Mobutu’s peace and his kingship are great achievements. But the kingship is sterile. The cult of the king already swamps the intellectual advance of a people who have barely emerged. The intellectual confusions of authenticity, that now give such an illusion of power, close up the world again and point to a future greater despair. Mobutu’s power will inevitably be extinguished; but there can now be no going back on the principles of Mobutism. Mobutu has established the pattern for his successors; and they will find that African dependence is not less than it is now, nor the need for nihilistic assertion.
To arrive at this sense of a country trapped and static, eternally vulnerable, is to begin to have something of the African sense of the void. It is to begin to fall, in the African way, into a dream of a past—the vacancy of river and forest, the hut in the brown yard, the dugout—when the dead ancestors watched and protected, and the enemies were only men.
1975
The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro
I
YAMOUSSOUKRO, a place deep in the wet forests of the Ivory Coast, is one of the wonders of black Africa. It used to be a village, and perhaps then it was like some other West African bush villages, where grass huts perish after two years. But Yamoussoukro was also the seat of a regional tribal chief; and during the half a century or so of direct French rule in the interior, the authority of the chieftaincy—moral, or spiritual, or magical authority—was not forgotten.
The very old man who is still chief received a French education. He became what the French called a “colonial” doctor—not the finished French product, but a doctor nonetheless. Later he became a politician, a protest leader. With independence in 1960—the bush returned with alterations to its people—he began to rule the Ivory Coast. And he has ruled ever since.
He has ruled well. He has used the French as technicians, advisers, administrators; and, with no ready-made mineral wealth, with the resources only of tropical forests and fields, he has made his country rich. So rich, that the Ivory Coast imports labour from its more depressed or chaotic African neighbours. Labour immigration, as much as natural increase, has raised the population from three million in 1960 to nine million today. Abidjan, the capital, begun unpromisingly on the black mud of a fetid lagoon, has become one of the biggest ports in West Africa. And 150 miles inland, at the end of an auto-route that would not disgrace France itself, the president’s ancestral village of Yamoussoukro, has been transformed.
The ancestral village has in fact vanished from public sight. The entire village—huts (if they still survive), common ground, the semi-sacred palaver tree—has been incorporated into the grounds of a new presidential palace. And all is hidden by a high palace wall that must be many miles long.
Down one side of the palace there is an artificial lake, and in this lake turtles and man-eating crocodiles have been introduced. These are totemic, emblematic creatures, and they belong to the president. There were no crocodiles in Yamoussoukro before. No one knows precisely what they mean. But to all Africans they speak at once of danger and of the president’s, the chief’s, magically granted knowledge of his power as something more than human, something emanating from the earth itself.
The power and wisdom of the chief have caused the forest around Yamoussoukro to disappear. Where once were African fields, unused common land, and wild trees there are now ordered, mechanized plantations. For square mile upon square mile mangoes, avocadoes or pineapples grow in straight lines, the straight lines that are beautiful to people to whom Nature is usually formless, unfriendly bush. Land in this part of Africa, it is said, belongs to the user; there can be no title in bush. And until they were given to the state some years ago, these plantations around Yamoussoukro were the president’s personal estates.
The president’s ideas have always been big, and his plans for Yamoussoukro are very big. He would like it to be one of the great cities of Africa and the world. The land has been levelled, and avenues as wide as runways outline the metropolis that is to be. Extravagant and sometimes brilliant modern buildings have been set down in the stripped wilderness and await full use.
To attract visitors, there is a great golf course, beautifully landscaped and so far steadfastly maintained against the fast-growing bush. It is the president’s idea, though he doesn’t play golf himself. The golf idea came to him when he was old, and now in his benign, guiding way he would like all his people, all the sixty or so tribes of the Ivory Coast, to take up golf. To house the visitors, there is a twelve-storey Hotel President, one of the French Sofitel hotel chain. The hotel brochure is printed in France; its silvery grey cover looks princely. “Find the traces of the native village of President Houphouët-Boigny,” the brochure says, “and discover the ultra-modern prefiguration of the Africa of tomorrow.”
The two ideas go together. The ultra-modern dream also serves old Africa. It is pharaonic: it has a touch of the antique world. Away from the stupendous modern frivolities of the golf course and the golf club and the swimming pool of the Hotel President there is the presidential palace with its artificial lake. Outside the blank walls that hide the president’s ancestral village and the palaver tree from the common view, the president’s totemic crocodiles are fed with fresh meat every day. People can go and watch. But distances in Yamoussoukro are so great, and the scarred, empty spaces so forbidding, that only people with cars can easily go; and they tend to be visitors, tourists.
The feeding ritual takes place in the afternoon, in bright light. There are the cars, the tourists in bright clothes, the cameras. But the crocodiles are sacred. A live offering—a chicken—has to be made to them; it is part of the ritual. This element of sacrifice, this protracted display of power and cruelty, is as unsettling as it is meant to be, and it seems to bring night and the forest close again to the dream of Yamoussoukro.
To the man from outside, whatever his political or religious faith, Africa can often seem to be in a state of becoming. It is always on the point of being made something else. So it arouses hope, ambition, frustration, irritation. And even the success of the Ivory Coast induces a kind of anxiety. Will it last? Will the Africans be able to take over from the French and the Israelis and the others who have built it all for them and still effectively run it?
And then at a place like Yamoussoukro, where the anxiety becomes most acute, it also begins to feel unreal. You get a glimpse of an African Africa, an Africa which—whatever the accidents of history, whatever the current manifestations of earthly glory—has always been in its own eyes complete, achieved, bursting with its own powers.
THIS IDEA OF AFRICAN completeness should not have surprised me. Something like this, a similar religious feeling, was, fleetingly, at the back of many of the slave revolts in the Caribbean. The idea of African completeness endures in various Caribbean religious cults; and touches the politics of the region. Many of the recent political movements in the black Caribbean have had a millenarian, ecstatic, purely African side.
West Africa peopled the slave plantations of the New World. But that wasn’t the idea I took to the Ivory Coast. I went for simpler reasons. The world is too various; it can exist only in compartments in our minds. I wanted to be in West Africa, where I had never been; I wanted to be in a former French territory in Africa; and I wanted to be in an African country which, in the mess of black Africa, was generally held to be a political and economic success. African success, France in Africa—those were the glamorous ideas that took me out.
France in Africa was a private fantasy. It was based on my own love of the French language, a special schoolboy love, given me at Queen’s Royal College in colonial Trinidad by teachers, many of them black or partly black, who were themselves in love with the French language and an idea (hinted at, never stated) of an accepting, assimilating France. France in Africa: I imagined the language in the mouths of elegant Africans; I thought of tall, turbanned women, like those of Mali and the Congo; I thought of wine and tropical boulevards.
But in the humidity of the
Ivory Coast, the wine (stupefying at lunch-time) was mainly rosé and Moroccan; West African French was as broken and sourly accented as West African English; and there was nothing like a boulevard in the hard little commercial centre of Abidjan, where, here and there in the shadows of tall new buildings, Lebanese shops still spoke of a recent, duller colonial township. Instead of boulevards there was the African hubbub of “popular” African areas. Away from that there was—as in many other former colonial territories—the ready-made, enclosed glamour of new international hotels.
Around the swimming pool of the Forum Golf Hotel the small-breasted wives of French businessmen and technicians sunbathed topless, among the black-and-orange lizards. Africa came on at night, as the cabaret: not the Africa of the night-clubs in the African areas, but the Africa of officially approved “culture”: the semi-religious or magical dances of the forest, done now in a landscaped garden, electric light playing on the big, bare breasts of dancing, chanting women.
I hadn’t really thought I would find France in Africa—it was a fantasy. But I hadn’t expected that in the Ivory Coast France and Africa would still be like separate ideas. It made more puzzling the success that was to be seen in the great capital city of Abidjan: in the urban highways, with direction boards that suggested France; the skyscrapers of the city centre; the university campus and the golf course; the spreading workers’ areas, disordered but not poor; the many mixed—African and European—middle-class residential areas; the blocks of government-built flats; the big port and industrial zone; the tainted tropical lagoon reflecting at dusk the lights of the rush-hour traffic on the “corniche.”
“Isn’t it wonderful,” an American from the embassy said to me one evening, looking at that view, “that they have done this with just a little bit of coffee and a little bit of cocoa?”
Out of apparently little, wealth had been created. And this wealth had been shared and used. The Ivory Coast boom had now abated. Coffee prices had dropped by a third and cocoa by a half, and the oil exploration people were leaving the Ivory Coast for other French African countries. There was some discontent now; protests had begun to be heard about the number of French people in the country. But something extraordinary had been achieved; in this corner of Africa even the continuing order of the state was like a miracle.
All around was chaos or nullity. Liberia, illiterate, impoverished, was ruled by its army after members of the previous government had been unceremoniously shot on the beach. (What pictures those news reports gave to the mind: the holiday setting, the bewildered men in suits or pyjamas, the uniformed men with guns, the sound of the sea.) Guinea, once like the Ivory Coast a French colony, and potentially richer than the Ivory Coast, was now bankrupt, a murderous tyranny, famous for the “black diet” of its condemned cells, where people were given neither food nor water and simply left to waste away. Ghana, at the time of its independence in 1957 far richer and better educated than the Ivory Coast, with institutions, was now after repeated coups in a state of anarchy, a source of migrant labour.
Yet, tribally speaking, the people of Ghana and Guinea were like some of the people of the Ivory Coast. The tribes, the ethnies, were not contained within national borders. And though the Ivory Coast was said to be liberal, it was also an African state, a one-party state, with its own cult of the leader: the man who had become president at independence had never stopped being president. What had been done in the Ivory Coast hadn’t been done suddenly; it had been sustained over more than twenty years. Clearly, then, to explain this African success, there had been—over and above the personality of the president—some principle of organization that suited the people, something easily grasped and repeatable.
The explanations given to the visitor were simple, short, polished: they had been given to many other visitors before. The nationalist movement in a country like Ghana had been a movement of clerks and lawyers, ideologues seeking at once to ennoble and Africanize Africa by foreign ideas. The nationalist movement in the Ivory Coast had been simpler, a movement of farmers, planteurs, village people.
This was added to by an ambassador I saw not long after I arrived. The news he had just received was of the putting down of yet another coup in Ghana. The two countries were different at independence, the ambassador said. They shared only the climate and the vegetation. In Ghana after independence the nationalists concentrated on “administrative structures.” In the Ivory Coast they concentrated on creating wealth, wealth from peasant farming. They were less concerned with Africanization. They built roads, to bring the villages closer to the market place. They gave the villages services and security—and security was important. They tried to keep people on the land by ending the isolation of the villages; and they had succeeded. There were now roads and hotels all over the Ivory Coast. The president’s village of Yamoussoukro in the centre of the country was now just a three-hour drive from Abidjan.
THAT WAS HOW I FIRST heard of Yamoussoukro. It was the president’s village, and it might have been no more than one of the farming villages opened up by a government concerned with agriculture.
Ambassadors have to choose their words. They do a specialized job and it is necessary for them to live ceremonial lives. As officials, their vision of a country shouldn’t run too far beyond that of the local people with whom they have to deal. So, with ambassadors as with other expatriates in black Africa, there appears at a first meeting a kind of ambivalence. To say what they feel they have to say they appear to be denying or ignoring part of what they know. Expatriates may know African Africa, but this is not the Africa they put forward to a visitor at a first meeting. They are men with jobs, skills; their job is part of their self-esteem; and the Africa they present to the visitor is the Africa connected with their jobs. The ambivalence is natural; it is not disingenuous. The doing of certain kinds of work in Africa, the practise of certain disciplines or skills from another civilization, can be like a disinterested exercise of virtue. Many expatriates—those who last in freed black Africa—become genuinely good people; and not a few are oddly solitary.
It was from Philip, an expatriate, that I next heard of Yamoussoukro. Philip was English. He was in his late thirties, and much of his working life had been spent in Africa. He now worked for an inter-state African organization. His wife was a black Guyanese girl of great beauty, from a family settled in England. It was odd, Philip said, that he should be the African side of their marriage, and Janet the English, “from Huddersfield.”
Her birthday fell that weekend. And, to celebrate, they were going on the expatriate Sunday excursion to Grand-Bassam on the beach. I went with their party: out of Abidjan, past the shack settlements of migrant labourers, past the coconut estates with coconut trees planted in rows and offering long vistas down the cleared spaces between the trees, past the lines of thatched huts selling African curios and artefacts, to the ruined old colonial capital of Grand-Bassam, abandoned after a yellow fever epidemic in 1899, concrete and corrugated iron and streets of thick dust, and at last the thatched Sunday restaurants on the sea: the excursion that, as I was to discover at the end of my second week, was part of the routine and tedium and constriction of expatriate life.
On the edge of Abidjan the highway became very wide, without any median divider. It was like that, Philip said, for parades.
“It’s like Yamoussoukro,” Philip said. “You should try to get there. Try to get there at night. You’ll see the double row of lights. You’ll wonder where you are. And in the morning you’ll see that you are nowhere.”
We passed low army barracks. They seemed to go on for a long time. They were the barracks of a French Foreign Legion regiment. They kept a low profile, Philip said. They were in the Ivory Coast only to train.
I said to him, “Does it depress you, being in all these African countries with their separate personality cults?”
It was too strong a question to put to him at this stage of our relationship.
He said, “There is the cult of personalit
y everywhere. Looking at the Falklands business from the outside, I would say there was a great cult of the personality there. Mrs. Thatcher raised herself up.”
I asked whether he really thought that the situations were the same.
He said with unexpected directness, “No.” And a little while later he returned to the subject, as though to explain both himself and what he had said. “You must understand that Africans like the cult of personality better. It is what they understand. A multiplicity of parties and personalities confuses them. I’ve seen this happen.”
AND AFRICAN attitudes to authority was one of the subjects that came up at an embassy lunch the next day. The president, I heard, had become aware of the growing discontent in the Ivory Coast. In his benignity, and out of his wish to do the right thing, he had tried to “democratize.” There was only one party in the Ivory Coast, and normally at elections there was only one list of candidates; people in any particular constituency simply voted for or against the party’s candidate. At the last election there had been an experiment. It was decreed that anyone in the party could contest any seat. For the 140 or so seats in the assembly there had been more than 600 candidates; and 80 per cent of the old deputies, some of whom had held their seats for twenty years, had been voted out.
Democracy of a kind had been served, but there had been a more than political consternation. The old deputies had built up followings; they had become elders; and in the African tradition an elder remained an elder till he died. A man stripped of authority couldn’t simply go back to being an ordinary villager; he had been personally degraded. So the democratic experiment had damaged the cohesiveness of village life. Ever since the election there had been any number of programmes on the television about the need for “reconciliation.” “Democracy,” people’s rule, was the imported idea; reconciliation was the African idea—in certain villages, among certain tribes, there actually was an annual ceremony of reconciliation, presided over by the local chief.
The Writer and the World: Essays Page 30