The Africans (11 page)

By the time I made my last visit to Zaire—the country V. S. Naipaul described so vividly in A
Bend in the River
—it seemed to be rapidly disintegrating in spite of the Mobutu Plan. At Mama Yemo General Hospital (named for Mobutu’s mother) unattended patients were dying because there were no bandages, no sterilization equipment, no oxygen, no film for x-ray machines. The dead often remained for hours in the intensive care unit before being removed because there was no room for extra bodies in the morgue.

The health clinics at the university campuses in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi had shut down because the medicines intended for use
there had been diverted to the black market. The university cafeterias were closed for the simple reason that there was no food. With inflation running at over 100 percent, a bag of cornmeal needed to feed a family of six for a month cost $130, twice a laborer’s monthly salary. In the rural areas people were reverting from cash-crop to subsistence farming because the transportation system had broken down and the food they had intended to sell at market lay rotting on the ground. (Zaire had 31,000 miles of main roads at independence in 1960; twenty years later only 3,700 miles of usable roads remained.)

Zaire’s debt to foreign banks and governments soared to $4 billion in 1980, and shortages of food and spare parts became critical. The government’s news agency closed down for lack of paper, 360 abandoned buses stood rusting near the airport, and the national airline, Air Zaire, could afford only enough fuel to operate one of every four domestic flights each day. Its Boeing 747 and Douglas DC-10 were repossessed. Through it all, Mobutu kept insisting that Zaire and its people were doing fine; the problems Western journalists wrote about, he said, were illusionary ones that merely underscored the media’s bias against Africa.

President cultism is hardly unique to Africa. In the United States, after all, John F. Kennedy became a cult figure, in death perhaps more than in life. But what African leaders have managed to do is mold cultism into a fine art. They have bestowed upon themselves godlike qualities and the unquestioned authority of the most powerful chieftain. Most, however, are not leaders in the true sense; they are images, the creations of a sort of African-style public relations campaign. As peculiar as the phenomenon may seem to a Westerner, it makes sense in Africa, where the uneducated masses respond to strong central authority. They do not want to be bullied by their governments but they do expect their presidents to exercise the same kind of authoritarian control that tribal chiefs and colonial governors used. Anything less is considered a sign of weakness.

Mobutu may have carried cultism to the extreme, but almost every black African president is, in varying degrees, a cult figure who has adopted a nickname to convey a desired image. Mobutu and President Etienne Eyadéma of Togo both like to be referred to as “the Guide.” Jomo Kenyatta, the late Kenyan president, was known as Mzee, the Swahili word for “Wise Old Man.” Julius Nyerere of Tanzania is known as “the Teacher”; Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi as “the Chief of Chiefs”; Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the
Ivory Coast as “the No. 1 Peasant”; and the late Macias Nguema Biyogo of Equatorial Guinea as “the National Miracle.” Uganda’s former president Idi Amin Dada used to refer to himself, only half in jest, as “the Conquerer of the British Empire.”

Togo’s Eyadéma has a presidential cheering section consisting of a thousand women and he wouldn’t think of making a public appearance without it. The women’s prime responsibility is to perform traditional dances and lavish their president with songs of praise—a ritual that Eyadéma says helps build a national spirit and identity. For $20, Togolese can buy wristwatches on whose face the illuminated portrait of Eyadéma fades and reappears every fifteen seconds. Eyadéma also has built a huge bronze statue of himself in the downtown square of Lomé, and commissioned an Eyadéma comic book in which he plays a Superman-type character.

In Malawi, everything from university dormitories to highways is named for President Banda, and women wear dresses embroidered with Banda’s portrait. The mildest criticism of Banda guarantees a stretch in jail. “They say my people love me,” observes President-for-Life Banda, “and I would be naïve to deny it.”

The lead item on most radio newscasts in black Africa seldom covers the major news story of the day; instead it deals with what the country’s president said or did that day, however routine or mundane. “President Daniel arap Moi said today that Kenya is a friend to all people of the world,” reports the Voice of Kenya. Or: “President Daniel arap Moi has called on leaders in the country to refrain from spreading malicious rumors among
wananchi
[the masses].” In Jomo Kenyatta’s final days, when he was a senile and largely incapacitated man of eighty-six years withering away in State House, the Voice of Kenya reported daily that he was on “a busy working tour of the coast provinces.” The two daily newspapers were required to run the usual page-one photograph of Kenyatta conducting that day’s affairs of state—even though they had to dig old pictures out of their files. The premise was that the people wouldn’t know the difference. But they did, of course, and no one was surprised when the Voice of Kenya suddenly started playing funeral music without any announcement one day in August 1978. Kenyatta had gone on his last “busy working tour.”

Moi, Kenyatta’s vice president, allowed only a respectful period before he started taking down Kenyatta’s pictures and putting up his own. Moi’s words soon became the headline item on each newscast and the
wananchi
were soon urged to turn out and cheer their president
each time he left State House. One cult—a legitimate one, given Kenyatta’s great charisma and early influence in the anticolonialist movements—had ended and another one of questionable authenticity had begun. (Quite deservedly, Kenyatta remains a legendary figure in Africa.)

The honeymoon for Moi did not last long. In short order he turned Kenya into a one-party state and started arresting dissidents and journalists. As Kenya’s economy deteriorated in the world-wide recession, Moi, a former schoolteacher, and his band of ruling elite grew richer by the day through various business deals. The inevitable happened early one morning in August 1982: a group of air force men seized the radio station and announced that they had overthrown the government. Before forces loyal to Moi could put down the attempted coup, more than 120 people had died and soldiers had gone on a rampage in Nairobi, looting, raping and shooting. The attempted coup coincided with a rash of worsening social problems in Kenya: widespread official corruption, rampant urban crime that included the murder of an occasional tourist, a stagnant economy and a government that would brook no criticism. Moi had a rare opportunity at that moment to exert his leadership and address himself to the root causes of the unrest. Instead he went for the jugular. He closed down the university for nine months and disbanded the air force. He turned Kenya into a one-party state, bought an independent daily newspaper and made it a mouthpiece of the party, ordered the arrest of several leading journalists and critics and went on a witch hunt for “traitors” in his cabinet. It was a distressingly familiar scenario in Africa, and it would solve nothing. The cancer had already started to spread, and Moi, a small man in the shadow of Jomo Kenyatta, was now fighting a delaying action.

Like Moi, few African presidents would consider taking a trip without summoning the full diplomatic corps to the airport or ordering the masses to line the route from State House to the terminal. I always found it a rather sad spectacle to watch thousands of Africans waving banners that they could not read and obediently applauding some man who demanded—but had not necessarily earned—their allegiance, respect and love. True, they didn’t have many other opportunities to show they really did belong to a nation, but the prime purpose of the exercise was designed to pamper the egos of insecure men needing acceptance and authenticity.

Let’s go to the banks of the Bangui River, deep in the heart of Africa, to see how one man dealt with that insecurity.

To an outsider, Jean-Bédel Bokassa seemed to have everything: a huge fortune and immense power, so many decorations that he needed a specially made jacket to display them all, and a fine family numbering nine wives and thirty legitimate children.

Since independence in 1960 he had been honoring himself with monuments and palaces and countless titles, including that of president-for-life of the Central African Republic. He was entertained abroad—for the trip to Peking he took his Rumanian wife as first lady—and even if he was considered a bit unorthodox, ambassadors listened to him, journalists quoted him and his countrymen paid him homage.

But what the former army sergeant didn’t have—and what he craved—was respect, a sense of legitimacy. Except for the fear he engendered, people just didn’t take him very seriously. His occasional savagery and frequent eccentricities did receive a lot of attention in the foreign press, but in the long run he was one of Africa’s most forgettable presidents, a tragicomical figure who was never able to come to grips with the problems facing his hapless country. He fretted over his inadequacies a great deal and lost himself for hours at a time reading about the one man he idolized, Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in a moment of supreme arrogance, snatched his crown from the Pope’s hands and crowned himself emperor in Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral in 1804.

Then it dawned on Bokassa. If Napoleon could do it, why couldn’t he? Surely no one would take him lightly if he was emperor. And to the amazement of everyone, including his two million subjects, Bokassa declared one day that his republic was now an empire and he was no longer a mere life-president; he was Emperor Bokassa I. Bokassa invited the Pope (who respectfully declined) to the coronation and offered international television rights to the highest bidder. He waived the edict that foreign journalists entering his country had to post a $400 bond at the airport, and hired the French firm of Guiselin, which had embroidered Napoleon’s uniforms, to design a coronation robe with two million pearls and crystal beads for $145,000. He drew up a list of earls and dukes, imported white horses from Belgium to pull his coach to the cathedral and spent $2 million for a crown topped by a 138-carat diamond.

All this seemed a bit lavish for a Texas-sized country with only 170 miles of paved roads and a per capita annual income of $250. The final tab was to reach more than $20 million, but French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, anxious to maintain political and economic control in France’s former colony, quietly passed the
word that Paris would arrange compensation for all unpaid bills. As Bokassa himself once put it, “Everything around here is financed by the French government. We ask the French for money, get it and waste it.”

On December 4, 1977, Bangui, a dusty river town of 250,000 souls, was packed with several thousand guests—but not a single head of state. The temperature climbed past 100 degrees and the dignitaries sat sweating in their morning coats and Parisian gowns, waiting for Bokassa to fulfill his lifelong quest for Napoleonic glory. Finally a voice boomed over the loudspeaker, “Sa majesté impériale, l’empereur Bokassa sa premier,” and everyone struggled to attention.

Bokassa entered the Bokassa Sports Stadium—which was next to Bokassa University on Bokassa Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Bokassa statue—wearing a golden wreath on his balding head. He ascended the eagle-shaped golden throne, placed the crown on his head, just as Napoleon had done, and took an oath to defend the constitution, which he had suspended a decade earlier. His two-year-old son, Jean-Bédel Georges, dressed in a crisp white military uniform, fell fast alseep at his side. There was polite applause. Africa had its first emperor since Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie was overthrown in 1974, presumed murdered and buried in an unmarked grave. But this was too much, even for Africa. Editorialized Senegal’s weekly
Afrique Nouvelle
: “The event is worth examining because it stresses … in a tragic way an image of an Africa still stumbling in search of itself.”

It also underscored the shallowness and sparseness of leadership in Africa and the silent obedience so many Africans will pay their rulers, no matter how despotic or unrealistic their ways. Publicly African heads of state scoffed at Bokassa’s contention that the coronation was an attempt to develop “African authenticity” and promote a national pride. What they may have thought in private was another matter, for Bokassa had had the gall to do what a score of African presidents would have loved to do had they not been more sensitive to international reaction. Most were already imperial presidents in everything but title; Bokassa had merely made his role official. “They were jealous of me because I had an empire and they didn’t,” he later told an interviewer.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa was born in 1921, one of twelve children of a prominent Mbaka chief in what was then the French colony of Ubangi-Shari. His father, a village chief, was assassinated in 1927, and shortly thereafter his grief-stricken mother committed suicide.
It was a trauma from which the young Bokassa never fully recovered.

Bokassa, a short, trim man with a wide, Alfred E. Neuman grin, was educated at mission schools, enlisted in the French army in 1939 and fought gallantly in World War II. He survived the debacle at Dien Bien Phu and rose to the rank of captain, an unusual honor for an African in a European army. At the time of independence, in 1960, Bokassa became the Central African Republic’s commander of the army, and Bokassa’s uncle, Barthélémy Boganda, president. Boganda died five years later in a plane crash—sabotage was suspected—and Bokassa’s cousin, David Dacko, became president. Bokassa overthrew his cousin on New Year’s Day 1966, and after “rehabilitating” him in prison eventually elevated Dacko to the position of presidential adviser.

Bokassa’s policies can be characterized as nothing more than unpredictable and during his reign the country slid steadily downhill economically, the people became poorer, the infrastructure and institutions fell apart chunk by chunk. The worse things got, the more bizarre Bokassa became.