by David Lamb
At Angola’s only functioning cotton mill, Africa Textile, outside Benguela, so many workers were showing up three and four hours late each day that the company sold everyone a bicycle at cost and began rewarding punctual workers with cloth at reduced prices. Absenteeism still averages 30 percent.
When production falls at the General Tire plant, a party meeting is called and the workers vote, usually unanimously, to declare a “Red Saturday”—an extra workday, which they donate without pay. General Tire had a Red Saturday during my visit, and only 3 of the 150 employees showed up—two foreigners and a party official.
“Our production was really hurt by all the political meetings the workers hold at the drop of a hat,” a foreign executive at Africa Textile said. “Now, finally, we’ve convinced the party to ban meetings, except after five P.M. on Friday. I told the party, ‘Look, you’ve got the only mill still operating in Angola. Why not leave it alone?’ ”
For most Angolans, ideology is just something they must live with. They cannot escape it, but they don’t pay much attention to it either. In one of the few factories operating in Luanda I asked a worker what he thought of an uncomplimentary drawing of President Carter scrawled on the nearby wall. “Who did you say that is?” the worker asked, puzzled. Then, after a lengthy pause, he added, “Is he Communist?” The bookstores are among the few shops still open in Luanda, but they sell only Communist literature. The newspapers are filled not with news but with propaganda. The ruling party exhorts the hungry masses to labor for society’s benefit while weeds and jungle reclaim the plantations, mothers nurse their babies on tea and sugar, and the standard of living deteriorates by the day.
“Angola, Angola, Angola!” a navy lieutenant exclaimed, throwing up his hands in exasperation one day when most of his men didn’t show up for a training exercise. “What is this thing we have created?”
* Brazil, a former Portuguese colony, has become a major trading partner with black Africa, seeking in particular to capitalize on its cultural and linguistic ties with Angola and Mozambique. Trade between the Brasilia government and Africa increased fourteenfold from 1970 to 1980. Among Brazil’s major exports are vehicles and food products.
* Except for its oil, in 1980 Angola was not producing much more than six hundred rubber tires a day and some textiles. It was importing half its food, and its agricultural exports had tumbled. Coffee production, for example, fell from 205,000 metric tons in 1974 to 25,000 tons in 1980. The diamond mines were earning less than a quarter of the $80 million they had brought in at independence. Most of the Benguela Railroad had been knocked out of operation by the antigovernment guerrillas. The government had not even published a budget since 1977.
* Like Neto and Roberto, Savimbi was the product of a missionary education. But he was the only one of the three who spent most of his time in the bush with his troops. Neto and Roberto lived outside Angola during the war years.
SHADOW FROM ABROAD
The United States better start taking care of things it knows how to take care of. We know so little of Africa, the 800 [sic] and some tribes that make up Africa … I say it is like a different world.
—SENATOR HUBERT HUMPHREY, 1976
ONCE IT WOULD have been easy simply to forget Africa. But no longer. By the 1980s the world had come courting and the stakes were high: Africa’s untapped mineral reserves were among the most plentiful in the world; its location was a strategic one from which a military power could control the West’s major oil-shipping routes as well as the Red Sea, gateway to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean; its strength as a political bloc was sufficient to affect decisions made in the United Nations; its growing markets were absorbing billions of dollars in foreign goods every year and demanding more; its unfilled farmlands were fertile and huge, a potential breadbasket for millions of people at home and abroad. Yet for all its riches, Africa was still virgin territory, vulnerable to internal pressures, susceptible to external influence. It was an inviting prospect for foreign suitors who came calling with gifts of guns and money.
And from Moscow to Washington, from Rio de Janeiro and Havana to Paris and Tokyo, governments jockeyed for influence, for a stake in the future of this continent, which twenty or thirty years from now might carry the weight to tip the world’s balance of power, one way or the other. The first “scramble for Africa” occurred a century ago when the European powers met in Berlin to carve up the Dark Continent for themselves. This new “invasion” was more subtle but its aims were similar: economic and strategic domination. So far, Africa has fallen into line. It needs money from the West to survive and weapons from the Eastern bloc to fight the enemy of the moment. And in accepting those dollars and guns, it has become as beholden to and dependent on foreign governments as it was in the final days of colonialism. It speaks of being left alone to find African solutions to African problems, but when there is a problem, military or economic, the summons for help immediately goes out to Paris or Moscow or London or Washington. It speaks of being nonaligned, but with the exception of oil-rich Nigeria, has not the clout to act or speak independently. So a new division, this one ideological, has appeared in Africa, dividing the continent in half. One group, the so-called progressives, looks to Moscow as its patron saint; the other, the so-called moderates, has cast its lot with the West. The groupings are helter-skelter, not regional, and as cross-border rivalries heighten, the potential for superpower confrontation increases.
There is a saying that you cannot buy the allegiance of an African government—you can only rent it for a day. And that pretty well sums up the risks involved for those investing in Africa’s future. Governmental loyalties change overnight and are sometimes available to the highest bidder. Moderate presidents are overthrown by progressive ones, who are toppled by army generals, who are ousted by army sergeants. Economies are nationalized and denationalized, foreign communities are expelled and invited back.
No foreign power should know this better than the Soviet Union. But the Russians are slow learners—and the most racist of all the foreigners in black Africa.* They live in compounds surrounded by high stone walls, seldom mix with Africans except at diplomatic functions and do not hire Africans for even the lowliest embassy job. They bring their own receptionists, cooks and chauffeurs from home. In Mogadishu, Somalia, and Lobito, Angola, special beaches were set aside for the Russians. In Conakry, Guinea, the Russians rode from their fortresslike embassy to their residential compound in buses, even though they could have walked the distance in five minutes. One day, strolling through an outdoor market in Mogadishu with a group of Western journalists, we were surrounded by an angry crowd. The people shook their fists at us and glared and repeated over and over, “Ruusk, Ruusk, Ruusk.” Finally our translator said something in Somali. The mood softened and the crowd pulled back to let us pass. “Don’t worry,” our guide said. “They thought you were Russians.”
Such hostility should surprise no one. Almost every African country that formed an intimate relationship with Moscow—among them Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Somalia and the Sudan—eventually discovered that they were on the wrong end of an unbalanced deal; the heavy-handed Russians were sent packing. The Soviet policy in Africa is based on capitalizing on regional instability and on providing the military hardware—but not the developmental assistance—needed to buy the dependence of various radical factions. Throughout the seventies, Moscow was content to probe for weak spots and to collect a few pieces of real estate here and there, adding Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola to its current cluster of allies. For the eighties, Moscow’s goal appears to be the extension of a Soviet-influenced belt that would reach across southern Africa from Mozambique to Angola and would isolate pro-Western South Africa, the continent’s only industrialized nation. It is a policy of opportunism that benefits only the Soviet Union.
The worry to the West is not that one or two African countries will become Communist; it is that a Soviet presence in any country has a destabilizing effect on the entire region
. Economic growth and political stability do not give rise to radical regimes; poverty and turmoil do. A peaceful Africa, prosperous and steady, is to the advantage of the West—and, of course, Africa itself—but not the Soviet Union. Take a map of Africa and put a red pin in every country where the government is especially repressive, where warfare engulfs the land, where the economy is a shambles. And wherever there is a pin, that’s where the Soviet Union’s influence is the strongest.
Few African countries have ever benefited from that relationship. Moscow’s first “developmental” gift to Guinea, a tropical West African country where few homes have running water, consisted of two snowplows and ten thousand toilet seats. French-speaking Chad got twelve Soviet university professors, who knew only one language—Russian. In Somalia, Moscow constructed a meat-packing facility, but the bulk of production went to the Soviet Union at discount prices. In Tanzania, Moscow built the last thing that backward country needed—a $30 million air-missile system to protect Dar es Salaam. Ethiopia had to mortgage its coffee crop for the next ten years to repay Moscow for the $1 billion arms airlift of 1977–1978. Guinea-Bissau buys fish taken in its own waters by Russian fishermen and packed in cans labeled “Caught in the Soviet Union.” In Mozambique, Spain pays $2 million annually for fishing rights; the Soviet Union gets them for nothing. Under terms of an agreement favorable to Moscow, the Soviets “vacuum-clean” the fish from the Mozambique Channel, keeping the best 75 percent of the catch and selling the leftovers to Mozambique’s Marxist government. In Angola, sixty cents of every dollar the government earns goes to the military or to repay Soviet debts. For each Cuban teacher or technician in Angola, the government pays Havana $600 a month. It also pays for the Cubans’ housing and utilities. Even to comrades, Moscow gives nothing for free and at some point it always calls in its debts.
The Soviet Union has become by far the largest arms supplier to Africa, providing eleven times more weapons than the United States and four times more than France. This alone gives Moscow considerable clout; without those guns at least two governments, Angola’s and Ethiopia’s, would not be in power today. But the Soviet Union’s biggest advantage in Africa is historical and psychological: Washington backed the colonial powers in Africa right up to the dawn of independence; Moscow supported the liberation movements. It is, though, naïve to take this tradition one step further and say that therefore the Soviet Union is Africa’s “natural ally.” But I met more than a few educated Africans, many of them Ethiopians schooled in the United States, who believe precisely that. They resent the economic and political strength of the United States, its backing of South Africa, its bullylike tactics in international forums, its professed concern for human rights abroad while having given its own minority groups at home much to complain about.
There’s an interesting point here. These same Africans speak with respectful awe of the American Revolution, considering it the model of an oppressed people’s triumph over colonialism. They know the U.S. Constitution better than most American schoolchildren do and mention it often as a document that reflects the dreams of all mankind. And if the United States and the Soviet Union both lifted visa restrictions and invited free immigration, Washington would have to send a larger fleet than it used in the Normandy invasion to carry the exodus out of Africa. Moscow wouldn’t be able to fill a Boeing 727. Why? Because Africans know the United States offers an individual something they can’t find at home or in the Soviet Union—an opportunity for economic advancement in a free society.
Washington has never known how to react to this love-hate affair. Nor has it ever been sure how to deal with Moscow’s clumsy, militarily aggressive posture in Africa. It had a chance to confront Moscow in Angola in 1975, in the Horn of Africa in 1977 and in the Rhodesian civil war that led to the birth of Zimbabwe in 1980. Each time, it backed off and sought political rather than military solutions. As it turned out, having no policy or at least a nonbelligerent policy proved to be the best policy of all. Zimbabwe became independent with a Marxist head of state, Robert Mugabe, who was thoroughly distrustful of Moscow. Angola and Ethiopia sunk deeper into internal warfare and economic chaos, making the Soviet Union’s investment an expensive one that was unlikely to return any dividends for a long time. If you accept the premise, as I do, that Communism is not a long-range threat to black Africa, it is entirely possible Moscow may never get any return on its money at all.
No doctrine, in fact, is more in conflict with the inherent character of Africa than Communism. First, Africans are religious, whether that religion is Christianity, Islam or animist. Second, Africans are capitalistic, collecting cattle or money as greedily as any Western entrepreneur. Third, Africans ate historically democratic, choosing their village chiefs and clan elders by varying forms of consensus. Fourth, Africans are individualistic, willing to labor for themselves or their tribe, but seldom showing much interest in the broader, abstract concepts of nation or state. Fifth, Africans simply do not work or produce when they are not rewarded with economic incentive.
The United States can capitalize on this natural antithesis toward Communism by convincing Africa that economic development and security are interdependent, that the longer-term advantages of economic assistance are far greater than the short-term ones of military support.
To accomplish this, the United States and its Western allies must provide the technical and financial aid that African countries, even Marxist nations such as Ethiopia and Angola, need to arrest their deterioration and to develop economic and political self-reliance. That in turn will make Africa less dependent on outside meddlers. At some point Africa’s radical states will realize that posters of Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels hanging in their main squares look as foolish and as un-African as would portraits of Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson. Until that happens, Africa will continue to take its guns from the East, its money from the West. But one president after another has learned that the expertise and financial resources needed for tomorrow’s growth are available only in the West, and if Africa is to develop a skilled, enterprising propulation, it is to the West that the continent must turn, just as it always has in the past.
The Soviet Union pumped $1 billion worth of weapons into Ethiopia in 1977 and 1978 to help that country gain a military advantage over two different antigovernment guerrilla movements, in the Ogaden and in Eritrea. When a severe drought struck the Ethiopian provinces of Wallo and Tigre a few months after the arms airlift, Moscow gave nary a ruble for relief. Marxist Ethiopia turned to the West and emergency assistance poured in, including $2.5 million from the United States. Drought struck again in 1983, and again it was only the West that helped.
The Gulf Oil Co. suspended production in Angola during that country’s civil war in the mid-seventies. One of the first moves of the Marxist government that came to power was to ask Gulf to resume production, which the company did. Gulf’s complex is located in the Cabinda region, and security for the U.S. interests there is provided by none other than Fidel Castro’s Cuban troops. And who did Angola retain as its economic consultants? The Boston firm of Arthur D. Little.
The UN Security Council pledged $385 million in 1976 to help Mozambique counter the financial drain of closing its border with Rhodesia, a move Mozambique hoped would help bring down the white-minority government in Salisbury. Only about $100 million of the pledge was ever delivered to Mozambique, but every cent of it came from the West.
In the late 1970s, the Soviet Union attempted to expand its political influence in the eight West African nations that comprise the constantly drought-stricken Sahel. Moscow increased the size of some of its embassy staffs, but not the amount of its donations. Again, economic assistance for the region came from the West, $1 billion in 1978 alone, of which the United States gave $67 million.
Until the arrival of the Carter Administration, the United States had displayed a remarkable insensitivity toward and ignorance of black Africa. Washington professed support for the aspirations of the emerging nations but i
ts real sentiments lay with the white man in Africa—the Portuguese, South African, Rhodesian. In 1962, for instance, the United States voted for a UN resolution criticizing Portugal’s colonial rule in Africa. But then, because Washington wanted continued access to Lajes Air Base in the Azores, Presidents Kennedy and Nixon both strengthened U.S. support for Portugal and voted with the Portuguese on almost every issue involving colonialism.
President Nixon continually refused to receive African heads of state visiting Washington or New York, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wouldn’t even see African ambassadors in Washington except as a group, an oversight that African statesmen quite properly found demeaning. To justify his boredom with Africa, Kissinger maintained privately that it was impossible to formulate an African policy. The place was too diverse, too politically incohesive, he said; you would need forty or fifty policies, not just a single one.
He was wrong. The Carter Administration gave top priority to forging a more equal partnershp with the Third World. Carter visited Nigeria in 1978—the first U.S. President ever to pay an official visit to a black African country. His Administration was actively involved in the settlement that ended the Rhodesian civil war and led to the independence of Africa’s fifty-first nation, Zimbabwe. And Washington began putting some distance between itself and the white supremacist regime in South Africa. Carter and his UN ambassador, Andrew Young, paid so much attention to Africa, in fact, that the British prime minister, James Callaghan, remarked, “There seems to be a number of new Christopher Columbuses setting out from the United States to discover Africa for the first time. Africa has been there for a long time.”