The Africans (12 page)

He celebrated Mother’s Day in 1971 by releasing all women from prison and ordering the execution of prisoners accused of matricide. Two were killed. The next year, in an attempt to curtail crime, he decreed that thieves would have an ear cut off for the first two offenses and a hand for the third. That failed to accomplish its intended results, so Bokassa personally supervised a ten-minute beating with clubs and rifle butts of imprisoned thieves. Three died, forty-three were maimed. Bokassa put the survivors on public display for six hours in the scorching sun.

“It’s tough,” he remarked to a horrified bystander, “but it’s life.”

Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary-general, protested the beating, to which Bokassa had invited the press and other special guests. Bokassa responded by calling Waldheim “a pimp” and a “colonialist.”

This would have seemed an appropriate time for some response from the outside world. But did Africa dissociate itself from Bokassa? Did Western governments curtail Bokassa’s financial assistance or cut diplomatic ties? Did the church voice any protests? Not at all. No one said much of anything. African presidents are a clubby group not given to self-criticism; the West generally will support any African who is anti-Communist; and Christian missionaries expect Africans to behave in an uncivilized manner anyway. So Bokassa endured.

“It really gets my goat when people write that Bokassa is the Idi
Amin of Francophone [French-speaking] Africa,” said the wife of an American missionary who had spent twenty-three years in the country, and who, like many missionaries, thought most Africans were still savages. “He’s not that bad at all. This place is a lot saner and safer than some of the other African countries, where these people are killing each other like flies. Besides, there’s complete religious freedom here. As far as Bokassa goes, he’s still living with that one incident when he cut off some ears. But they did that in medieval England, too, you know.”

Bokassa’s religious tolerance was understandable because at least twice he converted from Christianity to Islam and back again. When Libya’s strong man, Colonel Muammar Qaddafy, visited Bangui in 1976, Bokassa announced that he was adopting the Islamic faith and the name Salah Eddine Ammed. He pocketed Libya’s gift of $2 million, but no sooner had Qaddafy gotten on his plane for the flight back to Tripoli than Ammed the Moslem said he had again become Bokassa the Christian.

To celebrate his birthday in 1973, Bokassa opened the nation’s first television station (with his image filling the screen a good part of the time), although there were only forty TV sets in the republic. For his fifty-fifth birthday he ordered each of his countrymen to give him a present of 500 local francs (about $2.50), and when he told his people they would have to help pay for his coronation, he offered a simple explanation: “One cannot create a great history without sacrifices, and this sacrifice is accepted by the population.”

Bokassa was to learn, though, that even emperors can err. In 1979 he decreed that schoolchildren buy and wear new uniforms bearing his portrait. Not coincidentally, he owned the factory that made the uniforms and the store that sold them. A mild protest followed. Students were rounded up, packed like sardines into the prison and clubbed by Bokassa and his policemen. More than eighty died. Amnesty International revealed the massacre, and France—which had kept Bokassa afloat by underwriting half his annual budget of $76 million—decided that enough was enough. Bokassa was now a liability. With hardly a shot being fired, France flew paratroopers into Bangui one night and restored Dacko to power.
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The calendar had been turned back thirteen years; the Central African Republic was starting all over again.

Bokassa had been in Libya the night of the coup, trying to shake down Qaddafy for more money. When he learned he had been overthrown, Bokassa and his twenty-six associates flew straight to France, where he had extensive real estate holdings. But French authorities wouldn’t even let him disembark. For fifty-six hours Bokassa waited in his plane at the air base in Evreau, west of Paris, while France looked for a country that would take him. The Ivory Coast, another former French colony, finally agreed, on the condition that Bokassa give no interviews, engage in no political activities and make no public appearances. Having been sentenced to death in absentia by a Bangui court, the fugitive emperor was now, in effect, a nonperson. You can drive by his house in the Ivory Coast capital of Abidjan, a stately mansion overlooking the lagoon, and on sunny afternoons see him walking his dogs in the yard. He will wave if he knows you are looking. But the gates to the wrought-iron fence surrounding the estate are locked, and most people pass by quickly, not bothering to return his greeting.
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Though Bkoassa’s regime was as nonsensical as any in Africa, it should not be viewed in isolation. Its absurdity was the tragedy of all Africa, a continent that suffers so much at the hands of misguided leadership. Never has Africa been more in need of men with reasoned voices and clear visions, and never has the honor roll of leadership been so barren. The Old Guard—the first generation of presidents who took their people from colonialism to nationhood and governed through the sheer strength of their personalities—is largely gone now, the victims of old age or coups d’état. Authority has passed to a new group of leaders, younger, less educated, less sophisticated, less nationalistic than the Jomo Kenyattas of Kenya and Agostinho Netos of Angola. The Richard Nixons have replaced the George Washingtons. The new leaders have mastered power politics but little else. They have silenced all voices but those of the party line, and like their predecessors, they have failed to groom successors on the theory that any heir apparent is a potential threat. The result is a leadership vacuum into which unqualified men with a power base but no popular support can step and govern by whimsy.

At independence the Old Guard presidents were generally elected by popular vote, having been handpicked by the colonial powers as statesmen acceptable to London or Paris. They were soldiers or civil servants or those who had been at the forefront of the independence
movements. There were among them genuine leaders such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, distinguished statesmen such as Angola’s Neto, respected intellects such as Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor. The presidency, though, gave them their first real taste of affluence and influence. The multiparty democratic systems were dismantled one by one, presidential power was consolidated, the roots of cultism were planted. Soon it became as difficult for Africans to get rid of a black president as it had been to replace a white governor.

The practice of one man, one vote became, in reality, one man, one vote, one time. The president you got at independence was the one you would have until he died or was overthrown. Presidents don’t retire to become their country’s elder statesmen, because to be an ex-president in Africa is to be a nonentity. And the longer they stay in power, the more disdainful they become of their own people, and the greater become their own powers. One of the secrets of their longevity is to share enough of the spoils to create an elite, monied class of loyalists.

During Amin’s rule, a Uganda Airlines Boeing 707 piloted by a free-lance American crew took off from Entebbe Airport each Tuesday for the eight-hour trip to Stansted Airport in England. There it took on a curious cargo: tailored clothes, expensive whiskey, cigarettes, gourmet foods, fine wristwatches, stylish sunglasses. It was an odd assortment of luxury items, considering that Uganda was then in the throes of economic collapse and there were long lines in Kampala for even the most basic goods such as milk and sugar.

But these were the rewards for Amin’s loyalists, the officers in his 21,000-man army. While the civilian population remained imprisoned in poverty, the officers moved into rent-free, well-appointed houses in Kampala’s lovely hillside suburbs of Lubiri and Kololo Hill. They drove Peugeots and Fiats, often taken at gunpoint from their civilian owners, and they owned the businesses Amin had confiscated from Asian merchants. They controlled the lucrative coffee-smuggling racket and the currency black market. It was a cozy trade-off: Amin was their meal ticket to the good life, and they were his to political survival.

Other presidents may have done it more subtly, but almost everyone—except, interestingly, those truly committed to socialism or Marxism—created a similar elite class, usually of people from their own ethnic group. It was the style of patronage politics that Boston’s
James Michael Curley or Chicago’s Richard Daley would have appreciated: Take care of your own first, and they will get the others to fall into line.

The creation of neocolonial elite societies has been the subject of both controversy and criticism in Africa and has greatly retarded the development of nations and peoples. The former vice chancellor of Nairobi University, J. N. Karanja, observes: “If Africa is to develop, the elite must re-examine their consciences and understand and accept the unique history and circumstances of the African people.

“They must be honest and should realize that the African people did not fight for their independence so that they could become less free instead of freer, poorer instead of better off. It’s time that the African people had the right to choose.”

Elections, though, remain largely in the realm of fantasyland throughout Africa. In Gabon, President El Hadj Omar Bongo (his first name used to be Albert-Bernard until, having made the pilgrimage to Mecca, he decided El Hadj Omar was a more appropriate blend of Islam and Africa) celebrates his birthdays by holding elections and running unopposed; every seven years since 1967 his reelection has been nearly unanimous. In Somalia a single-party list of 171 candidates is presented to the electorate, who can check one of two boxes: Yes or No. In Burundi, where head of state Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza sometimes travels about in an armored car followed overhead by an armed helicopter,
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the country’s sole party endorsed Bagaza’s re-election in 1979 by a vote of 631–2; he was the only candidate. In Sierra Leone, elections resemble mini-civil wars with candidates being waylaid, kidnapped and forced to withdraw; the death toll during President Siaka P. Stevens’ re-election campaign in 1978 topped a hundred. Everyone said it was an unusually quiet campaign.

When Milton Obote ruled Uganda from 1962 to 1971, he was responsible for abolishing parliament, nationalizing the economy, rewriting the constitution to make himself de facto life-president, jailing thousands of opponents, destroying the Buganda monarchy, terminating national elections, establishing a one-party state and creating a strong-armed enforcer named Idi Amin. In 1980 Obote returned to Uganda from exile in Tanzania to run for president again with these words: “Never again shall we allow an individual to suppress the will of the country and to destroy our democratic institutions.” Obote regained the presidency in a rigged election, and
within a few months the suppression of individual rights and the dismemberment of democratic institutions were well under way.

Because of the high degree of illiteracy in black Africa, candidates are usually identified on the ballot by a symbol rather than by a printed name, and in some rural villages, like those in Mozambique, voting is accomplished by a show of hands. In Zambia’s 1979 presidential election, Dr. Kenneth David Kaunda chose for his ruling party the symbol of a magnificent eagle, proud and defiant, wings raised in flight. The opposition was assigned a snake. Needless to say, Kaunda won handily—just as he had every other election since 1964—although his policemen probably deserved more credit than the eagle; they kept the leading opposition candidates in jail until after the election.

In the face of such electoral obstacles, Africans have found alternative ways to express popular dissent and effect reform. In 1977, for instance, a peaceful revolt by women who operate the marketplace stalls in Guinea threatened to bring down the twenty-year rule of President Ahmed Sékou Touré. In Ghana the next year, a strike by middle-class professionals forced the government to abandon its plans for continued military rule. And riots in Liberia over an announced increase in the price of rice made President William Tolbert relent on his economic stabilization program and indirectly led to his overthrow a year later.

There were other signs as well in 1983 that democracy still stirred in Africa. The soldiers in Nigeria had handed over power to a duly elected civilian government and returned to the barracks while the country held national elections in 1979 and 1983. Kenya and Angola each had seen a smooth, constitutional transfer of leadership upon the deaths of their founding presidents. And in Tanzania and Kenya, the electorate had voted about half the members of parliament out of office. Africa took pride in these marks of maturity, but an important question still lingers: Is a Western-style democracy pertinent to the needs of Africa?

I don’t think so. Not now, anyway. The splintered, struggling Africa of today cannot afford the luxury of multiparties and independent presses and honest debate. In countries where national goals are not clearly defined, such freedoms enable the various factions to fight for self-interests at the expense of majority concerns. National institutions are not strong enough to withstand these pressures. And governments are not cohesive enough to endure forces motivated by anything less than nationalistic concerns.

At this stage most African countries are best served by benign dictators. Democracy can come later, if it is to come at all. But for now democracy is no more a panacea for Africa’s ills than is Communism. What Africa needs to develop is an
African
political system, imported from neither East nor West, that combines elements of capitalism and socialism, both of which are inherent to the African character. It should include two concepts that Africans today mistakenly view as contradictory—economic incentive and social justice.

The pity of contemporary Africa is that few presidents are secure enough to pursue policies or experiment with systems that might diminish their own power. And fewer still have displayed benevolence or wisdom in carrying out the affairs of state. The result is that many countries are run by men who are little more than clerks with guns.