy beaches and the soft ocean breezes, the Comorian people can count few blessings. Resourceless, destitute and disease-ridden, their island republic is the waif of the French colonial empire, the stepchild of an independence movement that promised so much and delivered so little.

  Potable water is still a luxury on the islands, collected during the rainy season in masonry cisterns. Illiteracy among the 400,000 Comorians tops 90 percent. Bananas make up 20 percent of the people’s caloric intake, and half the children die before the age of five. There are only 14,000 paid jobs in the entire country, and it was not until 1976 that the Comoros manufactured its first farm implement, a wooden hoe. The islands had nine doctors and no working telephones when I arrived in Moroni, the capital, on a rattling DC-3 from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, four hundred miles away. The only dentist had left two years earlier, and an old travel guide I picked up in my hotel—where I was the only guest—advised: “If you fall seriously ill on the Comoros, fly to Paris.”

  The Comoros—comprising only 693 square miles, one-sixth the size of Yellowstone National Park—declared unilateral independence from France in July 1975, thus becoming a republic and, later, the 143rd member of the United Nations.* France retaliated by promptly withdrawing its $18 million annual subsidy and five hundred technicians. Disaster was inevitable. Twenty-eight days after the French flag was furled, the Comoros had its first coup d’état. Attempted coups followed in each of the next three years, including one masterminded by the president’s press attaché. People died, the prisons were filled, paranoia gave way to a national insanity. The période noire, as it became known, had begun, and what happened next was as bizarre as anything modern Africa has ever seen. It was a drama whose cast of characters included a demented president, a white mercenary looking for a winning side after twenty-three years of fighting for losers, and two wealthy Comorian exiles, one of them an ex-president, plotting their return to the islands from the seclusion of a penthouse apartment in Paris.

  Ali Solih had seemed normal enough when he first came to power in a coup six months after independence. He was thirty-nine years old then, balding with a slight paunch. He had three attractive wives and he gave each her due share of attention. He was an atheist and a moderate drinker, despite his early Moslem upbringing, and was known as something of an idealist, frequently extolling the virtues of the Chinese revolution. His record as a senior civil servant in the ministry of agriculture was undistinguished. On the surface at least, there was nothing to suggest that this mild-mannered, bland government official would soon be transformed into the Madman of Moroni.

  “Do not believe all you hear about Ali Solih; my son was a good boy,” his seventy-nine-year-old mother, Mahamouda Mze, said one afternoon, receiving me in her tiny tin-roofed home a few miles from Moroni. Her living room was dark and cool behind the frayed blankets she had nailed across the open windows. An old Marconi radio sat in the corner, useless because her village had never had electricity. She had placed a rear-view auto mirror and a vase of plastic roses on a table near the radio for decoration. She lit her kerosene lamp, the blazing sun outside invisible in the blackened chamber she seldom left.

  “You know,” she said, “Ali would come every month to bring me food and a few francs, and he was always talking about how he wanted to do something for his people. He said Communism was best for a poor country like this. He said experiments with it failed in Tanzania and all over Africa, but he was going to make it work and all the world would look to the Comoros.

  “When he made the coup, I was scared. I did not want him to be president because I knew he would make many enemies.” She paused, taking a sip from the warm Coca-Cola bottle she held. Then she went on, “Now you tell me something. How could this thing happen? What went wrong?”

  Clearly, some great change came over Ali Solih. Some say it was the drugs and alcohol that changed him. Others believe he had a mental breakdown. Whatever the reason, the pressures of the presidency far exceeded the limits of his abilities. His fuzzy notion of national goals grew dim in the glow of personal power and the pleasures it could bring. The men with the brains to think or the courage to speak went to jail or to their graves until only the sycophants were left. The Comoros became Solih’s personal toy, and like a child with a new Christmas present, he played and experimented and manipulated, ending one game and starting another whenever he b
ecame bored.

  Boasting that he had “changed the people’s mentality,” he put together his own parody of the Chinese revolution. He fired the 3,500 members of the civil service and turned the government over to teen-age dropouts, the group he could most easily indoctrinate. He lowered the voting age to fourteen, burned 134 years of French administrative records and declared himself a prophet. He closed the hotels (“Foreign influence corrupts,” he declared) and nationalized everything from the taxi cabs to the bread shops. He brought in Chinese advisers to guide him and Tanzanian soldiers to protect him. He denounced religion as a curse and forbade Moslem women to wear black veils. Once he stormed into a mosque and raged at the worshipers, “Go ahead. Call on God! See if He answers.”

  For days at a time he refused to leave his white stucco palace. He divorced his wives and kept steady company with a bevy of young girls in his second-floor bedroom, drinking whiskey and smoking hashish and watching movies on his 16mm projector until the sun came up and the light of morning calmed his nerves. During the day he popped Valiums. His eyes grew bloodshot, his mumbled words became incoherent.

  Through the streets of Moroni, past the little whitewashed homes and the clusters of empty shops and the shuttered high school, roamed the youth brigade that Solih had sanctioned. Its members were illiterate toughs, and the so-called revolution—of which they had not the vaguest understanding—had bestowed upon them their first taste of authority. They had no ideology other than the power of the gun, and they killed and terrorized and raped. Petty criminals and “counterrevolutionaries” were marched through the narrow, winding streets, dressed in burlap grain sacks, their heads shaved and their faces painted with white stripes. A member of the youth brigade followed each procession with a megaphone, announcing the prisoner’s alleged crimes to the Comorians who lined the way.