by David Lamb
But in his search for international respectability, Touré had a hard time living down the past. He had always been single-minded and ruthless in his pursuit of revolutionary goals. His authority was unquestioned. His cabinet ministers might suggest, but only Touré decided. The state, the presidency and the party were all one, and politics were discussed only in hushed tones. None but the foolhardy challenged the Clairvoyant Guide.
Thousands of Guineans who tried to go against the tide had been imprisoned or killed. Torture was as common as the waving of Touré’s symbolic white handkerchief. By the best count available, seventeen of Touré’s cabinet ministers were shot or hanged between 1958 and the late 1970s, eighteen others were condemned to life in prison at hard labor. Several years ago the bloated bodies of five hanged officials were left to sway from the downtown Castro Bridge for two days as a lesson to the masses. Touré’s murdered victims included Diallo Telli, the secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity. As many as two million Guineans—a staggering total of 40 percent of all the Guinean people—have escaped their homeland to live in exile in other African and European countries.
When Amnesty International accused the Touré regime of practicing torture, the president replied in a word: “Rubbish.” He offered to open his prisons to any African president who was prepared to open his own to the same inspection. None accepted.
In his telegram to me, Touré said:
Those who have criticized Guinea [in connection with human rights] have never known its realities.
We consider them “sick doctors” for they pass judgment on people on whom they have never set eyes.
… Defining the rights of man is an abstraction, for that right differs from country to country. But what one should demand in the name of humanity, justice and human dignity is the nondiscrimination between men of the same country, and in Guinea there exists no discrimination.
Men and women are treated equally, really equally. Tribal differences have been erased. There is no distinction between colors or religions. The rights of the people are safeguarded better in Guinea than in many other countries of the world. We need not apologize to anyone.
Touré has a point, for there have been some intangible benefits from his decision to go it alone. Even though only 12 percent of the farmland is cultivated now and Guinea is forced to import most of its food, even though the per capita income of $210 has, in real terms, dropped since independence, even though signs of Guinea’s great potential wealth are nowhere to be seen and the country has only 300 miles of paved roads, Guinea is a country virtually without crime, corruption, prostitution or beggars. There is not a single foreigner holding down any key government position. There has been no disruptive rural exodus in Guinea because there is nothing in the cities to attract people. There have been no unfulfilled aspirations in Guinea because to know nothing else is to want nothing more. Guineans do not travel freely to the Ivory Coast to see how that country has changed. They do not listen to radio stations or read newspapers that give them access to uncensored opinions. They know only the world Touré has created for them, and in that world, there is no gap between rich and poor because everyone is poor. Even Conakry’s few businessmen live in dirt-floor hovels shared with chickens and goats.
If Guineans expect more, they do not show it. They express, in fact, a pride in their nationhood that is rare in Africa, an awareness that Touré, regardless whether he courts the Russians or the French, has not compromised his revolutionary principles during more than two decades of independence. Touré has done it his way and he is indebted to no one. If all 350 foreigners left Guinea tomorrow, the country would be no worse off than it is today. Touré’s emphasis has been nationalistic, not tribalistic, his concerns have centered on what he calls human development, not on economic growth.* Rather than being resentful, the Guineans have accepted Touré’s priorities and have become more secure in their own identity than most African people, more comfortable with the paucity of amenities than others.
That has been the major accomplishment of black Africa’s senior statesman, who once proclaimed, “All Africa is my problem.” It is, though, a modest accomplishment compared with the huge cost the Guineans have had to pay for a president who gave his people poverty and repression along with the promised freedom.
After my visit to Guinea, I wrote a long story about Touré that appeared on page one of the Los Angeles Times. I felt sure he would be offended by my description of the repression and economic sluggishness in Guinea. On the contrary, Touré told a U.S. diplomat in Conakry that he was delighted with the article, the he felt it was a fair and balanced assessment of Guinea’s place in Africa. Those were adjectives a Western journalist does not often hear from an African president, and they just went to show that Touré had no apologies for anything he had done. Indeed, some Africanists believe Touré has chosen a wiser long-range course for his country than has Houphouët-Boigny. They say he has disciplined and organized his people, has given them a sense of nationhood and has contained the temptations, greed and self-interest that can erode the foundations of nationhood.
But what would happen if the Guineans had a choice? What would happen if they had a chance to get a piece of something rather than being assured a slice of nothing? If they could speak their mind without fear of reprisal, if they were given the freedom to question and ponder, what would they say?**
*The fact that Guineans are less tribal than most Africans is partly attributal to the country’s relative absence of ethnic diversity: three major tribes—Foulah, Malinké and Soussous—and fifteen minor ones.
**Touré died of a heart ailment in March, 1984. The next week the army overthrew Guinea’s caretaker government, accusing Touré of running a ruthless dictatorship and promising a return to democracy.
CULTURE SHOCK
In Africa the clock is always at five minutes to twelve.
—ANONYMOUS
GENERALLY, THE LESS INTELLIGENT the white man is, the more backward he thinks the African is. “But they didn’t even have the wheel,” old settlers will say, implying that if it weren’t for the European, Africa would still be the Dark Continent. This simply isn’t true. The African devised systems—political, social, economic—that worked fine for him. It was only when he was thrust into a Western-oriented world that those systems started to break down. The African culture shock that an outsider encounters has to be considered in that context because everything is tainted by the newness of the African’s confrontation with the modern world.
Most Western tourists who visit the continent are pretty well isolated from the mind-bending frustrations of Africa. They are whisked from the airport to a Hilton or an Inter-Continental Hotel to a game-viewing lodge to a tour of Nairobi’s city market and back to the airport for a flight to London or Rome. But if you linger, you quickly realize that all those things you learned in the West about punctuality, efficiency and rational thought processes don’t have much to do with Africa. Africa can only be explained in terms of Africa. It is a different world where the shortest distance between two points is seldom a straight line, where patience is more than a virtue; it is a necessity for survival. Africa has taken all the worst aspects of European bureaucracy, combined them with ignorance and indifference, and come up with a system that is as undirected, as lethargic as a rudderless dhow in a rough sea. Niceties aside, Africa just doesn’t work very well.
In West Africa the expatriates have a word to describe their losing battles with life’s daily encounters. The word is WAWA, an acronym for West Africa Wins Again. It is a reminder that to avoid stress, you move with the system, not around it or through it. If the phone doesn’t work, the hotel is out of food, the air conditioner sputters and dies, the government official shows up three hours late for his appointment with you, the plane doesn’t arrive on the scheduled day, much less the appointed hour, you merely shrug and dismiss your travails with the words, “I was WAWAed.” The malady is rarely fatal.
The African is
mystified when a Westerner gets upset with these inconveniences, considering such signs of impatience a peculiarity of the Europeans and Americans. The African doesn’t live his life by a clock and he doesn’t get ruffled if things move slowly or not at all under the warm tropical sun. He will wait quietly in line for three or four hours to pay his water bill and obediently help fill stadiums to hear his leaders drone on for an afternoon about political philosophies he doesn’t understand. He will queue all day at a hospital to see a doctor and move on without a word of protest—to return the next day—when told the doctor isn’t seeing any more patients. What’s the rush? he will ask. Time is the one thing in life there is an abundance of.*
The most enduring memory of Africa I have is of idleness (not laziness): of thousands of Kenyans stretched out dozing on every inch of grass in Nairobi; of crowds sitting in city squares, of block-long lines outside government offices, of a hundred or more people waiting silently in a hospital emergency room, some with broken bones or festering wounds, hoping to see a doctor. Sometimes I would return to my Nairobi office after lunch and find a dozen people sitting there with my Ugandan secretary. They would be staring at the wall, no one talking, their hands folded in their laps. They had nowhere to go and nothing else to do. There were few jobs. Even for those who did work, the economic incentives in Africa are so small—a Tanzanian farmer receives ten cents from his government for producing the pound of freshly roasted coffee beans you pay $5 for in an American supermarket—that idleness is a tolerable alternative to work. And in those circumstances life is not lived by a clock.
But, curiously, if you put an African behind the wheel of a car, he is transformed. Speed becomes crucial. White-knuckled and seemingly as intent as a race-car driver, he careens at breakneck clip down hills and around corners, his vehicle inevitably as jam-packed as a Tokyo subway car. Posted speed limits are ignored by drivers and not enforced by policemen, vehicle safety inspections are not required, seat belts are virtually unknown. The result is a highway carnage bloodier than most old tribal wars.
In Zaire the road from the airport to Kinshasa is littered with scores of smashed cars left to rust. In Nigeria the new sixty-mile freeway linking Lagos and Ibadan resembles a deadly carnival game of bumper cars with kamikazelike drivers whizzing by left and right, roaring up behind other vehicles, swerving or jamming on their brakes at the last second. In Uganda, army trucks tear down the middle of the potholed roads, and oncoming traffic is expected to head for the shoulders.
Kenya has less than 2,000 miles of paved roads, yet about 1,500 persons die on them each year. After forty-four people died in one pile-up outside Nakuru in 1979, the police commissioner, Ben Gethi, announced a campaign aimed at the “control of drinking habits when using roads.” If Californians drove the way Kenyans did, and you took into account the number of registered vehicles and the miles of usable roads in both places, the annual death toll would exceed 120,000.
South Africa’s National Road Safety Council says that whites own 72 percent of the country’s four million vehicles and account for 21 percent of the road fatalities. Blacks own 12 percent of the vehicles and account for 62 percent of the deaths. In an attempt to reduce the slaughter, the council buys space in newspapers aimed at black readers and publishes a comic strip called “The Crazy Adventures of Bobo.” The hero is a black, naïve about the perils facing him when he takes the wheel.
It is difficult to find a satisfactory explanation for the Africans’ propensity to pass on blind curves and drive at out-of-control speeds. The best one, I suppose, is that an African does not conceptualize a potential problem the way a Westerner does. The Westerner says, If I do this, that might happen. The uneducated African does A without reasoning that it could lead to B. If an oncoming car has to swerve off the road to avoid his vehicle, and there is no collision and no injuries, the African does not say, Next time I’d better not do that. He will do exactly the same thing because he has, after all, accomplished his objective of getting from one point to another without major mishap. He does not deal with the unexpected on a sophisticated level because to do so is, again, a quality of education and training, and the automobile is a new device to most Africans.
One evening the body of a pedestrian was lying on the four-lane highway near our house in Nairobi. The rush-hour traffic veered around it at high speed, but no one stopped. Occasionally a car would neglect to swerve and would strike the body. The driver would continue on, his accelerator pushed to the floor. A friend from the United Nations passed the scene and stopped at a pay phone to call the police. He had this conversation:
“Hello. I want to report that there’s a body lying on the highway. Just beyond Riverside Drive.”
“How many are there?” the police dispatcher asked.
“How many what?”
“How many bodies are there?”
“One. There is one dead man on the road who was run over.”
“Is he carrying identification?”
“Look, I don’t know anything except that I’ve stopped up the road at the petrol station to call you.”
“I see. And this man, how long has he been dead?”
The conversation dragged on for another half-minute before the dispatcher asked one final question: “How many did you say there were?”
Such an exchange may unglue a Westerner, but often what is unfathomable to him makes perfect sense to an African. And who’s to say one is right and the other wrong?
On December 8, 1978, for instance, two Zaire air force Mirage jets approached Kinshasa from Bangui. The tower radioed the pilots, Major Uzapango Kanzeka Mba and Captain Luamba Nguy Wanguy, not to land because of limited visibility. Baffled, the pilots abandoned their jets and parachuted to safety. The planes ran out of fuel and crashed into the Atlantic ocean. They had solved the problem.
Then there was the Interpol conference in Nairobi, which attracted top law enforcement officers from throughout the world. At the session I attended, the topic was a broad overview of international counterfeiting and the first speaker was an FBI agent from the Washington headquarters. Midway through his presentation the Ivory Coast’s delegate started frantically waving his hand from the rear of the room. He was recognized and proceeded to read out a list of the serial numbers of all stolen bills in his country.
Or ask my friend Greg Jaynes about WAWA. A correspondent for the New York Times, he had been stationed in Nairobi for only a few days when there was a coup in the Central African Empire. His foreign editor told him to get there as quickly as possible. The Inter-Continental Hotel in Nairobi booked him into the “new” Inter-Con in Bangui, and Jaynes, setting off on his first out-of-town African assignment, was relieved to know that at least a clean room awaited him. He flew from Nairobi to Paris to Bangui—the quickest way to get from East to West Africa is usually via Europe—and arrived in a taxi at the address of the Bangui Inter-Continental Hotel, clutching his confirmation slip. All he found there was a hole in the ground. Construction had not yet started. The driver shrugged and suggested he come back in a year. Jaynes shrugged and found an un-air-conditioned room at the nearby Rock Hotel.
Jaynes had discovered what more experienced travelers already knew: there are few burdens in Africa greater than trying to get from here to there in a hurry. Trains opened up Africa for the adventurous traveler, but now, because the rails are unreliable or inoperable, the roads frequently impassable, and interstate highways all but nonexistent, you must fly. The real function of Africa’s airlines, though, has little to do with providing service or turning a profit. They were established originally to bring a sense of identity and prestige to fledgling nations, so the first priority for most governments at independence, even before expenditures on education and health, was a spanking new airport and an international carrier bearing the new flag.
Air Burundi, for example, had two international flights a week when I lived in Africa, both to Nairobi. It lost $12,000 on each round trip, but Burundi, one of the world’s ten
poorest nations, refused to suspend the service because it wanted the prestige of being an international carrier. Air Tanzania needs hard cash so badly that it doesn’t accept credit cards; and in most countries a foreigner buying a plane ticket cannot use local currency—pounds sterling or dollars only, please. Ghana Airways, once an efficient little carrier with twenty aircraft, was down to four operable planes at last count, including an ancient VC-10 with clogged toilets and faded upholstery. It was known as “Old Faithful” and was used on the prestigious run to London.
Black Africa has twenty-eight national carriers, all of whom lose money, except for Gambia Airways, which has no airplanes. Gambia, a pleasing little West African country that lives by its wits and within its means, owns two flight ramps and runs an office that sells Gambian Airways tickets for transportation on other airlines, thus earning the nonexistent carrier a tidy $250,000 annual profit. As for the other government-owned airlines, well, most have more pressing needs than carrying passengers. Those needs include shuttling presidents and cabinet ministers around the world, ferrying troops and war supplies to various battlefronts, as Ethiopian Airlines does, or transporting coffee to the international marketplace, as Ugandan Airlines’ lone Boeing 707 does. If passengers get bumped as a result, they should expect neither an apology nor a hotel voucher. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset,” I once heard an airline clerk tell a stranded passenger on a Wednesday. “There’s another flight Saturday.”
One morning the phone rang in the Nairobi home of an American journalist. It was Air Zaire and the clerk informed him that his flight to Kinshasa had been delayed two days for technical reasons. How, my friend asked, could the airline be so precise about the length of the delay? “Oh, the president has the plane,” the clerk said, “and he’s promised to return it by Tuesday.”