Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Such is the tension in Burundi that aid-workers in the capital, Bujumbura, developed a code and referred to Tutsis and Hutus as 'tacos' and 'hamburgers', or 'trees' and 'hedges'. I accompanied Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, who became president after the April 1994 plane crash, into the interior on a mission to urge his people to lie down their machetes and save themselves from the horrors of their Rwandan neighbours. He was a Hutu whose presence was tolerated by the dominant Tutsi power brokers to reassure the Hutu majority. In a tiny village surrounded by lush plantations he delivered a thunderous speech.

  'How long is blood going to have to flow in this country? What do you gain when you start killing and shedding blood? Can you drink it? Can you make bricks from it? Who has ever benefited from blood running in the streets? You must live together. It is time for the people to work for peace. I come with a present: justice, unity and peace.'

  Backed up by a vigorous drum roll his appeal for reconciliation was worthy of Mandela. The colourful rhetoric clearly moved his retinue, but it meant little to the thousands of villagers squatting on the deep red earth in front of him. They did not want fine words; they wanted a guarantee of protection from the random vicious attacks of both the Hutu guerrillas and the Tutsi security forces. Two hours later we bounced back in our heavily guarded convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles to the capital. Within a few days the village was once more the scene of vicious fighting.

  Ntibantunganya was Burundi's third president in seven months. He escaped the violent end of his two predecessors but his tenure, too, was abruptly cut short. In 1996, after eighteen months in power, he took refuge in the American Embassy following a coup by hard-line Tutsi army officers, much to the irritation of the Americans, who were believed to have tacitly encouraged the change. For more than a year he was stranded in the embassy and was spotted at receptions, a lonely haggard figure slipping sandwiches into his pockets before being shooed back out of sight by embarrassed American officials.

  After the Rwandan genocide it is easy to understand the West's despair about Africa. It is impossible not to feel heavy hearted when you visit Kigali. Months after the massacres the whiff of rotting flesh lingered in the streets. I found myself longing for a breeze not just to freshen the air but also to cleanse the moral taint. Nowhere was free from the past. Shortly after the genocide I stayed in a Jesuit centre. It was only in the candle-light on my first evening that I saw bloody handprints still marking the walls. Our guide advised us to stay away from Room 28. The next morning I heard how the seventeen priests and novices were first hacked with machetes and then dragged to Room 28 and shot. A mound of bloodstained blankets still lay in the comer. On a back wall was an icon with an inscription: 'God please don't let us waste the world's beauty and joy.'

  The genocide fuelled the weary conviction in the West that the word tribalism in Africa equals 'barbaric' and 'bad'. It was not accidental that, when the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia splintered after the collapse of Communism, the hatreds were described as ethnic, not tribal. The distinction lies at the heart of a perceived divide between the civilized and primitive worlds.

  African commentators rightly decry the hypocrisy. The litany of atrocities in the Yugoslav and post-Soviet wars of the early Nineties shows that Africans are far from having a monopoly on tribalism. Arriving in Africa after reporting in Bosnia, I needed no reminding of the similarities between Europe's and Africa's rifts. Both are linked to the feverish attempt to fashion nation states on the lines of Western Europe. Africa's added burden is that the fault lines are more profound than in Eastern Europe; borders are not only a recent creation, but also in most cases lack the slightest historical or even geographical justification, although this does not apply to Burundi and Rwanda as their boundaries are based on the frontiers of centuries' old kingdoms. With its straight lines and the occasional river frontier, the map of Africa at the Berlin Congress of 1878 no doubt looked very fine to the civil servants in Whitehall or the Quai d'Orsay. But the colonial map-makers were influenced more by the politics of Western Europe than by the reality on the ground. Most of the colonies were a mish-mash of tribes which traditionally had had little in common, like Nigeria with its divisions between the Hausa and Fulani of the north, the heirs of old Muslim kingdoms, and the mainly Christian peoples, the Ibos in the east and the Yoruba in the south, or the Sudan with a similar religious divide, rifts which dictate politics to this day.

  The colonial administrators provided a common enemy for their varied subjects. But once the colonies had been swept into independence the consensus in most cases ended. Consisting of some of the world's most unwieldy and artificial nation states, the new Africa was dangerously vulnerable to tribal infighting. But the real villains of the piece are not the map-makers but the politicians for whom stoking tribal resentments is often a first resort.

  The tribal carnage, which blights Africa, is not inevitable as many in the West suppose. When war erupted in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, Western politicians blamed 'ancient ethnic hatreds' as if somehow amorphous primordial forces were responsible for the bloodshed. The 'inevitability' argument pro vided a convenient pretext to rule out the need for serious analysis and policy decisions. It also created a smokescreen for the guilty politicians. If the Flemish started to massacre the Walloons no doubt there would be voices in London urging caution on the grounds that the two peoples had always been at each other's throats. In just the same way there is a perception in the developed world that tribal massacres are an ineluctable part of modem Africa, whereas in reality tribal identity only leads to bloodshed because of callous politics.

  Just as the Serbs and Croats were primed by their leaders' propaganda into a crude form of ethno-nationalism, so when put to the test many African politicians rely on whipping up tribal passions to stay in power. The brutality of the Rwandan genocide reinforced Western stereotypes about the African savage. There was something about hoes and machetes that made the killing seem still more primal than the idea of neighbours shelling neighbours in Bosnia, and pandered to the old stereo type of Africans as tribal barbarians. But there was nothing random about the massacres. They had been carefully planned. Hutu peasants were whipped into a murderous frenzy by state radio, in an extreme version of the role played by the media in Croatia and Serbia in the countdown to conflict in 1991. It was the old 'them' or 'us' message: Hutus should kill Tutsis before the Tutsis turned on them.

  In a poorly educated society such as Rwanda, where radio was for most people the sole source of news, the broadcasts were especially potent. In Rwanda's patriarchal society it was always unlikely that illiterate peasants would question their orders, particularly because land, or rather greed, provided a tempting personal incentive to take part.

  Known as the country of a thousand hills, Rwanda is not for claustrophobic. It is Africa's most densely populated state- or at least it was said to be in 1994. Every ridge is neatly terraced. Every speck of land is tilled. Once you step off the roads you feel choked by humanity. Before the genocide, about eight million people were eking out a living in a territory smaller than Wales. If it were not for the tropical climate, which assures at least two harvests a year, the nation would starve.

  The calls to kill Tutsis offered an answer to the age-old problem - no more competition for land. As the radio presenters helpfully pointed out, as long as they killed Tutsi babies and children there would be no chance of another generation returning to haunt them.

  So can Africa's tribes learn to live at peace? African politicians keen to develop an allegiance that stretched beyond the interests of their tribe could do worse than look to South Africa, one of a handful of states to move into independence without a tribal elite. It is blessed by three advantages. First, it has no obvious dominant tribe: eight million Zulu-speakers are balanced by almost as many Xhosas; Sothos come a close third. Second, its industrial economy has given rise to scores of vibrant urban black communities where tribe and tradition have waned, and where savvy, not bloodstock, is what c
ounts. Third, the ANC had the benefit of long years in exile to muse on the reality of power and to watch its peers' mistakes.

  The issue of tribe has not been eradicated, particularly in rural areas. With the exception of Chief Albert Luthuli, a Zulu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961, the ANC leadership, was in the second half of the 20th Century dominated by Xhosa-speakers from the Eastern Cape. Mandela and his contemporaries Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, the father of Mandela's successor, were all Xhosas. But this was as much a reflection of geography as ethnicity. The Eastern Cape had been at the forefront of black politics in South Africa since the early nineteenth century when the Xhosas defied the first white settlers in a succession of 'frontier' wars.

  Party insiders whispered that the 'Xhosa connection' played a part in the eclipse of Cyril Ramaphosa, who before the April 1994 election was Thabo Mbeki's only contender as Mandela's successor. Ramaphosa is a Venda, one of South Africa's tiniest tribes. Over a decade later Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s deputy turned political rival, used his Zulu heritage as an important part of his popular campaign to defeat Mbeki for the ANC leadership in 2007, and then rise to the national presidency. At many of his rallies in rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal supporters hailed him as a “100 per cent Zulu boy”. But in the growing urban black middle class such appeals had a limited effect.

  The rest of the continent, however, is a long way from the ANC's much vaunted non-tribalism. The quest to accommodate the tribe within the nation state has long been seen as fundamental if the continent is to emerge from its' cycle of despair. Samora Machel, the late independence president of Mozambique, famously declared that, 'For the nation to live, the tribe must die.' But much of Africa has stubbornly resisted his vision. For most rural Africans the tie of the tribe comes far before the call of country. It is a prop at times of trouble and an identity, and in some countries its importance has waxed as the nation state has failed.

  The only seeds of hope in such bleak environments are to be drawn from the spirit of individual Africans, not the politicians but people like Georges Ngalinde, the Tutsi smallholder who watched as his children were killed at Ntarama. Just two days before my visit he was sitting outside his hut when he saw three of his children's murderers walk past. They had joined the Hutu exodus into Zaire when the RPF stepped up their assault. Now, more than two years later, they were back, following the RPF's decision to close down, by force, the UN's Hutu refugee camps and he was planning to welcome them home.

  'How could I mistake them?' said Ngalinde. 'Remember I saw them, machetes in hand, as they went to work [killing his family]. Truly at first I was afraid to see them come back, because it made me think of those days. I am frightened. What happens if they start killing again? But we cannot take up a machete. We cannot behave like those killers. If Hutus arrive and they submit to the process of law they can live in peace.'

  His words were an inspiring testimony to Africans' resilience and dignity in the face of terrible suffering. I was reminded of Ngalinde several thousand miles to the northwest in Sierra Leone during one of the lulls from its intermittent chaos. I had spent two days travelling with a local representative of the aid agency CARE, first down the coast in a fishing boat and then walking and hitching rides inland, to reach a community that had been cut off for several months by fighting. We were talking to some of the villagers about how they managed to survive when a man came into view carrying a blow-up Father Christmas. The Rev. Jacob Johnson had arrived with his sup plies. He came every week, he said, on the road from Freetown which had been officially closed for three months. He was usually fired on by one side or another. But only once had he had to turn back. Would we like a lift home?

  It is often said that countries get the rulers they deserve. If only that were the case in Africa. Moi stood ramrod-straight before 20,000 wananchi (people) as the military band in their bright red tunics and black pillar-box hats oompah-pahed back and forth. Paratroopers, forest guards, city council workers, even the national youth service filed past. Not a step was missed, not a toecap was un-shined. By the standards of African parades the annual Kenyatta Day commemoration, marking the anniversary of the arrest of the then freedom fighter by the British, was an impressive performance. The crowd, which initially gave the distinct impression of having gone there against their wishes, warmed to Moi's remarks, particularly when he switched from English to Swahili and poked fun at the ranks of foreign diplomats on the podium behind him. There was a ripple of approval as he decried the 'tribalism' of his opponents.

  Yet even as Moi spoke, the bullyboys of his ruling KANU party were on the rampage intimidating opposition strongholds. In the countdown to the 1992 elections he played on the ethnic rivalry in the opposition and served warning that political pluralism would lead to tribal conflict. Then as soon as he had won, party bosses set about making his predictions come true, letting loose thugs from his Kalenjin tribe and from their allies, the Masai, on Luos and Luyha and Kikuyu peasant farmers in the Rift Valley, accelerating an ethnic cleansing that began before the elections. More than 300,000 people were forced to leave their smallholdings and were driven into refugee camps. Such is the reality of Moi's non-tribalism.

  Old-school white Kenyans argue that Moi is misunderstood.

  As legend has it, white Kenyans were 'officers' mess' as opposed to the 'NCOs' who flocked to Rhodesia after the Second World War. The older generations speak the language of the British establishment and their attitudes reinforce the British line, namely that, while a rogue, Moi was at least 'a steady hand'. He was the man to prevent the 'nightmare' scenario of Kenya's British passport-holding Asians fleeing in their thousands to Heathrow. Over toast and Earl Grey Tea early one morning in Karen, the old colonial suburb named after Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa, overlooking Nairobi, I heard how Moi is surrounded by a 'rotten lot', but is not all bad. My host was an enlightened man who had had extensive dealings with Moi, but he did not come from a rival tribe.

  Richard Leakey, the celebrated conservationist, is one of a handful of whites to have 'broken the compact' and taken a role in opposition politics. He has known Moi well since the early Seventies and had regular contact with him between 1989 and 1994 when he was head of Kenya's Wildlife Service before he resigned in frustration at government attempts to undermine him. He readily admits that in his one-to-one encounters their relationship was quite cordial. He remembers countless meetings when he would walk out of Moi's office convinced that he had won his point, only to hear the next day that Moi had changed his mind. With hindsight he appreciates that Moi is a master at saying what people want to hear.

  'When you sit down and talk to him he doesn't come across as venal, scheming or dangerous,' Leakey said in his office in a run-down side street in Nairobi. 'He comes across as congenial, compassionate, a benevolent leader ... You can tell him your frustrations and you leave feeling, "Boy, that man is really concerned." But it doesn't stick. He is the sort of man who will agree with you that red is his favourite colour. But then the next day when someone else says: "Don't you think red is ghastly?" He will say: "Absolutely, I couldn't agree more."'

  Their relationship changed dramatically, however, the year after his resignation when Leakey formed Safina, the opposition party. Masai warriors paraded outside his home. His rallies were attacked. In the worst incident he was whipped and beaten by police and prison officials. The clubbing continued even as Leakey, who had lost both legs in a plane crash two years earlier, fled on his artificial limbs to his car. He was a racist. He was a colonialist. He was fair game. Leakey laughed hollowly as he recalled all the anti-colonial slurs he had endured. 'When I was thirteen Moi actually applauded the British suppression of the Mau Mau [the anti-white Kikuyu guerrilla movement] and the "cancer" of the freedom fighter. How he slipped past that I don't know and yet now he is branding me a colonialist.. .'

  Significantly, Moi's attacks on Leakey caused more of a stir among conservative white Kenyans than among blacks: he stood accuse
d of 'rocking the boat'. A delegation, including Leakey's brother, Philip, with whom he is not on speaking terms, made a highly publicized visit to Moi to take tea with the president to pledge their support. Against the lurid backdrop of East Africa's tribal divisions it is easy to understand their logic. It is true he was neither a Mobutu nor an Amin and he kept Kenya, East Africa’s commercial hub and economic cornerstone, together. Nairobi has a vibrant opposition press. It is easy to see how Moi's apologists argued that things could have been worse. He should not be judged by Western standards, they cried. This is not Europe. This is Africa. You need to be ruthless to survive.

  It is one of the tragedies of Africa, or rather it is a reflection of the tragedy of Africa, that a man like Moi can with some justification be seen as a compromise. Moi is not in the first rank of Big Men: he was too astute to have sown the seeds of his own downfall and in 2002 he followed the path of Banda and Kaunda and accepted retirement rather than waiting to be forced from power. This came after he won a convincing victory in the second multi-party election in 1997, reflecting the durability of his ties of patronage and powers of intimidation as well as the success of his attempts to present himself as the father of the nation, and the chronic divisions of the opposition. Required by the constitution to stand down in 2002, he set about rehabilitating his image for posterity. Andrew Morton, the biographer of the Princess of Wales, wrote a biography, Moi: The Making of an African Statesman, which Moi's critics labelled a one-sided pro-Moi account. Parliament proposed a comfort able presidential retirement package of about $400,000 a year including, according to media reports, a staff of twenty-seven and three limousines. His old friend Biwott applauded the proposal, saying it was important that a president 'who has sacrificed so much for his country must be accorded good living in his retirement'. More pointedly, Anyang' Nyong'o, the opposition MP who introduced the measure, said it aimed to encourage presidents to retire rather than cling to power.